ROBERT MILLAR

The Yellow Jersey Companion to the Tour de France

Edited by Les Woodland

b. Glasgow, Scotland, Sep 13 1958

Robert Millar is a tiny Scottish CLIMBER who in 1984 became the only Briton to win the MOUNTAINS Competition. His fourth place in the 1984 Tour is BRITAIN's best ever result.

The writer Robin Magowan said of him, With his distinctive pointy nose he looks more like a Dickensian chimney-sweep. A French writer said his miniature size reminded him of an asticot, or maggot. 

He was British AMATEUR champion in 1978 when he was 19, and then moved to the ACBB club in Paris which had produced STEPHEN ROCHE, SHAY ELLIOTT and JONATHAN BOYER.

Millar won his first race with the ACBB club in a sprint rather than over hills, and then another 12 to become FRANCE's best AMATEUR. In 1979 he won the British title again and came fourth in the world amateur championship in HOLLAND after wrenching his foot loose in the sprint. That near-miss brought him a contract with PEUGEOT, for which the ACBB is a feeder club, but he had no wins for three years.

Millar never got on with Peugeot's MANAGER, Maurice de Muer, and didn't ride the Tour until Roland Berland took over in 1983. In that year's Tour Millar broke away on the Peyresourde, winning by six seconds and moving up 56 places to 27th. He also came second in the mountains competition. On stage 13 he became the first Briton to wear the polka-dot (mountains) JERSEY. Next year he won outright in the mountains and finished fourth overall, behind LAURENT FIGNON, BERNARD HINAULT and GREG LEMOND.

In 1988 he would have won a stage had he not followed the directions of a policeman directing cars at Guzet Neige and taken a wrong turn with Philippe Bouvatier. They were only 300m from the line when Massimo Ghirotto rode by and won.

Millar - Bob to fellow professionals - is the nearest Britain has had to a winner of one of the three major stage races. He finished second in the Tour of SPAIN in 1985 and 1986, second in the Giro in 1987 and fourth in the Tour in 1984.

He led the 1985 Spanish tour for nine days until PEDRO DELGADO ended his hopes on the last but one stage. He and another Spaniard, José Recio, got seven minutes' lead in 60km and won by 6:50. Just what went wrong has never been established. Millar, never an easy personality, says he would have been helped had he had more friends in the sport. Equally, he blamed his MANAGER, Roland Berland, for not giving him better time checks. Berland said he hadn't had them from the race organisation. The race organisation said they had been given every three minutes.

That was followed by claims that home riders had ganged up against foreigners. There were even suggestions that the conservative Spanish didn't want a long-haired vegetarian with an ear ring to win their national tour. Why didn't Millar's team-mates help? Because a railway crossing had delayed them for several minutes, they were reported to have said... 'Only the train never came. There were then claims that the Frenchmen in the Peugeot team didn't want their foreigner to win a big tour. It may be some of all of those or none at all.

Millar rode for 15 years as a professional and for six teams, including the 'chaotic' Fagor, the professional' Panasonic, 'where I learned more about how to race in six months than in six years with Peugeot' and the ill-fated Le Groupement, which ran out of money and folded in mid-1995, ending his career.

His last big race was that year's Manx International, which incorporated the national championship. He won alone on a circuit that included three climbs of Snaefell.

He said: 'I first found I could ride the mountains when I won the Route de France as an AMATEUR. It's basically a natural thing, the same as sprinting ability is natural.'

In 1997 he became British national coach. 'People who expect me to grovel to them and don't merit it and aren't influential in what I have to do won't get any more respect than they deserve,' he said.

Millar remains a contradiction. He is fiercely Scottish and complains that Scots are called British when they succeed but Scottish when they fail. And yet he lives in the English Midlands and rarely speaks well of Glasgow. He is by turns taciturn and even abusive, he has never been an easy man. Of reporters following the Tour he said, '[Those] guys see the race on TV, then ask you what's happened. You see them sleeping during the day because they've been drunk the night before. If I think they're useless, I tell them so.'

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Winner

1985 Tour Catalonia

1989 Tour Britain

1990 Dauphiné Libéré

1995 National championship

Tour de France

1983 14th Stage win Pau - Bagnères-de-Luchon

1984 4th Stage win Pau - Guzet-Neige, and Mountains winner

1985 11th

1986 DNF

1987 19th

1988 DNF

1989 10th Stage win Cauterets-Superbagnères

1990 DNF

1991 72nd

1992 18th

1993 24th