The Scot, the Breton, and the American

1984 Tour de France

Millar finished the '84 Tour in fourth place overall, with Greg taking third and winning the white jersey for best young rider. Here, they are followed up a climb by Pedro Delgado. 

The Spaniard would become an arch rival to both riders throughout the 1980s.

"If there are two meals left and a gun and the 

three of us - Greg, me, and Hinault - who am 

I going to shoot? Well, I'd shoot Hinault, obviously, 

because otherwise he'd shoot me and Greg and 

eat both the meals."

   - ROBERT MILLAR

Guy Andrews

Greg LeMond: Yellow Jersey Racer

Another English-speaking rider from outside the Eurocentric closed shop of 1980s cycling was the Scot Robert Millar. His fourth place at the 1984 Tour de France announced him as a young, gifted leader for French team Peugeot, and he was the first rider from an English-speaking nation to win the polka-dot 'King of the Mountains' jersey for best climber. Suffice it to say that if he'd been racing in the modern era with the support of a team built around these talents, his palmarès would have looked a lot different. But his climbing ability was extraordinary, and he was seen as the first British rider with the potential to win the Tour de France outright. His journey to the Tour was far from an easy ride. For Millar, in the early '80s, it meant being thrown into the French cycling world as a junior at ACBB, the Paris amateur club with direct links to the Peugeot professional team. He, like many of his peers, then had to fight for his place.

Millar always let his legs do the talking. Never a rider for excuses, his quiet, direct manner meant he was regarded by some in the media as taciturn and difficult off the bike, but his riding abilities only proved that he was canny and clever on it. As a result, he became a popular choice among teams looking for a solid GC rider who could ride well in any situation, especially in stage races with mountains, notably winning the Volta a Catalunya in 1985 and the Critérium du Dauphiné Libéré in 1990. He came close to winning the Vuelta a España in 1985, with only some collusion and skulduggery on behalf of the home teams dropping him into second place on the penultimate stage after a puncture. He finished second again in 1986, and was runner-up at the 1987 Giro d'Italia. He rode the Tour eleven times, and although he never won the race outright, he came first in three stages and always rose up the general classification when the race hit the hills.

As if to underline his racing pedigree, Millar became a consistent finisher at the World Championships too, in an era when the British team was distinctly lacking in support for a rider of Millar's caliber. Regular top ten finishes in such races as Liège-Bastogne-Liège, La Flèche Wallonne, and the Tour of Lombardy proved he could handle the hilliest and toughest of the one day classics. At the Grand Tours, Millar's climbing ability and willingness to help out was often relied on by isolated English-speaking riders finding themselves in a bit of trouble, such as Stephen Roche at the 1987 Giro d'Italia, Sean Kelly at the 1988 Vuelta a España, and, most poignantly, Greg LeMond at the 1986 and 1989 Tours de France. Millar's outlook on the world of professional cycling has always been a mixture of cynical realism and passionate enthusiasm. Since his retirement from racing in 1993, he has written concisely and perceptively about the sport for magazines and the Internet. He can explain a racing situation like no other writer, mostly because he's been there, but also because he has a calm and insightful intelligence.

When naming their best climbers, or their "road racer's road racer," Robert Millar's name is often at the top of many cycling fans' lists. Millar's talent meant that, when Greg joined forces with him on team Z in 1990, the American found himself riding for an outfit that could handle the hills. Although the two riders were polar opposites in terms of character, they had a mutual respect and regularly worked as allies against the rest-even, as in 1989, when on opposing teams. With their attacking riding styles and natural climbing abilities, they often found themselves together at the sharp end of some of the hardest races and stages at cycling's biggest events. In 1986 at the Tour de France, however, Millar, riding for the Panasonic team, took a backseat as Hinault and Greg fought their final duel.

1986: Robert Millar

"You just watched (Greg and Hinault) squabbling. When you're in that situation, naturally you take sides, and it's the one you hate the least that you side with because you're meant to be competing with them. You couldn't really like Hinault as a competitor, and Greg has that kind of character where you just like him anyway, even if he's beating you. He was friendly. You knew that Greg would pounce on you when you were at your weakest, although at least he wouldn't provoke that moment. Greg also raised the stakes because everybody's wages went up, although that meant that the team managers started to put pressure on you and the races became more and more important. So you had to put aside any friendships and get on with what you were doing.

