My friend Pippa — who used to be one of Britain's best male cyclists

Times

10 hours ago

We sit at an outside table at Le Patio restaurant on Rue de la République in Albertville, a town in southeast France. A typical après-Tour evening. Earlier that afternoon we'd watched the Tour de France play out on the Col de la Loze. Like many mountain days this one was titanic, with Miguel Ángel López of Colombia powering his way to a stage win. Now Pippa and I are having dinner, comparing our impressions of what we'd seen. Idyllic, you might have said.
Except that things are rarely perfect. This is 2020. Covid is still raging. So much so that the Tour had been moved from its July home to an August-September rental. We came to the race wearing masks, wondering if this annual pilgrimage was a good idea. President Macron took a different view, saying France should get back to the life it had before the virus. What better expression of French normality than the Tour.
We're at a table for two. Six or seven metres to our right are another couple. The man strikes up conversation. 'You're David Walsh,' he says. 'I read your book, the one about Lance Armstrong.' Any stranger offering this entrée finds an open door and soon this one is telling us his life story.
His name is Thomas. He's from Germany. Mid-fifties, I'm guessing. He was once an elite amateur cyclist and says he would have done better if he'd been prepared to dope. After that he coached an under-23 squad. He was now on a bike holiday in the Alps, riding two or three mountain passes each day.
Thomas speaks English well and is eating with a female companion. Once he gets talking cycling, there is no slowing him. His friend sits quietly, as if she's been here before and is fine with temporary exclusion. Reasonably interesting at first, Thomas soon makes us wish we'd sat at the other end of the restaurant. His companion winces when he orders a second bottle of wine.
We listen with diminishing patience. Thomas can't see beyond Thomas. Doesn't appreciate that his bike career wasn't exactly stellar and doesn't pay any attention to the woman at my table. Pippa was once a great cyclist. Pippa had a career. Pippa rode the Tour de France 11 times and was one of the great climbers. Pippa even won the polka-dot jersey: in 1984, she was King of the Mountains.
During the briefest pause, I mouth a silent question to Pippa.
'Is it OK to tell him who you are?'
'If you want,' she says.
I turn to Thomas. 'I'm surprised you don't recognise Pippa.'
Confused, he focuses on Pippa for the first time. As he flounders, I bring up Pippa's Wikipedia page on my iPhone and stretch it towards him. It begins: 'Philippa York (born Robert Millar on 13 September 1958) is a Scottish journalist and former professional road racing cyclist.' Thomas's expression conveys horror, as if he's discovered something that is broken and has to be fixed.
Six weeks before our interrupted dinner at Le Patio, I met Pippa York for the first time. We went to a village on the edge of the New Forest in Hampshire and for two hours we talked. Before that I'd never had any interaction with a transgender person. Yet I knew her former self. More than 30 years before, I'd covered the Tour de France when Robert Millar was one of the best.
Back then Millar gave the impression he would rather have root canal treatment than ten minutes with a journalist. He also seemed more interesting than most riders. But in the way that you might leave a difficult crossword puzzle, I gave up on him. Going to see Pippa that day in Hampshire was in part motivated by a desire to know more about Robert Millar.
• Philippa York: 'I'd never deny Robert Millar existed but I was only 5 per cent happy'
So when Pippa, now 66, is witty and charming, I mention that she seems different from the Robert I barely knew. 'I am a very different person to Robert Millar. I don't have to be competitive now. Professional cycling isn't a world that's open to friendliness between the people you're with, even if they're your team-mates. I was as competitive as anybody of my generation. I had the ambition and ego and selfishness that you need to succeed. But I wasn't a nice person. I wouldn't have classed myself as a nice person, because I couldn't be. The situations I was in didn't call for niceness.'
We talked about everything. How Robert Millar, the young Glaswegian, knew from his first day at primary school that he wanted to be a girl. How that affected his childhood and everything that followed. Cycling was at once the means to a better life and an attempt to suppress feelings that refused to be suppressed. After making his way as a young pro bike rider in France, he married a French woman, Sylvie Transler, in 1985. Four years later they had a son, Edward.
'I didn't get married because I thought it wouldn't work. I thought it'd be OK, this will sort me out. I will have a normal life and I will be a normal person. That works for a while and then eventually it doesn't because you aren't what is classed as normal. You have stuff to deal with that most people don't have to deal with.'
