an Englishman by the name of John Parker. His and Millar’s paths would cross again two years later.
Millar continued to perform well and earned selection to the Scottish team for July’s Scottish Milk Race, which was certainly the biggest race in Scotland and second only to the Milk Race – the two-week stage race held in England – in Britain. At 18, Millar was the youngest in an international pro-am field that included the leading British professional riders and amateur teams from Switzerland, Czechoslovakia and Poland. Five days long, the stages ranged from 83 miles to 105 miles, and took the riders the length and breadth of the country, from Glasgow to Aberdeen and Ayr.
Millar’s race almost came to a disastrous end on stage 3, Arbroath to Aberdeen, when he skidded on a gravelly bend and broadsided into a bridge parapet, colliding with a spectator who was sitting there. Rider and spectator disappeared over the side of the bridge, falling twelve feet, though Millar was able to use the unfortunate gentleman ‘as a cushion’, reported Cycling. Unhurt, Millar got back up and rejoined the field. (It is not known what happened to the man who’d provided a soft landing.) Early the next day, ‘his left thigh red from the crash’, Millar attacked repeatedly on the 103-mile stage from Stonehaven to Aberdeen. It got him nowhere, but it did get the Scottish team talked about, prompting Cycling to hail them as ‘the best band of triers the host country has recently produced, forcing their attentions on the race and taking the suffering that went with it’.
On the final day, Millar produced a sensational performance, placing second on the ninety-four-mile stage having attacked with seven miles to go. ‘The field was shredded and patched up many times over the 900-foot moors,’ Cycling reported. ‘With 30 miles left in the unabating wind [where] horizontal bars of driving rain replaced the brief sunshine, a long gradual climb to exposed moorland cut the field to 31.’ With fifteen miles to go, and a Swiss rider out in front, Millar punctured, but he quickly rejoined the group of thirty-one riders and at seven miles to go launched an attack. ‘It promised the waiting crowds something to hope for, but his gallant attack, like so many made by the Scots, was to fail. Second place was still a superb ride, Scotland’s best.’ In his first international race, in his first year as a senior, Millar finished seventeenth overall. Ninth was Gilchrist, the top-placed Scot. ‘We had been under a lot of pressure to do well in the Scottish Milk Race,’ recalls Melrose, another member of the team. ‘There was always the threat that they’d pull the plug on the race if the home riders didn’t do well. Generally we were struggling, but that day that Robert got second, I couldn’t believe it. The wind was unbelievable. I was nearly crying. It was some ride.’
Several weeks later Millar again shone in a field containing riders several years older than him, placing second in the Scottish road race championship, held over a ninety-one-mile course in Dundee. Having been in a late escape with Sandy Gilchrist, and despite being hailed ‘the most courageous of the Scottish under-20s’, he was beaten to the line by another prodigious talent. Jamie McGahan, just 18 and thirteen days younger than Millar, was the new Scottish senior champion. Clearly Millar was not the only young Scot with huge talent.
Unlike Millar, McGahan really could claim that he came from the wrong side of the tracks. He was brought up in Possilpark, one of Glasgow’s most notorious districts, in a tenement flat with no hot water. ‘It was one of the things that motivated me,’ he says, ‘I’d come in from doing 120 miles in the cold and then I’d have to heat a big pot of water for a wash. I remember thinking that everyone had a shower except me, but I didn’t think it was a big deal. Poverty’s relative, isn’t it?’ McGahan had been on the same Strathclyde team as Millar at the Girvan Easter stage race, earlier in 1977. On the first stage he crashed heavily, bent his bike and was swept up by the ‘broom wagon’ – the vehicle that follows the race, picking up crash victims and stragglers. Though it was early in the stage there was another rider in the broom wagon, with a functioning bike. McGahan asked if he could borrow it, then followed roads that he didn’t know until, quite by chance, he came to a junction on the race course some ten miles from the finish. A plan was instantly hatched in his 18-year-old brain. ‘I hid behind a wall,’ he recalls. ‘I must have been there three quarters of an hour. The leading group came past and I thought, “I’ll let them go.” It would have been too obvious. Then the next group came along, and I jumped out and joined them. But because I was so fresh I decided they were going too slow for me, so I jumped up to the next group. I really just wanted to stay in the race. But at the finish the guy in the broom wagon reported me. I remember this guy, in front of everyone, shouting, “Stand up, Jamie McGahan! You took a short-cut!” I was really, really embarrassed.’
Like Millar, McGahan realized in 1977 that he wanted to turn professional. But, again like Millar, he learned that in his path would be various obstacles, some real, others existing in the minds and attitudes of others. ‘I was aware straightaway what Robert’s ambition was. It was mine, too: we wanted to be pros. But people told us, “The best thing you can do, son, is go and get a job.” That was definitely the prevailing attitude in Scotland.’ There had been an indication from Millar earlier in the season that he would not only resist but rail against prevailing attitudes, and that he would repeatedly place himself in opposition to the authorities, no matter the consequences. A bizarre example of this is a Millar story that has passed into Scottish cycling folklore, concerning an extraordinary ‘double disqualification’ during one weekend in 1977.
It was a weekend when Millar contested two one-day events, both in the vicinity of Glasgow. On the Saturday, in a circuit race in Bellahouston Park, Millar was in the lead group, but he could only watch as one of his fellow competitors – most likely Tom Brodie – sprinted clear to win the race, crossing the line with arms held aloft in the traditional celebration, just like the professional stars did when they won big races on the continent. Unfortunately, this being amateur racing, there was a rule against taking your hands from the bars when it was deemed by the commissaire (race referee) to be dangerous. The rule wasn’t always applied, but on this occasion it was, and Brodie was disqualified.
The next day, in a race on the outskirts of Glasgow, Millar found himself in the lead group as they hurtled towards the finish, and this time he won the sprint and unashamedly raised both hands in the air to celebrate the ‘win’. The commissaire, Jock Shaw, was aghast. ‘There was a substantial bunch of riders and Millar shot out of it with two hundred metres to go,’ says Shaw. ‘Then he sticks both his hands in the air, the day after his pal has been disqualified for doing so. I said, “What did you do that for? I’ve no choice but to disqualify you.” And he just shrugged. “My pal did it yesterday. I was checking you knew the rules.”’ What he really wanted to do, suggests Shaw, was to catch him out. Perhaps another motivation was to give him a stick with which to beat the commissaire who’d disqualified Brodie the previous day. The race was of secondary importance. ‘He was neither up nor down about being disqualified,’ suggests Shaw. ‘He didn’t seem to care.’
This couldn’t-care-less attitude is seen time and again with Millar; it was either this or its polar opposite, righteous indignation, that he tended to display towards officials. But the question is, was there any basis, beyond his innate rebelliousness, for Millar to be suspicious of the motives and actions of others, in particular fellow riders or race officials? Later in his career there was spectacularly so. But later in that same year, 1977, there was an incident that he consciously committed to memory, in the same way, perhaps, that Lance Armstrong would later claim to ‘store on the hard drive’ any perceived wrongs by perceived enemies.
One of Millar’s final events of the 1977 season was the Tour of the Peak, a prestigious 90-mile road race in the Peak District. Millar made it into the race-winning break, but, as they raced into a driving headwind, he suffered a puncture. He made a quick stop and was handed the spare bike from the service car while the mechanics repaired his machine. He chased and re-captured the break; but a little later, on the approach to a climb, the service car drove alongside Millar to offer him his own bike back. Gerry McDaid, a Scottish official on duty at the Tour of the Peak, observed this and was horrified to see Millar accept the invitation to stop and
