In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
towards victory, resplendent in his British champion’s jersey, which was white with red and blue bands around the chest. Alas, the picture was on the inside pages rather than the cover and therefore would have been worth only £30 rather than £100 to Millar. He finished an outstanding season by winning the Tour of the Trossachs time trial, ending a seven-year run of wins by Sandy Gilchrist, and shattering the course record, set in 1964 by Ian Thomson.
A more significant item appeared in Cycling magazine on 7 October. ‘Millar Gets Paris Call’ read the headline. The story was reputedly prompted by a phone call to the offices of the magazine from Claude Escalon, deputy director of the Paris-based Athlétique Club de Boulogne-Billancourt (ACBB). ‘I’m very interested in taking an Englishman [sic] called Millar,’ Escalon told the staff at Cycling. ‘Have you any idea what kind of a rider he is, and where I could contact him?’
You don’t get anywhere being nice. Not in bike racing.
Claude Escalon was not alone in trying to fix Millar up with a French club. Through his international contacts as a high-ranking UCI official, Arthur Campbell had been sounding out US Créteil, the club with which Billy Bilsland raced before he turned professional, when the call came from Escalon. In fact, his phone call to the offices of Cycling wasn’t quite as coincidental as implied in the magazine. Over the past two seasons a tradition had started whereby the Athlétique Club de Boulogne-Billancourt, based in the western suburbs of Paris, would cherry-pick the best British talent. It was a ritual that started after Paul Sherwen’s move to the Paris club in 1977.
As an English speaker at the ACBB, Sherwen, from Cheshire, was an anomaly, a one-off, but he made such an impact that he was invited, when he left after a year to turn professional, to nominate one of his countrymen. For the 1978 season Sherwen had suggested that his replacement should be another rider from the north-west of England, Graham Jones. With Sherwen and Jones, the ACBB struck gold. And, not surprisingly, the success of these two riders fostered in those running the club a belief that on the other side of the English Channel lay a rich and untapped seam of talent. By the start of 1979, when Millar arrived in Paris, Sherwen had ridden his first Tour de France, with Fiat, and Jones had signed his first professional contract, with Peugeot. Jones had even finished 1978 with the prestigious Merlin Plage Palme d’Or trophy, awarded annually to the best amateur in France. According to the new tradition, he had been asked by the ACBB which British rider should replace him. Jones had responded that there was one outstanding candidate: Robert Millar.
Back in Glasgow, Millar was also doing all that he could to fix himself up with a move to the continent, which would be a step closer to a professional contract. There was a clearly defined pathway to that end. Millar had already worked out that the place to shine was not the Commonwealth Games, the Olympics, or the Milk Race; it was by racing with the best amateurs in France, Belgium, Holland and Italy, where most professional teams were based. The teams’ recruitment process was straightforward: they plucked the best talent from the domestic amateur racing scene. The only way to turn professional, then, was to live there. And, the really difficult bit, to win there.
Apart from giving up work and winning the races that would alert people such as Jones to his talent, the 20-year-old had been preparing for his departure in other ways, too. With the help of Arthur Campbell, he had been studying French. ‘I had made all the arrangements for him to go to France,’ says Campbell, ‘but when the offer from the ACBB came I kept out of it. At that time I became inundated with riders wanting to go to France to try and turn professional. I ended up saying, “No problem. Go to Central Station [the railway station in Glasgow] and make your way from there.” It wasn’t as easy as they thought, and I had been let down by every one of them – for various reasons. When you go there, you have to be prepared to give everything.’ After trying and failing to persuade Millar to finish his apprenticeship, Campbell didn’t hesitate in encouraging him to move to France, but with the same proviso: ‘Speak to your parents.’ The advice was met with an identical response: ‘It’s my decision.’
Campbell had been teaching Millar French for almost a year as 1978 drew to a close. When the lessons started, Millar hadn’t even been outside the country. But Campbell was impressed by his commitment to learning the language, noting that he started from scratch, but ‘did it the way it should be done’. Campbell adds that ‘though Robert didn’t say much, he had a good grasp of the English language. If you have that, you have a head start.’ He gave him homework, which was done every time, on time. Still, Campbell felt duty bound to warn him, ‘All you’re learning from me is the grammar. I speak French to you in a way that I don’t speak to French people, articulating every word, overemphasizing every sound. When you go to France you won’t know what’s hit you.’ Despite his rebellious track record when it came to educational matters, according to Campbell Millar was a model pupil, though he scoffs at the suggestion that he might have enjoyed learning French for its own sake. ‘Oh no, oh no – it all came from his ambition to be a cyclist. It wasn’t that he wanted to speak French!’
Given his feelings towards Glasgow, which he would articulate later, it seems likely that Millar regarded his imminent departure as decisive and final. Some of those who knew him were certainly left with that impression, recalling that he seemed to be preparing to cut his ties completely. For the past year, and especially since he had finished working at Weir’s, he had trained regularly with Bobby Melrose. Of course, even before he left work he’d still managed to join the out-of-work Melrose with surprising regularity. ‘He very seldom went to work,’ Melrose recalls with a smile. ‘In the winter we went out training during the day and in the summer we’d train during the day and then go out with the bunch at night. And we had an arrangement, even though we weren’t in the same club, that we would help each other in races and then split the prize money. You were always looking to make as much as you could.’ Despite their friendship – Melrose says he got on well with Millar and was fond of him – he was under no illusion that it would survive a move to France. ‘I think he realized that when he went to France he didn’t want to be missing his pals,’ Melrose says. It was a conscious decision, Melrose thought, for the purely pragmatic reason that he ‘didn’t want anything to come back for, or it would have been too easy for him to pack it in and come home. He didn’t want to feel lonely or missing anything about home. I can’t remember if he told me that, though I’m sure he did. But that was the impression I had, anyway.’
Willie Gibb recalls Millar’s ‘tunnel vision’ once his heart was set on moving away and pursuing a career as a cyclist. ‘It was almost like he didn’t care what other people thought of him. He was very obstinate and he was totally focused on where he wanted to go, but there was never any big-headedness about it. It was very matter of fact with Robert.’
There are marginal differences of opinion, but many people who were involved in the British cycling scene in the late 1970s make more or less the same observation: that Robert Millar was one among an unusually large group of talented riders – at 19, they say, he had comparable ability to Bobby Melrose, Jamie McGahan, Willie Gibb and the top young rider in England, John Parker – but that he was different. ‘Special’ is the word many used to describe him at various stages of his career, so that it became a euphemism for different, original, talented, unusual, eccentric, maverick. Many – a surprising number, perhaps – offered their appraisal with obvious and unconcealed affection.
Listening to what they had to say, and reading Millar’s own words, I was reminded of another iconic Scottish sportsman and cult hero, the climber Dougal Haston. Like Millar, Haston was aloof and economical with words, but also prodigiously talented and ferociously driven. Like Millar again, Haston divided people: some found him engaging company and became fiercely protective of his reputation after he died, others reckoned he had the social skills – and also the sting – of a wasp. When he died in a skiing accident in 1977, Haston was writing a novel, Calculated Risk, whose hero, John Dunlop, was very obviously based on the author. In one passage,