Stuff that would have to wait until Millar left the peloton. After retiring in 1995, aged 36, his life was darkened by depression and an overwhelming sense of failure. It felt as if he didn't have the courage to be the person he needed to be. The marriage to Sylvie ended and Millar set up home in England.
Without a career, Millar wilted. These were years she remembers as unrelentingly dreadful. Antidepressants seemed only to make things worse. But he'd met a woman, Linda, at a bike race. She was everything he was not: chatty, engaging, fun. Naturally he fell for her. They became a couple and had a daughter, Lydia. This relationship didn't stop what was churning inside him.
'It was getting worse and worse and worse and I thought, I have to deal with this transition stuff.' In 1999 she sought professional help. In early 2000 the transition began. Linda asked for time to consider the changed circumstances.
On that afternoon in the New Forest I said I could see that transition was something she truly wanted. No, she corrected me, it was what she truly needed. After my interview with Pippa appeared in The Sunday Times a few weeks later, I called her. 'Would you be interested in travelling with me on the Tour de France?' She was going to be working as an analyst for Cyclingnews, and said she might be. Without having any real idea what we were letting ourselves in for, we met on August 26, 2020, at Gatwick airport, boarded a flight to Nice, picked up a hire car, got our accreditation badges and that was it, together for almost four weeks.
It went so well that we did the same for the 2021 and 2022 Tours. In all, this amounted to 12 weeks of togetherness. Five or six hours in the car every day, seats alongside each other at the Centre de Presse and every meal eaten together. Since my first Tour in 1983 I'd travelled with a multitude of journalists, predominantly male, and got on well with most of them.
The times with Pippa were the best.
She did the driving. I did the questions. The story she told was desperately sad. I would listen back to the tapes and wince at my intrusiveness. How much do I need to know? She said the questions didn't bother her.
I had worried about how it would be when she took her place in the press centre and was pleased by the warmth of our colleagues. They ambled over to where we sat and introduced themselves to Pippa. It was their way of saying 'welcome' and there were a few who wrote sympathetic stories about her presence at the race. I joked that she made more time for journalists than Robert Millar ever had.
Towards the end of the first week of our first Tour together, Pippa met Sandra Forgues, who — as Wilfrid Forgues — won a gold medal at canoe-slalom at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. 'So how did it go?' I asked when she returned. She said it went great. 'Sandra talked about not wanting to die as an old man and that resonated. I too never wanted to die as an old man.'
By now I had come to understand enough to know this was absolutely true. In the beginning I had no idea. Why would a man with a female partner and daughter, and a son by a previous relationship, choose at the halfway point in his life to transition? How difficult must that have been?
From her first days at Abbotsford Primary School in Glasgow, she knew she was different. Everything about the girls' world appealed to her. Not much about the boys' did. When the girls went to their part of the school yard, she wanted to follow but already sensed that sissies weren't tolerated.
She coped by creating a secret world, tiptoeing into his sister Elizabeth's room at their 11th-floor flat in Pollokshaws, south of Glasgow. Elizabeth was a year older and her clothes fitted Robert. Picking the moment carefully, he would sneak into his sister's room and put on her clothes. Dressed in his sister's clothes, he felt more comfortable and more secure. He liked that feeling. The difficulty was getting to see the result in the bathroom mirror, which was downstairs.
Once, when alone in the flat, Robert was downstairs, checking his outfit in the mirror. Then the sound of an opening door. His dad unexpectedly arrived home from work. Men in 1970s Glasgow never came home early from work. This day his dad did and there was 13-year-old Robert, dressed as a girl. Tights, skirt, top, make-up, the whole shebang. And Bill Millar in the hallway. For God's sake.
Neither Dad nor Robert said a word. The bathroom door closed quickly. Bill Millar went upstairs. Robert pressed his back to the door.
He hasn't seen me. He hasn't said anything. I've got away with it. He began removing everything. De-girling. Clothes gone. Face scrubbed.
And then from upstairs, the shout: 'Are you finished in there yet?'
