In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
impression that he didn’t want to talk to them. I think he just felt he had absolutely nothing in common with them. Robert talked to me a bit, about cycling and races, never family or anything like that. The only other thing he talked about was the boredom of the factory, and how he couldn’t wait to get out. He used to say he found it mind-numbing. “The only reason I’m doing this is to make money to buy bike equipment,” he said. His attitude was that he didn’t want to go to college and he didn’t want to be at Weir’s either, but he had to do something until he could go over to France to get the professional contract. It was a means to an end.’
Racing provided more than a weekend diversion. As 1977 approached Millar took to training with even more gusto. He was now following a programme of weight and circuit training as well as cycling, with Bilsland providing guidance. Bilsland took him to his old interval training circuits, timing Millar and Brodie as they made repeat efforts. ‘There were guys who were better as juniors,’ comments Bilsland, ‘but you could see that Robert had a big margin for improvement. He was so consistent when we were doing interval training and mile reps [repetitions]: he could bang out more or less the same times sprint after sprint, even at 16.’
For the last two winters Millar had also been attending circuit training classes run by Bilsland’s old coach, Jimmy Dorward, held in a large school in the Springburn area of Glasgow. The classes were held on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and they always followed the same routine: a twenty-minute warm-up followed by a session of circuit-type exercises – squat thrusts, sit-ups, press-ups – designed to improve strength and overall fitness. The hall was divided in two, with cyclists training at one end and footballers – among them several who would go on to play for Rangers, and one, Walter Smith, who was eventually appointed Scotland coach, and who attended the class at the same time as Bilsland – at the other. Bobby Melrose was a regular. ‘The warm-up was severe, never mind the circuit training,’ he recalls with a grimace. ‘The footballers only did the warm-up, then they would lie at the back of the hall on mats while we did our training. Then we played football with them at the end. It was brutal.’
‘It was a great night,’ says the ageless Jimmy Dorward, now in his fifth decade of coaching cyclists. His description of the warm-up doesn’t quite tally with Melrose’s – actually, it is amusingly at odds with it. ‘General callisthenics,’ is how he describes the class, his hands flailing dismissively, ‘limbering up, stretching, a little jogging and so forth. I drew cyclists from all over Glasgow for those classes. But it was a great night and the lads loved it. I tried to get the footballers to join in when Alex Willoughby, a midfielder with Rangers, came along. But they said, “No chance, we don’t want to be shown up.” But then, cyclists have tremendous dedication to training.’ To illustrate the point, Dorward, who was Bilsland’s coach, told me what his pupil told him on his return from the 1968 Olympics in Mexico. ‘He came back and said that the cyclists hadn’t really mixed with the other athletes, many of whom seemed to be there to enjoy themselves. The ones they mixed with best were the boxers. The boxers know that if they don’t train they’re going to get a leathering. The cyclists were the same. So the cyclists and the boxers behaved impeccably – they had that in common.’
Dorward is modest about the significance of his role in running the legendary Springburn circuit training classes. ‘It wasn’t on my account that it was a fantastic class. Billy used to go, and he sent Robert. I watched him in circuits and he stood out there. He drove round, you know? He was a very good example to everyone. I remember Robert as being special, even when he was 16, 17. You don’t get many of that calibre.’ Dorward didn’t coach Millar, but he would have liked to. ‘It’s like a cabinet maker,’ he reasons, ‘if you see a nice piece of wood you’d like to work with it.’