"Greg could really beat the crap out of you, 

if he wanted to. 

You didn't want to ride with him, 

because you knew he was going to beat you."

"At first, you didn't mind Greg doing well, because he was clearly very talented and it was good for everybody. But once the team managers started to put pressure on you and the dynamics of your friendships with all the other guys changed... If you had to make a choice between Hinault and Greg, you chose Greg, but your team manager still wanted you to beat him, regardless of alliances. And that was quite difficult because the guy's better than you. He's physically better than you, so, as a rider, you're looking for a weakness or terrains where you can be at least as competitive as him-and there aren't many of those. For me, the only time I could beat Greg was uphill. In his early career, his climbing wasn't as good, but everything else was slightly better. But as he lost weight, his climbing improved. Like all cyclists, though, that took an edge off his sprinting and time trialing.

"We all had different talents, but it put more pressure on the team leaders to win. It was strange to see, because the dynamics changed for all of us. I was at the Panasonic team [in 1986]. I was still being sent to two big tours, and I just didn't want to do that. I would have rather ridden for the mountains classifications and been the best climber. I always wanted to be a great climber, rather than a second- rate GC rider who 'just' finished in the top ten; that didn't matter to me. When I first turned professional, in 1980, you didn't speak English. There were maybe a couple of guys who did, but you just didn't speak it. You spoke French otherwise you just didn't fit in, and you wouldn't have lasted long enough. But there was Phil Anderson, Sean Yates, and myself. Sean Kelly was already there and was best 'foreigner,' then Roche and LeMond appeared in 1981.

"In 1982, I finished second at the Tour de l'Avenir. Greg was just better than me everywhere. I didn't really race against him; I was just the first of the other guys he beat. He won by ten minutes. He was just so far in front in most of the disciplines that we were just racing for second place. I remember we went up Mont Ventoux, and there were only three of us left in the front. We attacked Greg all the way up Ventoux, and he just rode at the same level we could. I realized then that Greg was just getting better and better. I mean, normally on a major climb on that type of terrain, we'd have blown him out, but we didn't. We couldn't. "Panasonic didn't like Hinault that much, so there were a couple of times during the 1986 Tour de France when Greg was isolated and Panasonic did a deal to ride not for him, but not against him either, so that they had favors stored up for later. Then, in '89, when Greg had no teammates left with him in the mountains, [team Z manager Roger] Legeay told me to ride tempo sometimes, to calm things down when Fignon was attacking. Legeay was in negotiations with Greg to come to team Z in 1990, as it was announced soon after the Tour.

"Greg could really beat the crap out of you, if he wanted to. You didn't want to ride with him, because you knew he was going to beat you. In a breakaway group of five, very often people would stop riding just because Greg was there, because you knew he'd win the sprint. Unless Kelly was there, and then even Kelly might not beat him. And that situation happened quite a lot in Greg's career. It wasn't a case of Greg 'sitting on' and waiting for the time trial; it was often the way tactics would be. It's an important part of being a professional cyclist: if it's not working out in the breakaway, you ride at, say, 40 percent. Then, if Greg has to lead and ride at his 60 percent, he'll eventually sit up too. Then the group behind would catch on, and you'd see what the options were-see who's there and see what happens. And then if he still wins, then fair enough. That would happen a lot. But usually he'd beat you in the sprint and in the time trial as well!

"When you come across guys who are that talented, there's not a lot to play with. They're better than you; their 100 percent is better than yours. What was really interesting about Greg was that he could be aggressive and attacking during a race, ruthlessly exploiting any weakness in his rivals, but be completely different once the race had finished. Most of the others continued to be assholes. He was best described as the least macho. Most of the time during my career, I raced against Greg, but he was never shitty. We would talk and laugh in our little group of 'foreigners. It wasn't the atmosphere that exists nowadays. Back then, foreigners in teams were tolerated only if they could do a better job than the equivalent home rider, but for less.

