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

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      Another strange episode that Storrie remembers was a club run that ended with a stop on a private beach by the banks of the Lake of Menteith, around twenty miles north of Glasgow. It was a glorious summer’s day and Storrie, having obtained the permission of the house owner, allowed his young charges to go swimming. The condition stipulated by the land owner was that they behaved themselves, and all complied, except one: the rebel. While everyone else stripped off and went swimming, Millar kept his racing clothing on and stepped into the water until it was up to his knees. ‘He was a devil,’ says Storrie, smiling now. ‘He collected a pile of stones, holding them in his jersey, and he started throwing them at the boats. He kept throwing stones into one boat; he had so many stones in his jersey that I thought he was going to sink it. I kept saying “Robert, stop that!” but he just laughed. I couldn’t get a word out of him. Eventually I paddled out to where he was and tipped him into the water. He wasn’t happy. He came out the water shouting, “They were my fucking good cycling shorts!” They were soaking wet.’

      Storrie declares himself unsure whether Millar might have got into more serious trouble had cycling not provided an outlet for his energy, allowing him to channel his rebellious streak. But he does point out that Millar would not be unique had he been ‘saved’ by cycling. ‘That was the good thing about what I was doing. I was taking people away on the bike, getting them out of Glasgow, away from trouble. It was the ambition of a lot of kids to own a bike and I let them come along whatever bike they had. Some clubs would have said, “Away you go, that’s not suitable.” But if someone came out with us, as long as they could pedal, I’d let them come. I made allowances. I waited for them at the top of a hill. Others didn’t.’

      The other thing Storrie remembers is Millar’s burgeoning ability as a cyclist, in particular his apparent fondness for hills. ‘When you hit a hill he loved to jump away and get up it first. He was competitive. He was naturally strong, really outstanding.’

      Though he could be difficult, Storrie retains fond memories of the teenaged Millar, and even fonder ones of watching his career blossom on the biggest stage of all, the Tour de France. As he wrote in Cycling in 1984, ‘What a great thrill it was to see Robert on TV in 1983, winning the Pyrenean stage, then winning the same stage in 1984 against heavy odds … I am not ashamed to say that I shed tears of emotion as he danced away to victory, and even now, on the video re-run, I still get glassy-eyed. Knowing Millar, I can safely say, quoting Al Jolson, “We ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”’

2

       Mammy’s Boy

      Once you stop school there’s nothing to do. I had the [exams] to have gone to university. For what – an engineering degree? Like my dad, they’re all on the dole.

      Robert Millar walked out of the large iron gates of Shawlands Academy for the final time on 27 May 1975, at the age of 16. He had spent five years at the school and had just completed his ‘Highers’ – Scotland’s equivalent of A levels – performing well enough in those exams to earn a three-year engineering apprenticeship at Weir’s Pumps, a sprawling factory in Cathcart on the eastern fringes of Glasgow that provided employment for a few thousand young men – almost exclusively men. Willie Gibb remembers his classmate as ‘not studious’ but ‘smart’, ‘able to pass exams without really trying’.

      By then the Millar family had moved up in the world, not literally but metaphorically, having swapped the eleventh floor of the high-rise flat in Shawbridge Street for 73 Nithsdale Drive, a ground-floor flat in a sandstone tenement building that is a copy of a design by the nineteenth-century Glasgow architect Alexander ‘Greek’ Thomson. Today it’s a B-listed building, and the flats, with their views towards the north of Glasgow and the Campsie Hills, are much sought after. If it was a Thomson original, like the building housing flats around the corner, they’d be even more sought after. ‘You can’t touch them without permission from Rome,’ joked one of the Millars’ old neighbours when I paid a visit to 73 Nithsdale Drive.

      Millar had also graduated from the Glenmarnock Wheelers club runs to full-blown racing, riding time trials and mass-start road races. Though race outings were still comparatively rare – he said later that he competed in only four events in his first year’s racing – he seemed, after finishing ‘sixth and last’ in his first ever race, to make rapid progress. Three months after leaving school he achieved his most significant result so far, if only for the fact that it gained him his first name check in the publication that had proved such a distraction in the classroom and in what he considered to be dull lectures: Cycling magazine. For cyclists aged between 16 and 18 it was the biggest date on the calendar, the national junior road race championship, held over forty-two miles on a circuit in Dundee, some seventy miles to the north-east of Glasgow. The race was won by a rider who was a year older than Millar, and who at that time dominated the junior racing scene in Scotland. Bobby Melrose of the Nightingale Cycling Club sprinted in at the head of a small group of riders, leading for the final two hundred yards and crossing the line a convincing three lengths clear. In fourth place, just out of the medals but in the same time as Melrose, was, reported Cycling on 16 August, R. Miller (sic) of Glenmarnock Wheelers. Sixth was Tom Brodie, given the same time of one hour, fifty-two minutes and fifteen seconds. It would be around eighteen months before Cycling consistently began to spell Millar’s name correctly.

      By this stage Millar had also started training on Saturdays with a group known as the Anniesland Bunch (it still meets, incidentally, every Saturday at 10 a. m, at Anniesland Cross, riding a circuit of between seventy and eighty miles known as the ‘Three Lochs’, taking in Loch Goil, Loch Long and Loch Lomond). One of the regulars in the Anniesland Bunch was another rider who was showing considerable promise, and who was a year younger than Millar. His name was David Whitehall. Whitehall remembers Millar appearing at the meeting point at Anniesland Cross and having him pointed out. ‘I remember someone saying, “There’s that new guy, Robert Millar from the Glenmarnock,”’ shrugs the quietly spoken Whitehall. ‘Right away you could see that he had a bit of power. He didn’t have much experience following the wheels in the group, but after a few weeks it shone through that he had class.’

      Another member of the group was Ian Thomson, a strong rider in the 1960s and 1970s who also served as Scotland’s national team manager between 1969 and 1986. Thomson recalls his first impression of the 16-year-old Millar. ‘At the bottom of the old Whistlefield, a steep climb fairly near the start of the Three Lochs, he just took off. I thought, “Who is this kid?” There were forty or fifty of us out in the group – the roads were quiet in those days – and on this steep climb this boy took off and immediately put five or six lengths into us. It was February or March. And it was a miserable day, I remember that.’

      Gibb says that Brodie was still the strongest of the three friends, but he was beginning to sense a change in Millar’s attitude towards cycling. He had been bitten by the racing bug. While Gibb and others would attach panniers to their bikes and pedal out of the city on touring and youth hostelling excursions at weekends, for Millar, cycling quickly became centred on training and racing rather than riding for fun. Although he hadn’t been studious at school, he applied his brain to this training, and to plotting the progression of his cycling career. It was natural, then, that he should turn to Billy Bilsland.

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