In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
Читать онлайн книгу.
around Millar, particularly in relation to his legendary inability to get on with people. ‘I never found that,’ Bilsland insists. ‘He was shy, and OK, to try to speak to him was like drawing teeth sometimes, but I could chat to him. When he came home for the winter he always came into the shop [Billy Bilsland Cycles] and he could be chatty.’ And anyway, suggests Bilsland, to focus on how Millar interacted with people who in many cases were complete strangers is to completely miss the point – or the point of his cycling career at least. ‘Robert did it for himself,’ he says. ‘He didn’t do it for adulation.’ And then he adds, making a clear distinction between romantic notions – or delusions – of the sport and the cold reality of the business of professional cycling, ‘Robert did it for money, which might be the root of all evil, but it’s handy to have.’
Bilsland is matter-of-fact rather than sentimental. A well-built, stocky man who turned 60 in 2006, he is cheerful and friendly. He has a permanent twinkle in his eye and he laughs a lot, a silent laugh that begins deep in his stomach and eventually overcomes him, causing his shoulders to shake. But while he appears more genial and good-humoured than Millar, he can be a straight talker, too. ‘Robert didn’t suffer fools, never did,’ he says. ‘Big words were a thing with Robert. He doesn’t do bullshit. Some people are egotistic, but Robert didn’t have a big ego. I can imagine him now, wherever he is, if he meets someone out on his bike and they say, “You do a bit of cycling?” He’ll say, “Aye, I do a bit of cycling.” That would be it. End of conversation. He’s a downbeat, unassuming guy. A very bright guy. When I think about chatting to him, he was just a good guy. It’s a pity.’
‘If you speak to Robert, tell him I’m still alive,’ he smiles when I leave him at the station in Glasgow.
Apart from Bilsland, Millar was also hugely reliant on his father, Bill, for transport to races. However, although he was close to his mother, his relationship with his father was, by all accounts, strained. Those who knew the family say that father and son were similar: physically small, slightly built, quiet. Bill walked with a limp, often with the aid of a walking stick, as a result of polio.
‘Robert was a great mammy’s boy,’ says Arthur Campbell. ‘His father had a bit of a limp and I think he was a bit … I wouldn’t say Robert was disgraced by it, but he didn’t appear to have the same respect for his father as he did for his mother. His mum was a seamstress, and she never kept very well.’ Willie Gibb gently disputes Campbell’s suggestion, recalling journeys to London and Manchester with Bill Millar at the wheel. ‘He was good,’ says Gibb. ‘He went out of his way to help Robert. He was a quiet guy but helpful. I never picked up that Robert was embarrassed by his father’s limp, though he didn’t always appear grateful for the help he gave him. I think it could be as simple as the fact that his father would have been the sterner of his parents, the disciplinarian of the family. Robert wouldn’t have liked that.’
David Whitehall remembers one exchange between Robert and his father at a race in Aberdeen to which Bill had driven. ‘Robert seemed ashamed to be seen with him; he’d kind of usher him away. It was like his father was the delivery man, taking him to races, and then that was his work done until it was time to drive him home. I remember he put the wrong wheels on Robert’s bike. Robert was furious. “Dad, you put on the wheels with the big tubs [tyres]!” He gave him a right dressing down. And his dad just took it, you know, in a mea culpa type way. He’d kind of be saying, “You know what Robert’s like.” Others found it quite awkward.’
Neighbours of the Millars on Nithsdale Drive remember Bill with affection. Contrary to Millar’s quote at the head of this chapter, they don’t recall him ever being out of work. Rather, he had risen from being an ironmonger’s assistant at the time of Millar’s birth to become a salesman. Describing Bill Millar as the ‘perfect neighbour’ and ‘always well dressed, very dapper’, they explained that his passions were ballroom dancing – which he did with aplomb, despite his limp – and gardening. He tended a small patch in front of the Millars’ flat. Though quiet, he was cheerful, he could be outgoing, and he was, according to those neighbours, ‘quite proud of his boy’.