"When you're young, you're all, 

'Great, I'm hurting!' 

You're actually happy about it."

"You have a speed in your head where you get scared-a point where you're comfortable, and then one just beyond where you get scared. Everybody has that. If you're not scared, then there's something wrong with you. You go beyond comfortable and you're into the scared zone, and that happens quite a lot in racing. You're never ever comfortable there - unless you're crazy, that is. Those riders, like Greg, who were ridiculously talented going downhill, you know that they're never scared. So to stay with him was hard. He would push to try and drop you until he was feeling uncomfortable, and then I was already into the scared zone. Most descents with Greg would be okay, but the really fast ones would be horrible. You'd go into a corner, a fast one-not a hairpin, where falling off is no big deal, but one of the really big, fast, open sweepers, where you think about touching the brakes but don't dare. Those would be the worst, because he'd probably pedal into them and be leaning off the side of the bike... So you come out of the corner twenty meters behind, and then you'd have to close that and have to do a full sprint to get back. If you did a ten kilometer descent like that, where it was all really fast, open corners, by the time you got down, you'd be frazzled. Physically you might be okay, but mentally you'd be frazzled. Greg'd get to the bottom and be recovered, but you might never recover. You've been into the red on the way up, and on the descent you've stayed there-because you're scared.

"I had to learn to be a better descender, using relaxation techniques and such, just to stay in the front group and not be hanging on at the back. We worked hard at every aspect of racing. People presume that you just turn up and you're a good climber, so... But you have a certain amount of natural talent, and it's up to you to hone that to its absolute maximum. And then you look at where you are and compare it to the skills that you need. You have to choose the ones to improve.

"Nowadays, riders get to choose their programs to suit their talents, and they'll maybe do sixty-five races a year, whereas I would have done sixty-five races before the Tour de France. In those days, the team would be less specialized, so you'd have to go to the early one-day races even if you were a stage- race rider. You were sent to the one-day races to help the other guys out-ride in the front, chase down breaks, go back for bottles and jerseys, all that shit- and these races wore you out. You never really got any time off. And in the smaller races, if you weren't the team leader, you were expected to work. You had a totally different set of demands on you. In the Tour of Flanders, say, where your job would be to move the team leaders into position for the hills, you knew there was going to be a crash, and you knew that you could easily be in it... but you'd do it anyway. Every race, there'd be some moment when there'd be a screech of brakes and a crumple of bodies, and you'd think, I'm going to be in that. It's not normal.

"Greg got sent to all the races too, in his first years, but then you have the ability to absorb that workload. With all that time in the wind, the enthusiasm only lasts about two years, but you do it because you still can. You use that freshness for races that you want to do, like the Tour of Lombardy. You're looking at the hills, thinking, 'Oh, it'd be good to do that. All the great riders have done it, and I want to do it too. Then, five years later, you're thinking, 'Shit! The Tour of Lombardy! Oh no... And you'll still be in the front because you have the talent to be in the front, but you've lost the freshness and you don't have that hurt capacity anymore: you're hurting before you've even started. When you're young, you're all, 'Great, I'm hurting!' You're actually happy about it. But eventually, the sheer number of races sucks that life out of you.

"In 1990, I got sick just after the Millau stage of the Tour. If you look at the race images, I was already underweight and worn out, and then I caught something just after that stage. Next day- I think it was to Toulouse-I felt dreadful. I was sick at the Village Départ, then I had the trots. So when the stage started, I got spat out the back at the first acceleration. They sent Bruno Cornillet back for me, but I told him to leave me, otherwise we would have both been eliminated. I stopped after about a hundred kilometers. I was already outside the time limit, and there were still another hundred kilometers to go. I left that night, and the next time I saw the guys was at the Paris celebration.

