Richard Moore recalls his pursuit of the protagonist of his book, In Search of Robert Millar, and wonders how the Scottish climber might have fitted in at Team Sky today had Millar been born a generation later.
FOR VARIOUS REASONS, I am glad I wrote In Search of Robert Millar when I did. It was 2005 when I first had the idea, the inspiration being my admiration and my curiosity, the former for his achievements, the latter piqued by the burning questions: what had happened to him; where was he?
But that was the problem, too. It made the writing of his story difficult, if not impossible. I discussed it one evening with a journalist friend in a pub in Edinburgh, after he asked the question journalists always ask each other: ‘Have you got a book in you?’
Millar’s story of growing up in Glasgow and heading off to France and a remarkable career as one of the world’s top cyclists was the one that came instantly to mind, but I explained the insurmountable obstacle: his disappearance. How could you write a book about somebody whose whereabouts are a mystery?
‘Why not go “in search of”?’ suggested my friend. And the penny dropped. So in fact it wasn’t my idea at all, but my friend’s.
For the next 18 months I researched and wrote, but here’s the curious thing: I didn’t really want to find him. Or rather, I didn’t consider it necessary. That was the genius of the suggestion: the story would be about the search rather than the discovery; the ‘discovery’ would be somehow contained in the search. It would be this that would peel away the layers of Millar’s complicated personality, perhaps offering up clues as to his whereabouts, or, even more intriguingly, perhaps not.
The book was published almost two years after that initial conversation, in June 2007. The timing was deliberate, to coincide with the Tour de France starting in London. It was to prove fortunate in other ways. And unfortunate, too, in a way that still causes regret for me, and no doubt worse for Robert Millar.
Why fortunate? Well, we can now see the 2007 Tour as a pivotal moment for British cycling. When I pitched a biography of Millar, the sub-title wrote itself: it would be the story of Britain’s greatest-ever Tour de France cyclist. There was no argument with that. It was all very simple in those days. Tom Simpson was the greatest one-day rider; Millar the greatest stage racer. No need for any further discussion. Move along.
And yet, two years later, came another book, Boy Racer by Mark Cavendish. A quote appeared on the jacket: ‘Britain’s best-ever Tour de France cyclist.’ It might have been a weak claim at the time, though a stronger case could perhaps have been made a year or so later. And then, in 2012, it all changed again. But we’ll return to that.
Back to 2007. The London Grand Départ, watched by millions in London and on the road to Canterbury, acted to galvanise the sport in Britain. Less than a week later, Dave Brailsford was telling a few journalists in Bourg-en-Bresse how inspired he had been by what he’d seen in London, and about his ambition to set up a British team, and ultimately to win the Tour with a British rider. Though that seemed highly unlikely, things were undoubtedly about to get interesting.
But at the time, despite the crowds in London and Kent, and a vaguer sense that several young British riders might go on to achieve great things, there was still only Robert Millar.
As if to underline his status, and to honour him, his namesake and fellow Scot, David Millar, attacked on the stage from London to Canterbury to claim the polka-dot jersey – the jersey that symbolises Robert’s greatest achievement: his king of the mountains title (and fourth overall placing) at the 1984 Tour. (He remains the only English speaker ever to wear the polka-dots into Paris.)
Then, two years later, with Brailsford’s dream project about to be realised, Bradley Wiggins matched the elder Millar’s highest placing, finishing a remarkable fourth (though with Lance Armstrong stripped by the US Anti-Doping Agency of all his results from 1998, Wiggins should officially inherit Armstrong’s third-place, and thus belatedly become the first British rider to finish on the podium. Although he would eventually do that, anyway. But this is getting confusing.)
Wiggins’s performance in 2009 brought Robert back from the dead, so to speak, though I think a strong case could still have been made for him as our greatest-ever grand tour rider: two second-place finishes at the Vuelta a España and second at the Giro d’Italia, as well as his three mountain stage wins at the Tour, and his fourth and ninth overall finishes, make up a pretty impressive palmarès.
Why was the book’s timing unfortunate? Well, this also links, in a way, to the changes we have witnessed over the past five years. The Tour coming to London in 2007 opened a small window of opportunity, which would slam shut again as soon as the race returned to France.
It meant that, for a couple of days, the nation’s media would be interested in cycling and the Tour. And that meant potential interest in the story of Britain’s greatest-ever Tour rider. Thus it was a good time to publish a book about him.
But on the morning of the Grand Départ, as I awoke at a friend’s house, and prepared, with a sense of excitement and novelty, to go and report on the Tour de France in London, my phone bleeped with a text message: ‘Have you seen the Daily Mail? They’ve got a story about Robert Millar.’
I felt queasy. Writing a book like the one I’d tried to write, in which I tried to satisfy the reader’s curiosity while simultaneously respecting Millar’s very obvious desire for privacy, had felt at times like tight-rope walking. There had been speculation about Millar, including a story in a Scottish tabloid in 2000 alleging that he was having a sex change. It was a rumour I could hardly ignore, yet neither did I want to fan the flames of innuendo. It proved a difficult balancing act, but I was happy that the final part of the book comprised a series of emails between Robert and me. It meant he had the final word – that was satisfying.
