robert millarrobert millar
......................................................................................................................................................................................................... a peipers tale

palmares | a funny guy | the stolen vuelta |the spanish years |
honour | the small yin | setting the record straight | millar on motorbikes | the book |
robert millar colnago c40 review | 1988 winning magazine interview | training | the outsider |
2008 interview | british road champion | the 2011 tour de France

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a peiper's tale

the following is an extract from the chapter 'robert millar' from 'a peiper's tale' by allan peiper who was with robert in the acbb, peugeot and panasonic. i am extremely grateful to adrain bell of mousehold press and to allan peiper for permission to reproduce on the post. the book can be purchased from mousehold press at a cost of £12.95

I always had a soft spot for Robert; he is eccentric. Mr Eccentric. He was a lot like me in the sense of looking after his body. He was very interested in his food, in health food and not eating rubbish. He also had an eye for doing all the little things, the details of looking after yourself. Like he would get two ashtrays in the hotel room and put them under the feet end of the bed, so when he laid down his legs were raised and the blood would run easily to his heart to help his legs recuperate.

I can remember sharing a room with him a few times and coming out of the shower and he’d be laid on the bed with his sleeping mask on, and he wouldn’t let you turn the light on, and you couldn’t make a noise. Another thing I remember is that he walked everywhere on tip-toe, like he had cycling shoes on, but he did it no matter what he’d got on his feet.

But when Sean and I were around him we could crack that exterior, the odd little person that Robert was. And I can see a correlation in Davitamon-Lotto between Cadel Evans, and Nick Gates, Robbie McEwen and Henk Vogels, because Cadel is pretty eccentric. Not as extreme as Robert Millar was, but Cadel is different from your average bike rider; he thinks differently and acts differently.

I was driving a team car to the start of the Australian Championships recently, and all the Australian riders in Davitamon-Lotto were in it. Robbie had the front window down and Cadel yelled out from the back, ‘Can you close that window?’ And Gatesy said, ‘Oh pull your fucking head in. What do you think you’re going to get, a cold? It‘s 30 degrees outside’. And I looked in the mirror and saw Cadel’s face, and he just cracked up. Now that was good, because I thought Gatesy and Vogels were going to be too hard for Cadel. I was a bit wary that they would crack him mentally, but I can see that they are good for him, and they will look after him. That’s how it was with Sean and me, and Rob. We looked after him and we could get through to him.

millar in 84

We went to a race on the Isle of Wight; it might have been 1984 or ’85. Peugeot UK took us over and Sean won it. We were catching the plane back to Belgium from Heathrow, and security wanted to do a check on Robert’s bags. Well, he got really irate. He was really abusive to the girl who was looking in his bags, and afterwards I said to him; ‘Look Rob, if you ever speak to anybody like that again in my presence, I’ll fucking knuckle you.’ And it must have stuck, because I never heard him go off like that any more.

Robert wasn’t naturally like that, not naturally hard or abusive, but he thought he had to act that way. Maybe it was something to do with where he grew up, in Glasgow. He had put it on, and sometimes he didn’t know when to take it off. Sometimes in life you have to act hard, but not with everyone, and Robert didn’t always understand that.

That first Tour de France I rode was the one in which Robert won the King of the Mountains, so that made it even more special for me. Sean and I did what we could for him after I lost the young rider’s jersey. We rode in the wind for him, and on the climbs when the mountains weren’t too steep we fetched bottles, and generally looked after him in the bunch. Then afterwards, riding the criteriums with Robert in his mountains jersey was a good time, and it made me feel very proud.

I had a rapport with Robert. It was not like we were friends, because I don’t think it’s so easy to be friends with Robert Millar. I don’t mean that in a bad way, it’s just the way it is. But he felt comfortable with me and Sean. I think he felt accepted. I can see that with Cadel; he wants to be accepted. Cadel needs assurance, and he needs to feel he is accepted. As he is in Davitamon-Lotto.

Now, some people reading this who knew Robert in those days will wonder what I‘m on about, because sometimes it looked like he went out of his way not to be accepted. But again that was a front he put up – although, I admit, it was a pretty good one. Going out to be different, to be at odds with everyone, was a safety net with Robert, just in case he wasn’t accepted. It was a way of protecting himself from getting hurt.

He still used to do some strange things, though. I was just thinking about this the other day when I was driving on the autoroute in France. To get out of paying the tolls, Robert used to have a big pair of bolt cutters in his car. There are gates before the toll booths that are locked with chains, and at the last gate before the toll, and Robert always knew where they were, he would stop his car, cut the chain and drive off the autoroute. Then he’d come back on by the toll booth entry road, get a ticket and only pay for one stop.

He had a system for the airport, too. He’d drive his car into the car park, take a ticket and leave his car there for maybe two weeks. So by the time he came back he’d have a really big bill to pay. What he would do then was get a buggy, and drive the buggy out of the airport building onto the road and into the car park. Then, I don’t know how he did it perhaps he had a magnetic pass or something, but he’d get the barrier to lift, get another ticket so it looked like he’d just driven his car in, and use that ticket to get his car out. It would look as though he’d only been in there for ten minutes.

He was always coming up with these schemes to save money. I mean, who would think about having bolt cutters in the boot of their car? We used to take the piss out of him something wicked. I had five years with Robert, three at Peugeot and two at Panasonic. Robert went with me to Panasonic and was there in 1986 and 1987. Then he went to Fagor, the team Sean Yates was in.

There were some fireworks with Robert and Peter Post, though. Peter had this strict idea of what he wanted in his riders. They had to have good manners; they had to look smart. He had a mould he wanted them to fit, and it wasn’t just about how good a bike rider they were. He wanted good looking riders, and riders who could ride hard. I can’t put my finger on quite what it was, but the nearest I can think of is he wanted riders that he classed as ‘gentlemen’. I think Rob rubbed a bit with that.

Having said that, I still think Peter respected him. Robert did some good rides with Panasonic. He nearly won the Tour of Spain. He should have won the Tour of Spain, but there was something that went off with a car in the final mountain stage, where the rider who beat Rob was protected from the wind by the car for part of the course. He also did a good ride in the Giro: he was second overall and he won the mountains jersey there.

The thing about Robert, now that I’ve written about him and thought about the length of time I was on the same team as him, almost half of my career, is that I never really knew him. We never had a heart to heart conversation. I never went to his house, and he never came to mine.

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palmares | a funny guy | the stolen vuelta | the spanish years |
honour| the small yin | setting the record straight | millar on motorbikes | the book |
robert millar colnago c40 review | 1988 winning magazine interview | training | the outsider |
2008 interview | british road champion | the 2011 tour de France

.........................................................................................................................................................................................................