Bill Millar was occasionally sought by the media for a comment as his son’s career blossomed, though he didn’t appear to be effusive. When in 1984 Robert really hit the heights in the Tour de France his father was approached by Channel 4 and asked for a reaction. ‘We tried to get his father to give comment,’ recalls the Channel 4 commentator, Phil Liggett, ‘but he said, “I’ve got more children than just the one who rides the Tour de France. It’s very good that he’s done it, but I like my other children just as much.” It was a strange interview. His dad didn’t seem to want to know.’ Even later, when a journalist phoned the house to arrange an interview with his son, Bill Millar replied, ‘He is difficult … you had better check with Robert himself.’
It is possible, perhaps, to read too much into Millar’s apparent behaviour towards his father, particularly since most of the anecdotes date from when Millar was a teenager. It is not unknown for teenagers to be unpleasant towards their parents, after all. Millar was perhaps no worse, or better, than Harry Enfield’s horrific adolescent creation Kevin the Teenager. Nonetheless, in the few words Millar ever uttered about his family, when he was well into his twenties, he could be disarmingly frank about his poor relationship with his father. In 1984, in an interview with Jean-Marie Leblanc, then a journalist but the future director of the Tour de France, he was asked if he’d had the support of his family when he left Scotland for France. ‘More or less,’ Millar replied. ‘In fact, I have never got on very well with my father and I decided to live my life as I wanted. I only go back to Scotland for a few days each year since my mother died. Eventually, I won’t go back at all. I will live in Australia or Canada, or I may stay in France, where the standard of living is better than in Britain.’
Speaking in 1985, four years after the death of his mother, he told a film crew that her loss had come as ‘a bit of a let down’. The High Life was a documentary about Millar made by Granada TV and broadcast on the eve of the 1986 Tour de France, and in a sequence filmed so late that it almost didn’t make the final cut, Millar finally opened up about his family. ‘I was a lot closer to my mother than I was – than I am – to my father,’ he said. ‘I don’t know if that’s natural, or what. In our family it was like that.’ He looked down and quietly added, ‘Kind of a disappointment.’ Then the heavily furrowed brow was replaced by a nervous smile. ‘I don’t really miss my family much.’
‘So your mother never saw you reaching the heights?’ asked the film’s director, Peter Carr.
‘Nuh … nuh,’ Millar responded. ‘I saw my father when I went home to race but I might only see him twice a year if I go home again in the winter. I don’t really … I don’t really miss him that much. I have my life here and it’s like a different thing. It’s like going home to something else. It’s like being on holiday.’
The camera lingered on Millar as he stared silently at the ground. A smile flickered across his face but the heavy furrow and the frown quickly returned. Today, Carr, who spent the best part of a year making The High Life, remembers Millar as ‘enigmatic, mysterious, laconic … I thought he was troubled’.
As for Millar’s brother, Ian, and sister, Elizabeth, only scraps are known. Ian worked with Robert at Weir’s Pumps, David Whitehall recalls, though he found this out quite by chance. ‘His brother was the opposite personality, and I knew him, but I didn’t know he was Robert’s brother. Robert never told me; he never spoke about his family at all. One day someone said, “You know that’s Robert’s brother?” He was quite open and outgoing, quite friendly.’ Several of Millar’s cycling friends met his sister, to whom he was closer in age and, according to Gibb, virtually identical in appearance. Elizabeth trained as a nurse and got married. ‘I remember when his sister got married,’ says Whitehall. ‘Robert didn’t go to the wedding because he was doing his weight training that night. There was only me and one other guy who he spoke to at work, and it was this other lad who told me. The wedding was in January, I remember that, so it wasn’t even during the season. I mean, you could understand if it was in June or something … But there was more to it than him snubbing his sister’s wedding. It was