an issue devoted to, and guest-edited by, Millar. In it, he was asked who had been the biggest single influence in his career, and he named two people, Arthur Campbell and Billy Bilsland. ‘Arthur helped me find a team and meet the right people, while Billy was my first serious coach. Just saying “thank you” doesn’t seem enough when I think of how much they’ve helped me.’
Campbell’s first encounter with Millar was on a Sunday club run in, to the best of his memory, early 1976. He certainly remembers being struck by both Millar’s natural ability and his reticence. ‘It was a hard, hard Sunday. Billy was there; a lot of the best riders in the west of Scotland were there. It was harder than a race! Robert and Willie Gibb turned up, we met in the centre of Glasgow, and I said to them, “Be careful.” We rode to the highest village in Scotland, Wanlockhead, and after that, climbing up Glen Taggart, he was beside me. The road went up and up, and I said, “Go easy, son, this is really too far for you” – it was about 120 miles. And he just rode away from me, never said a word.’ Campbell still seems perplexed by the Millar enigma. ‘Was it shyness? I don’t know. I always tried to analyse it myself. Most people couldn’t put up with it, or you got the idea that he couldn’t put up with you. One got the impression that he didn’t suffer fools – at all, not even gladly. I don’t think anybody got to know him.’
Bilsland, who is married to Campbell’s daughter, was a giant of the Scottish scene, with stage wins in the 1967 Peace Race (held behind the Iron Curtain and known as the world’s toughest amateur race), the Milk Race and the Tour de l’Avenir. By the time he emerged Ken Laidlaw was still the only Scot ever to have finished the Tour de France, in 1961; only one other, Ian Steel, had even started the great race; indeed, only a handful of Scots had ever gone to the continent and not returned within a season, their bodies – and confidence – shattered. It is a measure of Bilsland’s ability, as well as his mental fortitude, that he stayed for seven years and only missed out on riding the Tour in the most bizarre circumstances. He turned professional for Peugeot in 1970 but when he failed to make the team for the 1971 Tour de France he returned, disappointed, to Britain. Then one of the riders selected instead of Bilsland suffered an injury. A letter was dispatched to his Paris address but he never saw it. He read about his selection in a newspaper, returned immediately to Paris, but he was too late. By then a young Frenchman, Bernard Thevenet, had been selected instead. It proved a stepping stone for him: Thevenet went on to win the Tour twice in the mid-seventies, while Bilsland, who rode for Peugeot for three years, never did get his chance at the Tour.
It is impossible not to wonder how different Bilsland’s career might have been if only his Peugeot team had managed to contact him. But Bilsland would prefer not to. ‘I don’t talk about that,’ he says. And the silence that follows suggests he’s not joking.
Despite that disappointment he enjoyed a relatively long and moderately successful professional career on the continent, finally retiring and returning to Glasgow for good in 1976, when he was still 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