"In 1985, Hinault did Greg over. Paul Koechli saying that Greg wasn't good enough is bullshit, but he can't admit it. We all knew that it was better for the sponsor for a French guy to win, but when you get done-over in a race, the lie is often perpetuated afterwards and people start to believe it. Hinault became unpopular with the French public anyway, almost because he was so good. He had to start giving out favors to make himself look popular again, but he was just pretending. He was still vicious, especially if he didn't get what he wanted. As his competitor, at first you think he's strong, but after a while you can see weaknesses there, so you exploit them... You would hurt him [by making him ride harder], and then he'd say something nasty to you and so then you'd do it again, because he'd been nasty to you. When you're competitive, it's 'normal' to physically hurt the opposition, mentally too. If you could attack them on a descent and unnerve them, you wore them out and it didn't matter how. Hinault had a nastiness beyond the norms of competition, and he could be insulting and xenophobic-that kind of crap. Greg was likable, but he just didn't have the nastiness. If he'd been like any other racer, he'd have waited until Hinault had done a really big turn and was suffering, and then he would've jumped him and left him. It's a bit like, 'tell him one thing and then I'll do him over!

"At the 1991 Tour, I crashed and ended up in a neck brace. Legeay was really angry when I didn't recover enough to meet his plans. As if the Tour is an environment where you get R & R! I think he thought that because I was dropped most days, I was having an easy time. On the day to Morzine, Greg got dropped early, and (Gilbert] Duclos-Lassalle and a few others were told to stay with him. Then, on the way up Joux Plane, Greg caught up with me. I was dropped from the main peloton, so I rode for him from there to the bottom of the finishing climb (Greg lost seven minutes, Millar around half an hour]. I threw up at the finish as I was so worn out, but it didn't stop Legeay being shitty with me and Atle Kvasvoll, who also was walking wounded. We ought both to have gone home before we even got to the mountains. We were broken. "At the end of 1988, I was with Fagor and I knew I was leaving. We were doing the Tour of Catalunya and it was boiling hot. The whole race was done in one long line: you had about two minutes of talking to your friends at the start, and then it was lined out for the rest of the day. It was just ridiculously fast- all in the gutter with the Once team smashing it at the front. I remember Greg was riding with the Dutch PDM team, and it wasn't going well for him. I doubt they'd have been nice to him at PDM; their mentality always seemed to be, 'win at all costs.' That was their way of riding. But in a breathing space, Greg rolls up alongside me and asks if I thought Fagor had any space on the team for him. He was in a bad way and hadn't been near the front all year. All I said was that I was leaving and I didn't know.

"The next year, Greg wins the Tour with ADR, so how pissed off would PDM have been?! It wasn't a shock to me, though. That's Greg for you: he was so naturally talented and robust, it wasn't a surprise to see him back in 1989 at the level he was at before. Sure, he'd put on a bit of weight, but his time trialing was a lot better. After Greg won the Tour in '89, Z signed him, so he joined after me. But I didn't have a problem with that: Greg was a good person to work with. He came with the World Championships jersey, and I don't know if he was joking or not, but I remember Roger Zannier (owner of team Z] saying that he didn't want him in the rainbow jersey, he wanted the team in a Z jersey. He was all about advertising his business... But the Worlds jersey is still really important, because in cycling there's only three races that really 'matter': the Worlds, the Tour de France, and Paris-Roubaix. For the Worlds you get the rainbow jersey, for the Tour you get the yellow jersey, and for Paris-Roubaix... well, you just get the brick. In cycling, those are the only things that matter. Just look at the coverage they get.

"Hinault supported Greg when he turned pro, so Greg was indebted to him. And when you like somebody and you respect them, and then they do you a bad turn, they're still your friend. But if they disappoint you, it really hurts. And it's worse in a competitive situation because you need to rely on them. You start asking yourself, what let them do that to you? Greg's never told anybody to piss off. He has that view of the world where everybody should do everything correctly; he has that American way, which is charming. But you couldn't go through cycling in that era, with all those demands on you, by pleasing everybody. It just wasn't possible. You were just expected to be an asshole.

"I never realized what sort of pressure and stress those guys who were winning the Tour were under until I noticed in 1990. Riders like that get a basic paranoia. They start worrying about their bikes, their shoes, their tires, their drinks... They start saying, I'm going to eat at a different time and have one person doing my bottles. I think Greg was the first person I heard about having one guy do all his stuff for him, like a minder. That's not normal; that's quite shocking. In cycling, though, you realize what you're doing isn't normal: hurting yourself and getting up and doing it again and again."