young Millar. Having lost his momentum at such a critical point, Millar never regained contact with the break. McDaid reproached him at the finish: ‘You made a big mistake there, Robert.’
‘I know,’ Millar replied. ‘It’s in my little black book. I’ll not do it again.’
The Smaller They Are, the Harder They Fight
I realized that only Arthur Campbell and Billy Bilsland knew anything about where I wanted to go as a bike rider; everyone else was of the ‘You’ll never do that’ school of thought. It was as if they believed you had to be born in Europe to be a pro bike rider.
Cycling is a summer sport, but to racing cyclists it can seem that winter is the more important period. It is during the winter months that dreams are dreamt and goals are set. Rather than being a period of hibernation, it is a time of transition, when the hard work is done, long miles are accumulated, and real improvement, even transformation – from bad to mediocre, average to respectable, good to great – can seem possible. It is also the time of year that separates those who are serious about their dreams and goals from those who are not. The Christmas Day test is a useful barometer. Top cyclists say that they train on 25 December not because it will necessarily do them good, but because they know that some of their rivals will not. Similar tests of dedication, or character, can apply to days of torrential rain and interminable cold, and in the most extreme cases, when the roads are blocked with snow. At the highest level, it is all about attitude and the scoring of psychological points, even, or possibly especially, for your own benefit. And it is an area in which Robert Millar excelled.
It was over the winter of 1977/78 that he seems to have set a goal he knew would gain him a foothold on the ladder that would lead, eventually, to a professional career. He realized that the foundations, psychological as well as physical, needed to be laid during the cold months. Naturally, he trained on Christmas Day, riding the seventy-mile ‘Three Lochs’ circuit in the company of Jamie McGahan. For good measure, they did the same on New Year’s Day.
Willie Gibb remembers Millar telling him, in the middle of that winter, his main goal for the following season. It was out of character for him to talk about his ambitions, which is one reason why Gibb can recall this statement of intent. A second reason was its sheer audacity: Millar told Gibb that he would win the British road race championship. ‘It was bizarre, and I thought he was just being daft,’ says Gibb. ‘He wasn’t even the best in our little group in Glasgow. I couldn’t comprehend it. I thought he was talking nonsense because I would never even have dreamt of saying something like that. I think I put the top guys on a pedestal – not consciously, but I assumed they were better than me and I couldn’t beat them. But Robert had this attitude, I think, of believing that if he wasn’t strong enough now, he’d become strong enough. And that was obviously what he was determined to do that winter.’
There is a third reason why Millar’s winter prediction remains lodged so firmly in Gibb’s memory. To the astonishment of Gibb and everyone else – everyone except Millar, that is – he fulfilled it.
For the season-opening Girvan stage race over Easter weekend in 1978, Millar was selected to represent the Scottish ‘A’ team, alongside Sandy Gilchrist and Jamie McGahan. It was a race run off in, according to Cycling, ‘the worst conditions ever for Girvan’ – which was saying something. It was freezing cold, and it snowed, making one climb impassable, which instead of shortening the race added five more miles to the course, taking the distance for the stage up to a hundred miles and reducing the main bunch of riders to just nine. Tellingly, Millar was one of the survivors, placing fifth on the stage and eighth overall. In terms of scoring psychological points, he was already in credit.
From there he travelled to England for the Sealink International, a five-day stage race, where he finished eighth, with third-placed Des Fretwell the only other British rider in the top ten. His run of good form continued a couple of weeks later when he was fifth behind Fretwell in Llangollen-Wolverhampton, a counting event towards the Pernod series – effectively the national road race series. It was a result that earned Millar a quote in Cycling, and an unusual one at that, since it found him in confident, cocky mood. ‘Call me the flying Scotsman,’ Millar instructed the reporter, adding of the season that stretched ahead of him, ‘I’ll be riding the Milk Race and the Scottish Milk Race and I hope to ride the Commonwealth Games.’
The Milk Race represented a huge step up for Millar and some of his other young Scottish team-mates, including McGahan. Curiously, they had come in for some criticism in the midst of a tug-of-love between the Scotland and Great Britain teams over Sandy Gilchrist. The experienced Gilchrist, noted Cycling, would ‘do better in the GB squad than when “supported” by young Scots who lack stage-race experience’. How those inverted commas, dripping with sarcasm, wounded the young Scots’ pride! Who were those people at Cycling, mocking their aspirations to support a team leader such as Gilchrist in the Milk Race? A fortnight before the Milk Race started in Brighton, Bobby Melrose placed second in another Pernod event, the Lincoln GP, with Millar fifth. ‘Significantly, in every break there was a Scot,’ reported Cycling. ‘Such was their determination to answer detractors of their ability with actions as eloquent as a thumbed nose.’
The manager of the Scotland team for the Milk Race was that stalwart of the Scottish scene Jimmy Dorward. He had also managed Millar at the Girvan stage race, which provided him with an introduction to some of the teenager’s more curious behaviour, and his unwillingness to conform. When they left the guesthouse to go for a meal, Dorward and his riders walked down one side of the road, while Millar, alone, opted for the other. ‘The other side was more interesting, I suppose,’ Dorward, who presumably thought he had seen it all, remarks with a shrug.
But that was nothing. Before the Milk Race, Dorward encountered Millar’s stubbornly independent streak again, though this time he found it difficult to laugh off. The team had assembled in Glasgow for the flight to London. ‘I gave them a wee talk,’ explains Dorward. ‘The Milk Race was a major international race, fourteen days long, and they were a young team, so I was telling them what I was expecting and what I wasn’t expecting. I told them they weren’t going to win the race. I didn’t want them going up the road with the Czechs and Poles only to get an absolute hammering that would take two days to recover from. I suppose I was trying to calm them down, so they wouldn’t be overawed by the situation. But after I’d said my piece, Robert spoke up: “You’re talking a lot of fucking nonsense.”’ Dorward says that he was close to telling the 19-year-old to pack his bags. ‘But I thought I’d give him another chance, particularly since we hadn’t actually started the race yet.’
It turned out to be a wise decision. It was to prove an eventful Milk Race for the Scottish team and for Dorward, but, ironically, Robert Millar was the least of his problems.
By the time of the Milk Race, in late May, Millar’s working arrangements had changed radically. Having been little more than a virtual employee of Weir’s Pumps for some months, on account of his cat naps in the toilets and mysterious afternoon disappearances, he finally made the arrangement official and permanent by resigning. And, in keeping with the increasingly professional approach he was adopting towards cycling, this was no reckless decision financially. In an interview with Cycling later in the season, Millar said that he’d received £500 from Lorimer’s Brewery, which supported several Scottish athletes though, in Millar, only one cyclist. Given that his £26 a week from Weir’s was no longer coming in, it was his only significant income, prize money in races being modest. The money, he said, had come in handy in the light of his decision to leave work – which hadn’t been taken lightly, he added. But, as the 19-year-old explained, ‘You’ve got to