I suspected, however, that the Daily Mail would not have – how shall I put this? – come at the story from the same angle. And so it proved. If I remember correctly, the story was on page seven: a position of prominence. I understood that it would not have been so prominent – indeed, would probably not have been written at all – had the Tour not been starting in London that day; and had I not written my book. (I was later told, by a Daily Mail journalist, that a reader had contacted the paper after a review of the book appeared on the sports pages; the reader claimed to be a neighbour of Millar, and tipped them off as to his whereabouts.)
The story ticked all the tabloid boxes: it purported to be sensational, it was unsympathetic and cruel, it involved a terrible invasion of someone’s privacy, and there was clearly no ‘public interest’ justification. It was hit-and-run journalism, a bit like a terrorist attack: catastrophic for the victim, and of no value whatsoever to anyone else.
I certainly don’t regret writing the book. I think most readers understood what I was trying to do, and ended up with greater respect for Millar’s achievements, and for his singular talent and approach, his eccentricities and foibles.
There is another question now, though – one that has arisen in the last five years, and intensified over the past 12 months.
It concerns how Millar might have fared in the new era of British cycling and in the Brailsford-managed Team Sky. It is tempting to dismiss any idea that a maverick like Millar could have fitted in, far less thrived, in such a regimented set-up, where every watt is logged, every ounce is weighed and effort calculated.
A while ago I asked another singular, and Scottish, individual, Graeme Obree, how he thought he’d have got on in such a system.
‘Actually, I would have done terribly badly,’ said Obree, and proceeded to explain that, as ‘a privateer’, he would be denied opportunities unless he conformed. And his character meant he wouldn’t have been able to conform.
On first consideration, we might think the same of Millar. The argument would go that he ‘did his own thing’ by going to France to pursue his ambitions, which is often cited as evidence that he was a loner, a rebel, too independent to fit into any system. ‘Individualist’ is the term he liked to use.
Yet what it overlooks is that Millar, unlike Obree, did fit into a system: the continental professional cycling system. How else would he have sustained such a long (15-year) career as a professional, and why else would he have ridden for some of the world’s top teams?
Millar was ambitious but also smart, and he figured out the best – at the time, only – route to a career as a professional on the continent (a route Obree could avoid, to a greater degree, because his ambitions lay on the track rather than the road). It was why he went off and ‘did his own thing’ in France, with a commitment that necessitated consciously cutting ties with old friends in Glasgow.
‘I think he realised that, when he went to France, he didn’t want to be missing his pals,’ as one former friend told me. ‘He didn’t want anything to come back for, or it would have been too easy to pack it in and come home.’
Everything he did was designed to make life tolerable in France, where he knew he needed to be to fulfil his ambition. Before leaving, he began French lessons with one of his mentors, the late Arthur Campbell. Millar had hardly bothered with school, rarely turned up for work – when he did, he spent as much time as possible sleeping in a store room – yet, in Campbell’s weekly classes and with the homework he was assigned, he was a model pupil. This owed nothing to his interest in the language. ‘Oh no, oh no,’ laughed Campbell. ‘It all came from his ambition to be a cyclist. It wasn’t that he wanted to speak French!’
Had Millar been starting out now, he could have taken a different route. He might have decided that British Cycling and Team Sky could provide the optimum pathway to a career as a professional. He may have embraced this system and blossomed. His other old mentor and coach, Billy Bilsland, claims he would have won the Tour.
It is an impossible question. Millar in Team Sky kit? How would he have got on with Brailsford? He briefly worked under his predecessor, Peter Keen, as British road coach in 1997.
But Keen, from a sports science and coaching background, wanted to focus exclusively on track racing, didn’t think Millar had strong management skills, and sacked him.
Millar was damning of the British Cycling approach – still focused mainly on track racing – when we exchanged emails in late 2006. He wrote: ‘There’s no creativity, it’s all numbers and figures, which is great in a fixed environment like track racing… i.e. If you have this number of watts you’ll go this fast and we’ll know you can reach this level of competition. It’s like painting by numbers, fill in the boxes and you’ll complete the picture… Woohoooooo, isn’t that clever? Trouble is, road racing isn’t that controllable and if Picasso turned up for a job at the BCF [British Cycling Federation] paint school they’d tell him he was barking up the wrong tree.’
Yet, with glorious perversity, Millar himself was an innovator and something of a sports-science pioneer (even if the discipline was hardly recognised back then). He was certainly open to new ideas, although, rather than having these imposed upon him, he seemed to come up with many of them himself, mainly through reading books.
With regard to diet, he was enlightened, as Stephen Roche noted: ‘Robert would come to the dinner table with these little bags of nuts, oils, raisins, hazelnuts… Regarding nutrition, diet, training, Robert was way ahead of his time. He would know how many calories he’d had that day; he knew everything. And you look over at the dinner table on a race now and all the French riders have these little bags…’
‘Robert was the first guy to train with ankle weights on,’ said Pascal Simon, a team-mate at Peugeot and neighbour in Troyes, where Millar lived. ‘In fact, he was the only guy.’
