In Search of Robert Millar: Unravelling the Mystery Surrounding Britain’s Most Successful Tour de France Cyclist. Richard Moore
Читать онлайн книгу.
positive. By which I mean that he didn’t tell me to fuck off. Yet all it amounted to really was that he knew I was trying to write a book. He let it be known that he did not object to – or, as he put it, could not stop – a book being written about Robert Millar the cyclist. But a book about Robert Millar the cyclist was not really what I had in mind. I wanted to know what Millar was like, where the dedication (or anger) that drove him to the top of world cycling had come from. It was Robert Millar the person I really wanted to get to know.
I met people, and spoke to them about Millar. Many said the same things. Yes, he was a bit strange, eccentric, stubborn, likeable when you got to know him – and special, that was the word that kept being repeated. I lost count of the number of times a former team-mate said ‘Robert’s special’ with a knowing, enigmatic smile. Naturally, this only made me more curious, but also slightly wary. It was a euphemism, but for what?
Then I travelled to Ninove, in Belgium, to see Allan Peiper, one of the more thoughtful and articulate of Millar’s former team-mates. Initially Peiper didn’t adjust well to retirement, as he explains in his autobiography. But after staring into the void of life after cycling and eventually finding a new sense of purpose, it was clear that he had been thinking quite a bit about Millar too. ‘Rob was very intellectual compared to most cyclists,’ said Peiper. ‘He thought about life and had it figured out, to some extent, but that didn’t make him any less complicated. There was anger inside him. It’s the same with a lot of top sportsmen, especially top cyclists. They have some emotional chinks that create the drive to want to be good. Whether it’s Lance Armstrong growing up in a trailer park, or Robert Millar growing up in Glasgow, I think for a lot of us there was a definite cause there, something that caused them to be angry. Something that made them need to succeed and prove themselves. Or just be accepted.’
For some reason, Peiper’s words, and his obvious enthusiasm for the task of trying to decipher the character of his old team-mate, fired my own enthusiasm. Somehow, talking to Peiper also made me less wary, less scared of the task of trying to unravel the Robert Millar enigma. I returned to my hotel room and wrote a second email, hoping that he would reply to this one directly.
Hi Robert,
I wanted to finally email you directly rather than going through [the third party] – hope you don’t mind. As you know, I’m planning to write a book about you to coincide with the Tour starting in London next year; it seems the right time given your status as Britain’s best ever Tour rider.
Over the last few months I’ve met with quite a few people who knew you growing up in Glasgow, and others who raced with you later. I’ve been putting off contacting you directly, to be honest, because, although I followed your career very closely at the time, I still felt there were gaps in my knowledge. Basically, I didn’t want to ask daft questions. However, now I feel that I’m getting there, and that I am less likely to ask daft questions. I really wanted to establish contact to see how – or indeed if – you would like to answer my questions. Of course I’m aware that you may have some questions for me as well, and I’d be pleased to answer them.
For your interest I am in Belgium just now and met with Allan Peiper, who spoke with great fondness of you and sends his best.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Best wishes,
Richard.
It’s the Grit that Makes the Oyster
Glasgow is all grey. It’s not that I’m ashamed of being a Glaswegian, I most certainly am not, but abroad you find out what you have been missing.
Robert Millar put Scotland on an international stage it had never previously graced, but as an ambassador for the country, and in particular for his home city of Glasgow, he could not have done a worse job. At times it could seem, especially to some of those he’d left behind, that he derived some perverse satisfaction from sticking a knife into the city of his birth, or applying a kick to its head – both appropriate metaphors for a city that is not unfamiliar with violence.
Millar spent twenty years in Glasgow before leaving – or, as he would have seen it, escaping. After disappearing to the continent he rarely returned for more than a few weeks at a time. Initially he came back to his parents’ home for the winter, training with the same group of cyclists he’d trained with in previous years, selling some of the season’s racing kit, telling stories of continental racing and its stars, against whom he was now racing, and speaking in a French/American-tinged accent that was markedly different to a guttural Glasgow brogue. But after the death of his mother, Mary, in 1981, Robert’s visits home became fewer and further between.
Millar left nobody in any doubt as to why his trips home became shorter, and less frequent, until they stopped altogether. The impression of Glasgow that he shared with the wider world – ‘abroad, where you find out what you have been missing’ – was unequivocal, even if his own feelings towards Glasgow, and Scotland, have at times appeared ambiguous. In an interview in 1987 he blamed the weather, declaring it ‘disgusting’ and continuing, ‘Know any place else where it rains during the day, but not at night? I like the people, not the place: grey, grey, grey. But remember, I spent the first few years of my life in the Gorbals before moving to the city outskirts – a modern housing estate built on a razed slum and fast turning back into one.’ In the city where he grew up, said Millar, the first lesson learned was that ‘Fellow who can’t climb tree fast enough gets eaten.’
It was too much for some Glaswegians. That same year, 1987, a letter appeared in Cycling magazine: ‘Well done, Robert, you’ve done it again. You have just put off many would-be visitors from coming to Glasgow. I’ve been listening to you moaning and whining for years now, it’s pathetic. Glasgow is no worse than any other big city in Britain, and a lot better than some. Can you possibly think of anything worse to say? No – I think you’ve said it all. On your bike, Robert.’ And when an extract of a chapter on Millar in Robin Magowan’s Kings of the Road appeared in Cycling, it provoked this response from a Scottish reader: ‘The suggestion that Millar was a “dead end kid” who was lucky not to be “behind bars, if not dead at 15” is amazing. Robert Millar was raised in Pollok. Unlike the Gorbals this is a very average housing estate just like any other city around the globe, and is not particularly unpleasant … Strange indeed that the son of an engineer, raised in an average area and educated to a high standard should be described in this way … I am suspicious of the seemingly verbatim quotes of Millar’s, such as “I had the A-and O-levels to have gone to university.” In Scotland we do not sit A-levels.’
And yet, and yet … ‘I don’t feel Scottish,’ he told a journalist in 1998, ‘I am Scottish.’ A sense of resignation is perhaps detectable here, but also some pride – and, typically of Millar, defiance. There are other examples of his paradoxical attitude towards Scotland. In 1992, during a Tour de France that visited all the member countries of the European Union that bordered France, the riders’ daily race numbers were adorned with the blue EU flag with its twelve small stars; each morning, Millar painstakingly coloured in the stars with a blue biro before scratching a cross – thus creating a Saltire, Scotland’s national flag. Yet it is clear that Millar felt oppressed and held back by Glasgow and its people. Being small in height and build, in a city renowned for its proliferation of ‘hard men’ and its admiration for the ‘big man’, he might also have felt that he didn’t fit in. But ‘grey’ was the word he seemed to prefer, using it repeatedly to describe the city. In stark contrast was Europe, colourful and alive with possibilities.
It was to Europe that he travelled, as soon as he could. When Millar arrived in that promised land, he bumped into an Australian cyclist whose ambitions, if not his middle-class upbringing, mirrored his own. Phil Anderson would later go on to become the first non-European ever to wear the yellow jersey of the Tour de France leader. But four years before that he was, like Millar, lost and alone in Paris. At the airport, Millar looked