Robert ran upstairs, sat on his bed and waited. It was late when his father finally came to his bedroom. A man wrestling with words and struggling. He could have said: 'You know, I saw you dressed as a girl today, Robert.' He could have said: 'What the f*** are you playing at, kid?' He could have said: 'No son of mine '
Instead, Bill tried to understand. Tried his best to express something soft through the awkwardness of a working-class Glaswegian man in the 1970s. 'You're going through puberty, adolescence. We all went through it. It's a natural time. It's confusing too.'
And his son, the boy who wants to be a girl, isn't relieved to hear the pastoral tone. He's crawling under his bedsheets. It's excruciating. Oh Jesus. Don't, Dad. Anything but this. Be angry even, but not this.
Bill confirms that he and Mum have had a talk. Oh, no, he's told my mum. Oh Jesus. What's she gonna say? Why the f*** would you tell her?
'So, your mum and I, we don't want you to worry. You're a good wee lad. And this is just a thing that you're going through. As I said, lots of people go through it. Puberty and all that.'
And then: 'I went through it. Yes, when I was growing up, I was a bit confused as well.'
Robert is thinking: 'You've dressed as a girl as well? It's not just me, then? Why didn't you say that at the start? Maybe it really is just a phase? Maybe I'm not a freak show like they say in the magazines or the papers. My dad was confused as well. It passed for him. Look at him, he doesn't wear dresses any more. Just look at him. He's fine now.'
His dad gets up to leave. Bill Millar walks out of his child's bedroom in Glasgow in the 1970s. Touchy-feely is years away. Man-to-man is all there is, even if one man is a boy whose sole contribution to the conversation has been a mortified grunt. Bill Millar has that face on. The face says, it's OK, I've talked about that. Whatever it was, I've talked about it. I've dealt with that. I've done my bit. I've asked you. You've listened. I can report back downstairs. Job done.
'So that's it, son. Yeah. Now go to sleep.' Bill Millar's footsteps faded down the stairs. Robert lay there, a curled-up comma of a boy, fretting in his bed. Questions he wanted to ask now raised their hands — too late.
His mum never, ever mentions the subject. Nobody ever mentions it again.
Only once in our hours of conversation on the Tour did Pippa get upset. Her mother, Mary Millar, died on July 30, 1981, of carcinomatosis. She was in her forties. Robert was then a second-year professional, riding for the Peugeot team in France. Though he knew his mum had been unwell, the thought of her dying hadn't crossed his mind.
Elizabeth called. 'Mum's died.' He replied flatly: 'OK, I'll be back for the funeral. Do we know when it will be?' And his sister said: 'Well, she died a month ago. We've already had all that. You know, the funeral and stuff.'
His first thought was: 'What the f***?' His first words were: 'What do you mean? Why didn't you tell me?'
'Oh,' Elizabeth said, 'we didn't want it to get in the way of what you were doing.'
I asked Pippa what her relationship with her mother was like. 'I thought it was OK. I was closer to my mum than to my father.'
Did she call her family much? 'No, no. I almost never called them, no. And they'd never call me because it cost a fortune to make international calls.'
Did her single-mindedness give them the wrong impression? 'Yeah, I think it was that.'
I asked how she remembered her mother. 'Now, there's a hard question. I don't remember her as the person that became ill… You've just made me cry.'
A long pause. 'I don't really want to answer that.'
It was in the Pyrenees that I first stood on a mountain and waited for the Tour de France. Tenth stage of the 1983 race, Pau to Bagnères de Luchon, 201km that traversed four mountain passes: the Aubisque, Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde. Intense heat for a stage that would last for 6 hours and 23 minutes. Just brutal.
A week or so before I'd jumped on the back of Tony Kelly's BMW 1000 motorbike and from Dublin we headed south to Rosslare, took the ferry to Le Havre and then chased down through France to catch up with the Tour. It felt as if we were running away with the circus.
On the Aspin we waited for five hours, killing time with speculation about how things would play out. Rarely in sport is one's anticipation of action commensurate with one's experience of it. Tony and I were fans, there to cheer on our compatriots Sean Kelly and Stephen Roche. Kelly had the yellow jersey, Roche the white jersey given to the leading young rider. That day the two Irish riders were crushed, but in tandem with a tough 30-year-old Colombian climber, José Patrocinio Jiménez, the 24-year-old Robert Millar rode the race of his life.
