robert millarrobert millar

honour .........................................................................................................................................................................................................

palmares | the stolen vuelta | a peiper's tale |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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by Kenny Pryde re-printed with permission from Cycle Sport, February 1997

Robert Millar is probably the best rider Britain has ever produced. How did he attain this status and what were the influences which shaped the man?

What made Robert Millar great bike rider? What attributes did he require to scale the oxygen starved heights of cycling's toughest arena, the European professsional circuit? Aside from the obvious physiological requirements, a certain mental toughness is needed and those who practise demanding sports are often renowned for being a little bit different. Euphemistically speaking, such people tend to be a 'bit special'.

Le Groupement

In cycling, few riders were more 'special' than Robert Millar. In his spiky prime the Scot was right up there with Laurent Fignon, Gianni Bugno, Gert Jan-Theunisse, Steven Rooks and all those other miserable so-and-sos who journalists would do anything not to to have to talk to. A quote? Some days you would have to content yourself with a grunt or a scowl. Millar had a degree in non-verbal communication, specialising in agression, but this couldn't hide his talent.

'Millar was different, Millar could hack it out there', states his mentor and coach Billy Bilsland, a Peugeot and Raleigh pro of the early 1970s who is in a better position than most to judge what made the Glaswegian special. 'He could win and go back to his apartment until his next race. That's what cracks a lot of people.'

In fact you could say that he hit the nail on the head straight off. Millar was different, different in terms of talent and in terms of mentality. Bilsland, a fellow Glaswegian continues; 'He was special. I remember five of us went for a ride round the coast and ended up in Largs getting changed into dry clothes. A guy came into the toilets and I said to him, 'OK you've got a champion here, which one of us is it?' Of course he didn't pick Robert because there was never an ounce of fat on him. He had a fabulous pair of legs and a big heart.'

Bilsland recalls Millar's arrival at the Glasgow Wheelers' weight training sessions in the winter of 1974, a meeting which led to him joining the club and coming under Bilsland's coaching wing. 'There were other guys who were better as juniors, 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, he could bang out more or less the same times sprint after sprint, even at 16. He was kinda shy though, quite quiet until you got to know him.

However, the side Millar showed to his coach, a man he respected and needed, was nothing like the attitude he adopted with others around him. The riders who were closest to the Scot in terms of class and ability got to know him a little better than most, but were still mystified by the ambitious young man they raced and trained with.

Willie Gibb, a Scottish National Road Champion, was at Shawlands Academy on the south side of Glasgow with Millar and they joined their first cycling club together when they were fifteen. They continued to race together until Millar went to France in 1979. 'Even at school he had a total disregard for what people thought of him and he was very obstinate,' explains Gibb. 'I mean, I knew him from when we were at primary school and at fifteen you would say he was a bit odd and that didn't change all the time I knew him. He was a loner and he put off a lot of people in Scotland with his attitude when he was younger. Part of the problem was that people just didn't know how to take him - but he didn't care, he was so single minded.

'I remember when he got his apprenticeship with Weir Pumps he said all he did was go to the toilet, lock the door and try to sleep so that he could be well rested for his training later on. Everyone around him was was getting on with racing in Britain as well as getting a job and a life, getting married or whatever, but Robert had a mission in life and that was to be a top cyclist.'

robert z millar

Clearly that sort of mission required a singular approach and his application left little room for anything or anyone who couldn't directly assist. The teenage Millar appears to have been a rather shy young man who built a wall around himself, a wall behid which there was no access for anyone who couldn't help him with his 'mission'. It wasn't a particularly high wall and was not insurmountable, but it served its purpose.

Once installed at the ACBB in 1979 he could hide behind the inevitable language problems and the label of etranger (foreigner). The Millar who arrived in Paris was no different from the youngster who had left Glasgow behind. Paris was a stopping off point on his road to glory, but he hadn't arrived yet and the wall stayed up. 'You never mixed with the French guys, you went to ACBB for a reason - to do the best for yourself,' Millar said of his attitude on his arrival in France.

While he was concentrating on the matter in hand - getting a contract - Millar went out of his way to avoid all other diversions. Jamie McGahan, a fellow Glaswegian who raced with Millar in numerous Scottish national teams both at home anad abroad, recalls; 'I remeber going over to his flat in Glasgow one winter to buy a jersey from him and he said; 'I've just had this haircut done' - a real brutal haircut - 'just in case I weaken and want to go to a disco.' It was the middle of winter, you've got to relax a wee bit, haven't you? But that was Millar for you, totally dedicated.'

Cut back to the ACBB flat in Paris where the talented Scot is already comfortably installed, winning races, doing well, the apple of team manager Claude Escalon's eye. A Liverpudlian by the name of Mark Bell arrives, a little lost, finds a bed and tries to find his feet. Lying in his room, staring at the ceiling, he hears a noise in the kitchen and goes to investigate. He finds Millar, who says next to nothing to him, makes his dinner as Bell looks on, takes it back to his room and shuts the door behind him.

TVM

Cut to a Shop supermarket in Troyes three years later. McGahan is riding for UV Aube in Troyes and, by chance, meets Millar doing his shopping. 'I asked him how life was treating him as a pro and we exchanged a few worlds and he left. That was it. Indifference is the word that springs to mind. There was no suggestion that we went for a ride or a coffee or a meal or anything. He was never a very warm character. Then at least. I was and am full of admiration for him as a bike rider, but as a human beaing he was a dead loss.'

