In Search of Robert Millar: Richard Moore. HarperSport
2007. 360 pages hardback £15.99. ISBN 978-0-00-723501-8
THE AVERAGE PRESS hack would be proud
of labelling Robert Millar 'The Enigma'. The success of Richard Moore's
biography of the great Scottish rider is that he avoids the tawdry tag.
To know all is to understand all. We still don't know all about Millar,
but now we at least know enough to perceive and understand something
of the real man beneath the journalists' accounts of a kind of cycling
hermit: he's a loner, can be very rude, is eccentric, is individualistic,
is hard to get along with, and so on. It's true that when the Glasgow
clubs stopped for their drum-up along Loch Lomond, Millar would go off
and light his own fire, but most of the other judgments are subjective,
and the judges often have an axe to grind.
What is clear that, unusually, Millar set out from his mid-teens to
have a successful career as a professional cyclist, and nothing would
be allowed to stand in the way of it. He became in the process a kind
of sporting puritan, deadly serious about his sport and his position
in it, and had no time for those who lacked a like seriousness. So,
no beers with the lads after the stage or the night before a championship,
no missing out training rides because it was cold or drizzling; the
vegetarian diet was, for him, another key to success - he was winning,
why should he care if his team-mates thought him a freak? The guys in
the minority aren't always wrong.
But these were clearly some of the reasons why he didn't get on with
a string of team managers, some of his team-mates (some, on the other
hand, think he's a great guy), and why he had little time for witless
journalists who ask daft questions: 'How important is it to you to have
won this title?'
Millar's reputation for being a poor communicator, rude, offhand, and
so on must surely be based on people with little sense of humour misunderstaning
his jokes. Millar spent most of his life away from home, and Scottish
(and Welsh) humour, unlike Irish, don't travel well.
The quality of his character is evident from the way he won, and then
a year later successfully defended his British road race title, lasted
a year in the hostile atmosphere of the ACBB which needed foreign stars
for PR purposes but didn't pretend to like them or spend much time on
them. Arguably, if people had been nicer to Millar, then he might have
turned out differently; but first at the ACBB and then with Peugeot,
his first pro team, he was treated abominably by the management. Maurice
de Muer valued only big power riders (like Phil Anderson) so denied
Millar a ride in the Tour two years running, instead wasting his ace
climber in flat races. The rabidly francocentric Peugeot squad was badly
mismanaged by Roland Berland who wasted the talent not only of Millar
but also Anderson and Roche. Berland's incompetence was largely to blame
for Millar losing one of the Vueltas in which he finished second.
Neil Storey and Peter Carr, who made the Millar film The High Life,
found the Scotsman articulate and intelligent, and because they were
coming to their subject afresh, with none of the baggage carried by
the cycling press, found him a pleasure to work with.
Millar was also unlucky with his teams, and with what happened to them
- team leaders sick and unable to lead, incompetent management and sponsors
in financial difficulties. The surprise about his time with Panasonic
is that for a couple of years he actually got along quite well with
Peter Post, but his other teams - TVM, Fagor and Le Groupement - were
either near- or total disasters.
Millar remains Britain's best-ever stage race rider; the results speak
for themselves: second in the Giro, twice second in the Vuelta, fourth
in the Tour and winner of three mountain stages and the mountains prize,
winner of the Dauphiné, plus a second and a third, second in
the Tour de Suisse and Tour de Romandie, a first and a second in the
Tour of Britain; and some good single day performances too, including
third in Liège - Bastogne - Liège, and so on. And this
is the man who is widely regarded as a freak? It's no surprise that
his job as road manager with the BCF lasted only a year - how could
so inflexible and reactionary an organisation have found a way of working
with him?
Yet others managed to come to terms with his directness, his blank refusal
to suffer fools, and were able to harness his undoubted talents. He
wrote and reviewed equipment for several magazines, and showed himself
to be a natural and entertaining writer, although he complained that
it was hard work. And he was the star attraction, much sought-after,
at many training camps.
One of the strangest events of his life was the baseless rumour that
Millar had become a tranvestite and was contemplating a sex change.
A former acquaintance had sold this 'story' to a Scottish tabloid for
£7000, but by the time Millar looked into the chances of suing
for libel the money had gone and he'd have been lucky to be awarded
the guy's dole money. No surprise, then, that Millar finally went into
hiding, where, it's to be hoped, he finds some kind of tranquillity.
Ramin Minovi