In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore

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СКАЧАТЬ aspired to emulate – and in one or two cases, judging by the hairstyles and contrived reticence, actually to be.

      At that first camp there was massive disappointment when we learned that he couldn’t accompany us on training rides because he was recovering from a minor operation in a place ‘where it affects cyclists most’, as it was reported. ‘Where the sun don’t shine’ would also have been accurate. The next year he was back, and fit. Towards the end of the first training ride I found myself splashing through puddles on back roads near Stirling in a small group of five riders that had become detached from the larger groups. One of the riders in the group, even smaller than he looked on the television, was Robert Millar. We took it in turns to ride at the front alongside him. But when it came to my turn, and my front wheel drew level with his, a very strange thing happened. Fate, or a gust of wind, intervened. My woolly winter training hat was whisked clean off my head, and deposited in a puddle. I don’t think Millar had seen that one before. He kept his cool, but half turned and said, almost inaudibly, ‘A wet hat’s better than no hat, eh?’ To which I nodded silently before peeling away from the group to go back and get it.

      The chance to ride alongside Millar had disappeared in a freakish puff of wind. All those questions loaded with self-interest – How many miles should a 15-year-old ride in a week? What races should a 15-year-old aim for? If you’re going to turn professional, how good should you be at, say, 15? – would have to wait.

      But not for long, because the training ride was followed by a question-and-answer session. We shuffled nervously into a lecture theatre, and then Millar appeared. The questions flowed, while Millar’s eyes darted around, rarely focusing on his audience. His answers were brief and to the point, and they were characterized by that steely assurance that seemed so at odds with his diffident manner. Most of the questions, inevitably, were about the Tour de France. Millar looked a little puzzled. ‘I think you should ask some different questions,’ he said in that curious mid-Atlantic-Scottish-French accent, wearing that half smile. ‘None of you are riding the Tour de France, so I don’t think it’s relevant me talking about it, eh.’ That was us, a roomful of teenagers, told. He did have a point though.

      Nine years later, three years after his retirement, he managed the Scotland team in the Prutour, the nine-stage Tour of Britain. I was in that team, and my abiding memory is of Millar as shy, friendly, modest, with a vast knowledge of the sport, and almost always ready with a witty, often dark one-liner. Perhaps he was too shy to be a truly effective manager. But that was handy in our case: we were rubbish.

      There was an incident before the start of one of the later stages. One of the Scotland riders had misplaced his race numbers. This was a disaster: without them, he wouldn’t be allowed to start. The rider in question was infamously disorganized, always late, always leaving something behind at the hotel. Yet with barely a minute left before the start, the numbers miraculously appeared … from where Millar had hidden them. He smiled that thin smile as he handed them over and said nothing. The rider got the message.

      There is no debate over whether or not Robert Millar is Britain’s greatest ever Tour de France cyclist – and that, in many people’s eyes, makes him Britain’s best-ever cyclist. Supporters of Tom Simpson, the Englishman who died on the slopes of Mont Ventoux during the 1967 Tour de France, might disagree. But Simpson was a one-day specialist: he excelled in the ‘classics’ and the world road race championship, which he won – the only British rider ever to do so – in 1965. Millar, on the other hand, was a man for the major tours, of France, Italy and Spain. For many, these three races are the pinnacle of the sport, and in these events Millar stands head and shoulders above any other cyclist from these islands, which is not bad for someone who grew up in Glasgow, whose frame extended (when he wasn’t crouched over his bike) to five feet six inches, and who tipped the scales at just nine stone.

      Millar was an outstanding cyclist, clearly, but he also had style and class. He was cool, enigmatic, aloof, and quietly determined. His obsessive quest for perfection was awesome. It could be quite terrifying, too. After one stage of the Tour de France the television cameras caught him removing his racing jersey to reveal a painfully skinny upper body, arms as brown as barbecued steak, and torso, with ribs protruding, translucent white. ‘Ooooh,’ said my mum, recoiling in horror. Not mock horror. Everything about him – his self-contained manner, his appearance – screamed absolute dedication, and of an extreme way of living.

      When, in the early 1980s, Millar emerged as one of the world’s leading cyclists, his sport, to most in Britain, was as colourful, intriguing and impenetrable as a foreign language, and those who enjoyed it were fed only on scraps of coverage. It couldn’t have been further removed from the arenas where we traditionally watched and enjoyed sport: football grounds, athletics tracks, tennis courts. The Tour de France was on another scale; it belonged in a different dimension; it represented something other, something more, than sport. You didn’t enjoy the Tour de France, you marvelled at it. The mountains, especially, were where the Tour de France was transformed from being merely a sport into something bigger, more significant. And it was here, in the thin air and against the jagged backdrop of the Alps and the Pyrenees, that Millar excelled. His gifts in such an environment, his ability to dance with smooth grace up such steep mountains, seemed an extravagantly, exotically impressive, not to say surreal talent for somebody raised in one of Europe’s most industrialized and impoverished cities. The Tour’s profile in Britain increased throughout the 1980s, thanks in large part to the growing impact of English speakers such as Millar.

      There are those who claim that in his apparent desperation not to engage with the media, Millar was his own worst enemy. Many said that he lacked charisma; others complained that he had no personality. They were wrong. He was the Morrissey of the sporting world: enigmatic, complex, sardonic; unconventional yet cool; hopelessly shy but at the same time absolutely sure of himself. Oh, and a vegetarian. Confidence, as Phil Liggett said, oozed from Robert Millar, but it was a curious kind of confidence. He was an outsider, always. Watching him race could be as exasperating as it could be exhilarating. He lost the 1985 Tour of Spain on the penultimate day, having been the outstanding rider in the race, when the Spanish teams ganged up to ensure a home victory, but also, and equally importantly, to deny Millar. He was certainly alone there. At the roadside the Spanish fans held up banners expressing their contempt for the strange Scot, for the crimes of (in no particular order) not being Spanish, wearing an earring, and having permed hair. Millar was different. He rubbed people up the wrong way. The director of the Tour de France nicknamed him the asticot – maggot – of professional cycling. To professional observers he was the ‘weedy Woody Allen lookalike, with spectacles, pony tail, and balancing chips on each shoulder’; he looked ‘more like a Dickensian chimney sweep’ than a man who made his name and his fortune in such a brutal and unforgiving sport.

      The career of Britain’s best-ever cyclist ended abruptly, ignominiously, and without fanfare. His French team went bust on the eve of what would have been his twelfth Tour de France, and that was it. The end. Millar disappeared.

      He didn’t literally disappear, at least not at first. He hovered around the cycling scene for a few years; he was appointed British national coach, and he wrote, with flair and humour, for cycling magazines. But his spell as national coach ended just as ignominiously when he was told, less than a year into the job, that he was surplus to requirements.

      In the midst of this some rumours began to swirl around Millar. Some were cruel, some were downright vicious, but they were fuelled by gossip, not least because they went unchecked by Millar. One tabloid newspaper, upon hearing the rumour that this famous cyclist might be having a sex change, camped outside his door for a week. In 2000 the story was published and Millar was, according to some who knew him, devastated. Yet, in keeping with the cyclist who had pursued his career with singular focus and stubborn self-containment, he did not respond. He said nothing.

      Then he really did disappear. All his ties with the cycling world were severed. He appears to want nothing to do with the sport any more. He has next to no contact СКАЧАТЬ