Why did the Glaswegian make it abroad where so many others failed? Bilsland believes he knows, given that he had travelled more or less the same road to France. 'Millar was a winner,' he says simply.

Millar was different, he always stayed apart a bit, he was always a bit funny.

He was the man who built is own fire for his own soup can at the winter drum ups as a 16 year old. He was the stroppy youth who was 'cowped' into Loch Lomond for causing trouble at a private beach at Rowardenan. 'It's true. It's true,' exclaims John Storrie, stalwart of the Glenmarnock Wheelers, Millar's first club. 'He was a bit of a rebel, a bit of a loner, but one day we stopped to swim in Loch Lomond at a private beach. Well, the woman who owned it said it was OK, but Robert started throwing stones at a canoe or something, he wouldn't stop so I threw him in the loch. He was upset because he had his best shorts on.'

Rebel, Loner, Odd, Weird. These are the words which you hear over and over again when you talk to those people who knew Millar best as he propelled himself from the multi-storey flats in Glasgow's Shawlands district to the Continent and bike stardom. He could deny it now. He could deny it till he was blue in the face, but it wouldn't change the opinions of those he left behind. He's changed now, of course he has, but could it be that those characteristics helped him, were indeed crucial to him. Now he's a funny guy. But then?

The acerbic wit which has served Millar so well in his more recent career as a writer was less tempered with humour in his racing days. What now passes for humour managed to get up the noses of any number of people in the past. In a poll of 'good blokes of the peloton' Millar wouldn't have received too many citations (the cycling fanzine 'Well Phil' described him as 'the Scots git with the ponytail') Remember the loner on club runs back in Glasgow? The outsider mentality which the shy boy from the south side cultivated stuck to him like mud to a bottom bracket shell. It suited his personality to hide behind a facade of 'being difficult', of not tolerating people he considered fools. Not even if they were under-researched journalists from Scottish newspapers looking for the inevitable pre-Tour quotes. 'One guy asked me what I did when I wasn't cycling, like, did I have a full time job,' says Millar of an early interview as a pro. Can you guess how well that question went down?

Late on in his career the guard inevitably came down and he opened up a bit more, bioth to riders and the media. Maybe the pressure at Panasonic and Fagor had gotten to him because by the time he reached Z and TVM he was a changed man. 'He was always very serious,' recalled Theo de Rooy, a former room-mate at Panasonic, 'sometimes a little too serious. He didn't laugh a lot, he tended to follow his own line. 'This didn't stop de Rooy working hard for Millar when he could, telling epic tales of adventure in the cross-winds of the Vuelta.

Millar left Panasonic chastened and lowered his sights a little, realising and accepting that he wasn't a Tour contender. If he had harboured any notions on that score pre-Panasonic, he had discarded them when he left for Fagor to ride shotgun for Stephen Roche. Alas by a quirk of fate, Roche watched the bulk of the 1988 season from ateam car or watching the bunch leave him behind as he struggled with knee injury.

The burden of team leadership fell on Millar and he didn't enjoy it at all.

Z

Perhaps, having clawed his way to the top of the greasy pole, he didn't enjoy the view. It was lonely up there and you needed friends. Friends were something Millar had made little effort to cultivate. When you treat people with indifference on your way up, imagine the glee with which these same riders 'flick' you whenever the opportunity presents itself. Single-mindedness is one thing, riding roughshod over people is quite another. Millar undoubtedly paid for his 'to hell with you' attitude at various points in his career. Recalling the 1985 World's, when near veteran Joop Zoetemelk slipped away to win a rainbow jersey, Millar would later reflect; 'Funny how things like that never happened to me.' Precisely. Bad Karma maybe, or what goes around comes around. In order to win races you need friends, often in other teams.

'The need to have friends, or to have some kind of standing in the bunch is important, it always has been,' notes another ex-continental pro, John Herety. 'There are some guys who will be chased down or some guys who, let us say, spur you to greater efforts in a chase. I don't know wheter Robert was ever one of those guys, I don't think he was. It's more like a team thing, but there's no doubt that a lot of the time your face has got to fit if you go up the road for a win.'

Training - Glasgow

For all that the take-no-prisoners appraoch mellowed when he was at Z - he set up fellow Scot Brian Smith at ACBB, for example, the first and last amateur Millar lifted a finger for - and TVM, he could still surprise with his savagery. When young Dane Bo Hamburger arrived at TVM, Millar was asked if he would give the youngster some tips, a bit of help to find his feet. The response? 'To hell with that. No one helped me when I started, so why should I help him. He'll just get good and maybe take my place on the team.' Dog eat dog.

Do not imagine, however, that the Scot left the sport under a cloud. His career was better than any British pro you care to metnion and there is little doubt that his attitude to journalists, the media and anyone who crossed him was unambiguous, yet, crucially, he didn't make any enemies and he was a respected rider in the bunch. A rider who kept himself to himself, a rider who wouldn't go out of his way to befirend anyone, but who was undoubtedly loyal to thos around him. 'He always made a point of thanking us, he played straight with us,' recalled de Rooy., while Wayne Bennington could thank Millar for his introduction to Z after he had been shown the door by Systeme U.
But perhaps the last word on the modern Millar should go to his fellow Z rider, Norwegian Atle Kvalsvoll. When spotted at the World Championships in Lugano, Kvalsvoll's forst words to a British journalist were; 'How's Bob? Still laughing at everyone? He was a funny guy.

'Funny ha ha, not funny peculiar.

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palmares |the stolen vuelta | a peiper's tale |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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