The teams’ recruitment process was straightforward: they plucked the best talent from the domestic amateur racing scene. The only way to turn professional, then, was to live there. And, the really difficult bit, to win there.
Apart from giving up work and winning the races that would alert people such as Jones to his talent, the 20-year-old had been preparing for his departure in other ways, too. With the help of Arthur Campbell, he had been studying French. ‘I had made all the arrangements for him to go to France,’ says Campbell, ‘but when the offer from the ACBB came I kept out of it. At that time I became inundated with riders wanting to go to France to try and turn professional. I ended up saying, “No problem. Go to Central Station [the railway station in Glasgow] and make your way from there.” It wasn’t as easy as they thought, and I had been let down by every one of them – for various reasons. When you go there, you have to be prepared to give everything.’ After trying and failing to persuade Millar to finish his apprenticeship, Campbell didn’t hesitate in encouraging him to move to France, but with the same proviso: ‘Speak to your parents.’ The advice was met with an identical response: ‘It’s my decision.’
Campbell had been teaching Millar French for almost a year as 1978 drew to a close. When the lessons started, Millar hadn’t even been outside the country. But Campbell was impressed by his commitment to learning the language, noting that he started from scratch, but ‘did it the way it should be done’. Campbell adds that ‘though Robert didn’t say much, he had a good grasp of the English language. If you have that, you have a head start.’ He gave him homework, which was done every time, on time. Still, Campbell felt duty bound to warn him, ‘All you’re learning from me is the grammar. I speak French to you in a way that I don’t speak to French people, articulating every word, overemphasizing every sound. When you go to France you won’t know what’s hit you.’ Despite his rebellious track record when it came to educational matters, according to Campbell Millar was a model pupil, though he scoffs at the suggestion that he might have enjoyed learning French for its own sake. ‘Oh no, oh no – it all came from his ambition to be a cyclist. It wasn’t that he wanted to speak French!’
Given his feelings towards Glasgow, which he would articulate later, it seems likely that Millar regarded his imminent departure as decisive and final. Some of those who knew him were certainly left with that impression, recalling that he seemed to be preparing to cut his ties completely. For the past year, and especially since he had finished working at Weir’s, he had trained regularly with Bobby Melrose. Of course, even before he left work he’d still managed to join the out-of-work Melrose with surprising regularity. ‘He very seldom went to work,’ Melrose recalls with a smile. ‘In the winter we went out training during the day and in the summer we’d train during the day and then go out with the bunch at night. And we had an arrangement, even though we weren’t in the same club, that we would help each other in races and then split the prize money. You were always looking to make as much as you could.’ Despite their friendship – Melrose says he got on well with Millar and was fond of him – he was under no illusion that it would survive a move to France. ‘I think he realized that when he went to France he didn’t want to be missing his pals,’ Melrose says. It was a conscious decision, Melrose thought, for the purely pragmatic reason that he ‘didn’t want anything to come back for, or it would have been too easy for him to pack it in and come home. He didn’t want to feel lonely or missing anything about home. I can’t remember if he told me that, though I’m sure he did. But that was the impression I had, anyway.’
Willie Gibb recalls Millar’s ‘tunnel vision’ once his heart was set on moving away and pursuing a career as a cyclist. ‘It was almost like he didn’t care what other people thought of him. He was very obstinate and he was totally focused on where he wanted to go, but there was never any big-headedness about it. It was very matter of fact with Robert.’
There are marginal differences of opinion, but many people who were involved in the British cycling scene in the late 1970s make more or less the same observation: that Robert Millar was one among an unusually large group of talented riders – at 19, they say, he had comparable ability to Bobby Melrose, Jamie McGahan, Willie Gibb and the top young rider in England, John Parker – but that he was different. ‘Special’ is the word many used to describe him at various stages of his career, so that it became a euphemism for different, original, talented, unusual, eccentric, maverick. Many – a surprising number, perhaps – offered their appraisal with obvious and unconcealed affection.
Listening to what they had to say, and reading Millar’s own words, I was reminded of another iconic Scottish sportsman and cult hero, the climber Dougal Haston. Like Millar, Haston was aloof and economical with words, but also prodigiously talented and ferociously driven. Like Millar again, Haston divided people: some found him engaging company and became fiercely protective of his reputation after he died, others reckoned he had the social skills – and also the sting – of a wasp. When he died in a skiing accident in 1977, Haston was writing a novel, Calculated Risk, whose hero, John Dunlop, was very obviously based on the author. In one passage, Dunlop makes a distinction between himself, a serious career climber, and a female friend, whom he describes as a ‘weekend climber’:
For you [climbing’s] one of the dozens of beautiful facets of life that are there to be enjoyed: it doesn’t rule your life as it does mine … Maybe you’re right, maybe I’m obsessive. But Jackie Stewart didn’t become world champion just by pottering around vaguely in cars. He had one singular urge and that was to be the best Formula 1 driver in the world. Racing was his life, just as climbing is my life … there is a group that’s recognised as the world’s best and that’s where I want to be. God knows I’m far enough away from it now, but I’d never have the remotest chance of reaching it with your attitude. It’s difficult for most people to understand a singular strong urge to do something well. You only really take out of something the amount you put in; you get small amounts of pleasure out of many things, whereas I get a huge amount of pleasure out of one.
Haston, just as Millar would do, also repeatedly made a distinction between people like him and ‘normal people’, the implication being that to be considered normal would be construed as a grave insult; and, taking the theory to its natural conclusion, that normality, including any evidence of normal behaviour, was to be resisted and avoided. Normality could only hold you back; the key was to be different, not to fit in, to set yourself apart from your peers.
Millar flew into Charles de Gaulle airport in January 1979 with an address, Rue de Sèvres, in his pocket. ‘No one came to meet me, so I took a taxi,’ Millar told Rupert Guinness for his 1993 book Foreign Legion, which documented the extraordinary impact on world cycling made by the English-speaking ‘exiles’ in a relatively brief period, from Paul Sherwen in 1977 to Stephen Roche, Sean Yates, John Herety and Allan Peiper, all of whom represented the ACBB in the years after Millar. ‘We drove to Paris,’ Millar continued, ‘and came to this place with huge doors. There was no sign, but I walked through to ask a lady there, who came up and asked what I wanted.’ Then, a claim that would have shocked Arthur Campbell: ‘I couldn’t speak any French at all. But I worked out that what she was saying was that the Rue de Sèvres I wanted was on the other side of Paris.’
In The High Life, the hour-long documentary film about Millar, he talks engagingly, if slightly awkwardly, about his first impressions of Paris, confessing that he had been ‘scared to speak at first’. Millar then reveals that as well as the French lessons with Campbell, he had also purchased a cassette course. ‘I did three hours a day until the end of the course,’ he says. He continues, falteringly, ‘It’s a bit kind of difficult at first, when you get off the plane … you’re in the airport in Paris, and you show the taxi driver the address you want to go to, and he takes you there. It’s kind of a letdown. Because you think that everyone’s going to look after you. They see so many guys come [to France] that they don’t really look after you so well. You have to do it all yourself and you feel kind of …
