Nobody transitions frivolously: Pippa York's farewell to Robert Millar
Back at the fag end of the last century I went for a job interview with the sports editor of the soon-to-be-launched Sunday Herald. I'm not sure I was really what the new paper was looking for. I can't have been anyone's idea of a budding sports journalist. I liked football, but wasn't much interested in the Old Firm. And, other than boxing, if I'm honest, I wasn't that fussed about many other sports.
I did like cycling though and the sports editor and I ended up talking about the Tour De France, then one of my favourite sporting events. The subject of doping inevitably came up. 'I can't see how they can complete all those mountain stages without drugs,' was my considered opinion.
You may not be surprised to learn that I didn't get the job. But reading The Escape - the new book by David Walsh and Pippa York - in the last few days I have felt a little spark of vindication all these years on.
Walsh is the chief sports writer at the Times and the man who helped uncover Lance Armstrong's doping programme. York, meanwhile, rode the Tour 11 times and became the first British rider to win the polka dot jersey in 1984. Back then she was Robert Millar, Scotland's greatest ever road cyclist.
Robert Millar taking part in the Tour De France in 1984 (Image: FREE) The book they have written together is a conversation about sport and life and as part of that Walsh does ask York, 'Did you dope when you were Robert Millar?'
The answer is positive. 'Just as much as everybody else, I didn't regard it as doping. I considered it cheating, and I didn't cheat any more or any less than anybody else.'
York goes on to admit she took cortisone. 'I was as ambitious as anyone, and things were different back then. There was no out-of-competition testing and it wasn't that difficult to get away with stuff.'
If I'd known that back in 1989 when I stood in the rain in King Street in Stirling on my lunch hour to watch Millar flash by in seconds during the Tour of Britain would it have changed anything? Probably not.
Millar, 'the little man from the Gorbals with the big heart,' as commentator Phil Liggett described him in 1984, the year Millar won the King of the Mountains title in the Tour, was the reason I fell in love with cycling.
And if the Irish rider Stephen Roche, the winner of the tour in 1987, soon took over as my favourite (outside football, that moment on La Plagne in the Alps in 1987 when Roche appears from nowhere to almost catch Pedro Delgado is the most thrilling moment in my life watching sport), Millar remained something of a hero to me.
I suspect I even liked the fact that he was taciturn and made journalists' lives difficult at the time. Some 40 years later in The Escape, York has an explanation for her behaviour back then.
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'I was missing 1 or 2 per cent to be as good a rider as I could be,' she tells Walsh. 'As a person, much more was missing. Because of gender dysphoria, the whole social side was really stunted, I was emotionally closed to most people.'
Not here, though. Not any more. And this is the real value of Walsh and York's book. Yes, you can read it as a commentary on Tours past and present, as a confirmation that doping was a thing back then, or even as a description of what it is like to cover the event, if you are so inclined.
But at its heart is York's cool, considered account of why she felt she had to transition, the emotional and physical impact of that decision and the sense of peace she has achieved in its wake.
At a time when there is more heat than light around discussions of trans people, this feels like a useful contribution and a reminder of the seriousness of the decisions people are making in their lives. As York reminds us, 'nobody transitions frivolously.'
From the age of nine or 10, Robert Millar began wearing his sister's clothes. He'd sneak into the family bathroom of their home 11 floors up in a Glasgow high rise to see how he looked in the mirror.
He felt, in Walsh's words, 'misaligned with the world.' For a long time cycling became a way of placing that misalignment on hold. 'Because I was so invested in that career, I wasn't thinking about gender dysphoria,' York admits.
But it was always there. Millar stopped riding when he was 37. By then his marriage had ended. He went into a spiral of depression and by 1999 he realised he was going to have to deal with his gender dysphoria in some way.
'It became a need,' York explains in the book. What that need might lead to he didn't know at the time. The process would last almost 10 years and include psychotherapy and hormone replacement. And then in May 2003 Robert Millar travelled to Bangkok to undergo genital surgery.
It was no small decision. Over and above the physical risk of going under the knife, he had a partner, Linda, to consider. She had fallen in love with Robert. Now she was going to have to live with Pippa.
'The need to recognise the grief of others and to give them the time for a grieving process is a responsibility we all carry,' York says.
What can Linda still find that she fell in love with, Walsh then asks? 'The same soul, the same essence, except, I hope, a more peaceful one, more aligned with itself. Happier. The same heart that still loves her,' York explains.
'I'm less of Robert Millar because he is no more, but I'm more myself. It is, I hope, that self - myself - that she loves and will recognise in my altered body.'
Pippa York tells her story in The Escape (Image: free) For those who recall the uncommunicative, sometimes even surly, cyclist Millar had been, the fact that she can be so eloquent, so open now, is surely proof of York's own argument that she is now who she needed to be.
Some years ago I interviewed the late, great author Jan Morris about her life and adventures. As James Morris she had reported on the first ascent of Everest. But in 1972 Morris travelled to Casablanca for gender reassignment surgery.
At one point in our conversation I asked her about her transition from James to Jan. She took perhaps understandable umbrage at the question. And yet gender seems such a central part of who we are that such questions are inevitable. In The Escape York has provided some answers.
I am probably naively optimistic to think that there can be an accommodation in the ongoing arguments about trans rights; a recognition that women's concerns need to be met, but also that trans people are just that, people.
That begins with hearing their stories. And that is the value of the testimony that's contained in The Escape.
He was Robert Millar. Now she is Pippa York. We are all the sum of our experiences. It seems worthwhile listening to hers.
The Escape by Pippa York and David Walsh is published by Mudlark, £22
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