Almost certainly as a result of all this dedicated training, Millar made an immediate impact in 1977, his first senior year. In the first event of the season, a handicap race in Ayrshire in mid-March, he sprinted in first, just beating Whitehall. Two weeks later, the Tour of the Shire provided a sterner test. According to Cycling, ‘Sandy Gilchrist and Dave Brunton [both seniors, who tied for first place] were red-faced when junior road race champion Robert Miller [sic] was only ten seconds down’ in a race run off ‘in tough conditions, with an icy crosswind’. Next up was one of the biggest events on the Scottish calendar, the Easter weekend Girvan 3-Day in Ayrshire. With his performance here, in the colours of Strathclyde, Millar offered ‘hope for the future’, according to Cycling; ‘a fine fifth place by Scottish junior champion Robert Millar [clearly he was making an impact: it was the first correct spelling of his name] on the final stage’. But the revelation of the weekend was another young rider, an Englishman by the name of John Parker. His and Millar’s paths would cross again two years later.
Millar continued to perform well and earned selection to the Scottish team for July’s Scottish Milk Race, which was certainly the biggest race in Scotland and second only to the Milk Race – the two-week stage race held in England – in Britain. At 18, Millar was the youngest in an international pro-am field that included the leading British professional riders and amateur teams from Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Five days long, the stages ranged from 83 miles to 105 miles, and took the riders the length and breadth of the country, from Glasgow to Aberdeen and Ayr.
Millar’s race almost came to a disastrous end on stage 3, Arbroath to Aberdeen, when he skidded on a gravelly bend and broadsided into a bridge parapet, colliding with a spectator who was sitting there. Rider and spectator disappeared over the side of the bridge, falling twelve feet, though Millar was able to use the unfortunate gentleman ‘as a cushion’, reported Cycling. Unhurt, Millar got back up and rejoined the field. (It is not known what happened to the man who’d provided a soft landing.) Early the next day, ‘his left thigh red from the crash’, Millar attacked repeatedly on the 103-mile stage from Stonehaven to Aberdeen. It got him nowhere, but it did get the Scottish team talked about, prompting Cycling to hail them as ‘the best band of triers the host country has recently produced, forcing their attentions on the race and taking the suffering that went with it’.
On the final day, Millar produced a sensational performance, placing second on the ninety-four-mile stage having attacked with seven miles to go. ‘The field was shredded and patched up many times over the 900-foot moors,’ Cycling reported. ‘With 30 miles left in the unabating wind [where] horizontal bars of driving rain replaced the brief sunshine, a long gradual climb to exposed moorland cut the field to 31.’ With fifteen miles to go, and a Swiss rider out in front, Millar punctured, but he quickly rejoined the group of thirty-one riders and at seven miles to go launched an attack. ‘It promised the waiting crowds something to hope for, but his gallant attack, like so many made by the Scots, was to fail. Second place was still a superb ride, Scotland’s best.’ In his first international race, in his first year as a senior, Millar finished seventeenth overall. Ninth was Gilchrist, the top-placed Scot. ‘We had been under a lot of pressure to do well in the Scottish Milk Race,’ recalls Melrose, another member of the team. ‘There was always the threat that they’d pull the plug on the race if the home riders didn’t do well. Generally we were struggling, but that day that Robert got second, I couldn’t believe it. The wind was unbelievable. I was nearly crying. It was some ride.’
Several weeks later Millar again shone in a field containing riders several years older than him, placing second in the Scottish road race championship, held over a ninety-one-mile course in Dundee. Having been in a late escape with Sandy Gilchrist, and despite being hailed ‘the most courageous of the Scottish under-20s’, he was beaten to the line by another prodigious talent. Jamie McGahan, just 18 and thirteen days younger than Millar, was the new Scottish senior champion. Clearly Millar was not the only young Scot with huge talent.
Unlike Millar, McGahan really could claim that he came from the wrong side of the tracks. He was brought up in Possilpark, one of Glasgow’s most notorious districts, in a tenement flat with no hot water. ‘It was one of the things that motivated me,’ he says, ‘I’d come in from doing 120 miles in the cold and then I’d have to heat a big pot of water for a wash. I remember thinking that everyone had a shower except me, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. Poverty’s relative, isn’t it?’ McGahan had been on the same Strathclyde team as Millar at the Girvan Easter stage race, earlier