Had power meters been available in the 1980s, Millar would surely have used one. He might not have been wedded to it, but he would have used it, and used it smartly.
At the 2012 Tour, as Wiggins rode to victory – a victory that owed rather more to ‘numbers and figures’ than to creativity, it must be said – another rider emerged who seemed more reminiscent of Millar. Chris Froome, on his way to second place overall, was a climber, like Millar, and he, too, was a bit different: not a product of the British Cycling system, like Wiggins, but quirky, erratic, a bit of an ‘individualist’.
David Millar summed up the differences between Wiggins and Froome: ‘Brad’s your archetypal athlete, a class-A athlete who does everything in an incredibly detailed way; he’s mechanical, very engaged and professional. Whereas Froome is a bit looser; he’s a maverick, he comes from a different background. He’s very much a self-made man. Brad is manufactured. Don’t get me wrong, Brad has done it himself, but he’s also the product of a system.’
As well as Froome, another British rider was beginning to earn comparisons to Robert Millar in 2012. Jonathan Tiernan-Locke, the first home winner of the Tour of Britain since Millar in 1989, will join Team Sky in 2013, and he comes with a reputation for also being a bit different, a left-field player.
They are a similar size (Tiernan-Locke, at 63 kilograms, is slightly heavier than Millar was), and climbing is their main weapon, but Tiernan-Locke has even more in common with Millar than you first realise. When he was 18, he, like Millar, went to France to pursue his dream of turning professional (it was 2003, and France was still the best option, with the British academy, which produced Cavendish, not opening its doors until 2005).
Tiernan-Locke went to the city in which Millar had lived: Troyes, joining the UV Aube club and coming into contact with Millar’s old mentor, and the man at the centre of the Troyes cycling scene, Jack Andre.
While in France, Tiernan-Locke fell ill and his chance seemed to be lost. He returned home and went to university, then slowly recovered his health, returned to racing, and worked his way back through the ranks through British domestic teams.
Despite his singular focus, there was always more to Millar than just cycling. He had a hinterland. And so it is with Tiernan-Locke.
‘I’m definitely appreciative of the fact I’ve done other things,’ he said at the Tour of Britain. ‘I’ve got a load of friends who aren’t cyclists, that haven’t just lived always in that bubble.’
The question of how someone like him, who has done his own thing, will fit into the Sky set-up has occurred to him, he admitted.
‘But I’m not a maverick like Jez [Jeremy Hunt], say, and even he’s integrated into that set-up. I’m quite open. In all areas of my life, I’m open to new ways of doing things. Plus, you can’t ignore what they’ve done with the guys who’ve gone there. Pretty much everyone who has gone there has got better. I don’t know someone who’s gone and their performance has gone down. They’ve either prolonged their careers or they’ve had their best results there.’
It is possible that in 2013 and 2014, by watching Tiernan-Locke’s progress, we will get an idea of how Millar might have got on at Team Sky. Brailsford wants Tiernan-Locke to lose five kilograms – so he will be more Millar’s build – and believes that, as well as excelling on the shorter, punchier climbs, there is no reason why he can’t also ride with the best in the high mountains.
It will be interesting. But will there ever be a more fascinating, compelling and original figure in British cycling than Robert Millar?
I’ll finish with an anecdote that didn’t make it into the book, because I only heard it afterwards. It ties into a concern I had at the outset: that I would do my research and speak to his old acquaintances and discover that, although I had admired him as a kid, I didn’t actually like him as an adult. I think I would have found that book hard to write, but I needn’t have worried. I did like Millar – and so, it seemed, did those few who felt they knew him best.
Although he could come across as prickly and rude, it seemed to me that Millar had (has) a good heart. And some further evidence for this came in an email I received after the book came out. It was from a reader, who recalled what was apparently a fairly routine incident – Millar being rude to fans before a race. The race was the Kellogg’s Tour of Britain, before a stage start in Chester, and Millar was spotted by the teenager and his older brother. Both were fanatical Millar supporters.
‘He was walking with a colleague an hour or so before the race and we asked for a photo.’ Millar’s response was curt. The fans were duly hurt. And they wrote about his ‘sulky attitude’ to Cycling Weekly, which published the letter.
‘Two weeks later a French postal package arrived at the house, with a hand-written letter from Robert, apologising for his temper, explaining he was going through a lot of contract emotions… He had read Cycling Weekly and asked them for our address to make amends. Included in his package was one of his tops from the race, a pair of Z-Peugeot shorts, a signed photograph and a Z-Peugeot headband. Needless to say [this] restored his popularity with us.’
Richard Moore is a former racing cyclist and is now a journalist and author whose first book, In Search of Robert Millar (HarperSport), won Best Biography at the 2008 British Sports Book Awards. He is also the author of Heroes, Villains & Velodromes, Slaying the Badger and Sky’s the Limit.