In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
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only 30. Bilsland was a renowned hard man, able to survive any race, no matter how tough. He didn’t win many of them, but it hardly mattered. Such riders were of great value to the continental professional teams, where they fulfilled the role of domestique, or team helper. In his seven years on the continent Bilsland was a much-respected domestique for the Peugeot team before moving to the Dutch-based TI Raleigh squad. Coincidentally, his protégé Millar would go on to ride for both teams in their later guises.
Millar first encountered Bilsland in the winter of 1975, at a circuit training class. The following year, with Millar feeling that he had outgrown the Glenmarnock Wheelers, the pair talked. Millar felt ready to move up to the next step, and the next step, as he saw it, was the Glasgow Wheelers. Bilsland’s connections with the club, as well as those of Arthur Campbell, the president of the British Cycling Federation and a leading light in the world governing body, the Union Cycliste International (UCI), convinced Millar that a move to the Glasgow Wheelers would allow him to climb the rungs of the ladder he could now see in front of him, stretching all the way to the continent and, eventually, the Tour de France. It was at this time that he and Willie Gibb went their separate ways, though Gibb also said goodbye to John Storrie and the Glenmarnock Wheelers and joined another club, the Regent CC. Tom Brodie, meanwhile, went with Millar to the Glasgow Wheelers, though his racing career was destined never to reach full flight.
Gibb says that by this stage it was obvious to him that Millar was determined ‘to give cycling a right good go’. They still cycled together, but there was no more chasing buses down the Ayr road, or all-night fishing trips. Millar was not one to talk openly about his ambitions, but Gibb remembers that ‘he started to come up with all these changes to our training. Robert read a lot of books, but there was one in particular, Cycle Racing: Training to Win by Les Woodland. He followed what was in that to the letter.’ When Gibb recalls the severity of these sessions it can bring him out in a cold sweat, even now. ‘When I think back to the training we did, it was way over the top. It was brutal. We were basically over-training, but because we were young we were able to do it and recover from it. Robert was doing all kinds of weight training – he was getting some guidance from Billy Bilsland by now – and I just did the same as him. We did a lot of double sessions, training during the day and again in the evening.’ Gibb was a strong rider himself, representing Scotland at the 1982 Commonwealth Games and winning several national championships. He retired from racing in the mid-eighties to concentrate on earning a living. Then, in the mid-nineties, having established a successful career in the electronics industry, he made a comeback. ‘I tried to do the same kind of training that I’d done with Robert in the 1970s,’ he says, ‘but I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t cope with the intensity of it.’
By 1976 Millar was racing every weekend and, though still a junior, he was placing regularly in the top three, even in events open to senior riders. After several near-misses he scored his first win on 15 May in the Chryston Wheelers fifty-six-mile road race; two weeks later he won his second bunched race, the Glasgow Road Club fifty-mile road race. In August, in the junior road race championship, he improved from fourth twelve months earlier to first, ‘justifying his Billy Bilsland training’, according to Cycling, ‘with an inches victory from Dave Whitehall, Ivy CC, in the championship over 45 miles in Aberdeen’. He was still appearing as ‘Miller’, and perhaps here, in his apparent unwillingness to point out the mistake to the Cycling correspondent, was the first example of his reluctance to engage with the media. Whitehall gained revenge on his rival in the time trial Best All-Rounder (BAR) competition, which was decided by a rider’s best times over twenty-five and fifty miles. A missing marshal in a time trial in Glasgow cost Millar a chance to overhaul Whitehall, an incident that ‘prompted a furious outburst from Arthur Campbell’.
By now Campbell and Bilsland had seen Millar’s potential and were beginning to assume mentoring roles. ‘I had just stopped racing so I went out training with Robert and the boys,’ says Bilsland. ‘My wife and I didn’t have kids at that time, so Robert would come and stay with us before races, and we’d be up early in the morning and away.’ To this day, Millar is the only rider who has enjoyed such close attention from Bilsland. Despite his years on the continent, in the tough school of professional racing, Bilsland has rarely actively sought to help promising young Scottish cyclists, though he has remained involved with the sport through his bike shop in the east end of Glasgow, and by holding various roles with his beloved Glasgow Wheelers. He has been the club chairman for more than a decade. The most likely reason for his reluctance to mentor other riders is that he would be too realistic about their chances. He knew that most, if they tried their luck abroad, would fail, and fail spectacularly. He didn’t want to waste his time, or theirs. But in Robert Millar he very quickly identified someone who would not fail.
There is a parallel here with Millar himself. As his professional career blossomed he quietly helped several young Scottish cyclists to find clubs or teams on the continent, but there was only one who seemed to enjoy Millar’s unqualified support. His name was Brian Smith, and, while not enjoying as spectacular a career as Millar, Smith did ride as a professional for the best part of a decade, the high point of which was a season with the American Motorola squad alongside a young Lance Armstrong. Millar’s attitude appeared to be identical to Bilsland’s. For both men, a sense of realism prevailed, and at times that could be devastating for those whose dreams were crushed by a cold, hard dose of it – such as me and my fellow young cyclists when, at the training camp in Stirling in 1989, Millar advised us not to ask him about the Tour de France because it wasn’t ‘relevant’ to us. But underpinning this apparently insensitive remark was the conviction of someone who knew what he was talking about, and knew he was right.
When he was in his late teens, on the other hand, Millar seemed convinced that he would be different – that he knew how to make it, and would succeed if he applied certain principles. In an interview in 1991, Bilsland observed, ‘Millar was one in a million. He always knew where he was going.’ He had, he added, ‘an inner hardness’. Bilsland’s conviction on this point has not changed in the years since then. ‘From day one he said he wanted to go to the continent and turn professional,’ he says. ‘That was his aim. And it’s always easier if your father’s gone before you.’ When pressed on his use of the word ‘father’, Bilsland rejects the suggestion that he was a father figure to Millar. ‘Not really, because I wasn’t that much older than him,’ he explains. ‘It was more a case of me saying to him, “Any way I can help you, I will.”’ Bilsland must have been fond of Millar. ‘Yeah, I like him. I think he’s a great guy.’
Bilsland speaks in the present tense sometimes, at other times referring to his former protégé as if he is no longer around. The reason is that he is uncertain about the current state of their relationship. Like everyone else, and despite their previous closeness, he has no idea where Millar is. He has heard rumours, but nothing concrete, and nothing from Millar himself. When Millar was inducted into the Scottish Sports Hall of Fame in 2003 it was Bilsland who attended the ceremony on his behalf, at the request of the organizers. He didn’t hear from Millar, and he still has the small trophy presented to Millar, in absentia, on the night. Yet he remains fiercely protective of someone he remembers with great fondness. So much so that when I initially contacted him he refused to talk about him. ‘Robert’s a private person,’ was Bilsland’s response. ‘He wouldn’t want a book written about him.’ Although no one else refused to discuss Millar, I did sense, in the case of one or two of his old acquaintances, an initial hesitation, and guardedness. Some seemed to want to protect Millar, though from what, and for what reason, they did not know. That much became clear when they all asked the same questions. Where is he? What’s he doing?
Bilsland’s refusal to talk about his former protégé, however, was a big problem. And one of the difficulties, quite apart from the fact that I considered his input essential, was that I could see his point. Millar had given his consent to my writing a book by email through a third party, which, I had to admit, hardly constituted a ringing endorsement. But it was all I had, it was all I was likely to get; and I felt strongly that the story of Britain’s greatest ever cyclist, the man who had single-handedly turned thousands of us on to the sport, deserved to be written. Bilsland’s knockback was therefore a hard blow. So I wrote to him, outlining my plans for the book and the motivation that lay behind