• Philippa York: 'Doping? It was cheating and all of us were doing it'
The two led over the Tourmalet, Aspin and Peyresourde and 300 metres from the top of the final climb, Millar accelerated away from his companion. Two arms raised, he crossed the finish line all alone in Bagnères. On one of the cruellest mountain days in the Tour, he had outridden every rival. One of the great performances.
When I remind Pippa of this, the implied praise comes with a caveat. Being Robert Millar, I say, must have been compensation for not being the person he wanted to be. Who can win a stage of the Tour de France and not feel elated?
Pippa smiles softly at my enthusiasm. Without saying as much, her expression says I am a simpleton who imagines victory takes care of all. 'Pippa York and Robert Millar are two different people,' she says. 'I don't deny Robert's existence. Philippa couldn't have won those bike races. The difference is I now feel 95 per cent content. Before, when I existed as Robert, I was about 5 per cent content. I've now just got the normal concerns. Wrinkles, wishing I was taller, slimmer, whatever. That missing 5 per cent is not related to gender.'
Pippa was 41 when she committed to transition. The process would take ten years, and take her to San Francisco and Thailand. As she explained it, there are stages of transition and the person transitioning starts without knowing the end point. 'You're going into the unknown. You first do the counselling and you think, I am who I am now. Then you realise that's not enough.
'So you decide, I'd like hormonal treatment, and then that makes you feel a lot better. And again, you want more because you're on a small dose and it doesn't make enough of a difference. The hormones affect those pathways in your head that would have been active if you'd been born female. Now they're all activated. You're thinking, 'This is good, I'm happy with this but I'm not happy with how I look.'
'And then you deal with the bits you're left with, which are male and you're thinking, 'Well, I don't really need those.' '
First, there was the facial surgery. Pippa went to Douglas Ousterhout in San Francisco because he was a pioneer of facial feminisation surgery. It was expensive. 'I thought, 'I can spend this amount of money on a really good car or I can spend it on a better face.' Which was going to serve me longer? Which is more important to me? When I'm sitting on a bus and a load of teenagers get on and they look over at me, do I want them to think that I was previously male? Recently male? Or do I want them to glance over and think, 'There's a woman,' and not give me a second glance?'
The operation took eight hours. Pippa didn't worry about the duration, or even too much about the outcome. She simply wanted to survive the scrutiny that a trans person endures. When people looked at her in the street, it didn't really matter to her if they thought she was an ugly woman. All that mattered was that when they looked, they saw a woman.
A year later she travelled to Thailand, where she'd found a surgeon who would complete her transition. Dr Chettawut enjoyed a burgeoning reputation for his work with trans patients. Pippa spent 30 days in Thailand. This process was intensely difficult not just for Pippa herself, but for her partner, Linda, and her children, Edward, who is now 36, and Lydia, 30.
Edward and Lydia have been understanding, so too Linda. Pippa recognised that Linda might not wish to continue in their relationship. Linda had met and fallen in love with Robert Millar. Now her partner was a female called Philippa York. After much reflection, Linda decided to stay. They are still together.
Being male and predictable, I was curious about what happened to the severed parts in Thailand. Do they just wash them down the drain?
'It's a question that people often ask me,' Pippa replied. 'I'm glad they do as it's a chance to explain something a bit spiritual. I was in Thailand. Dr Chettawut is a Buddhist, and in Buddhist tradition it's usual that they allow you, encourage you, to retain all the things they remove from you.
'In their belief system it's part of your soul. Every part of the body is deemed sacred and you have to keep everything you were given. It's part of the unity of life. You have to keep them close to you. So after the operation they give them to you in a jar. It's a nice jar and you can take them home. Some people may bury them. But I still have them at home. I keep them in the living room above the fireplace.'
I am flabbergasted. 'Wow. So, they give them to you and you keep your penis in a jar in the living room? That's amazing.'
'No, David, it isn't,' Pippa says. 'But you're the most gullible journalist on the Tour de France. For the record, I've absolutely no idea what happened to the parts.'
© Pippa York and David Walsh 2025. Extracted from The Escape: The Tour, the Cyclist and Me by Pippa York and David Walsh (Mudlark £22), published on Thursday. Order a copy at timesbookshop.co.uk. Discount for Times+ members