A Hero Returns

About 25 years ago I was just "getting into" proper cycling; a bike was slowly morphing from a toy, through merely a mode of transport and finally into a machine to have fun on and explore the world. I was learning to mend and replace bike parts, just starting to enter the murky world of "specialist clothing" and hanging around bike shops being an annoying teenager. I absorbed and learned from snippets of the Tour De France that were sneaking onto the television and then "The High Life" appeared on the goggle-box; a Granada TV documentary about Scottish cycling pro Robert Millar, a sporting champion unsung and unrecognised by a British public that were hugely ignorant of cycling, despite him bagging several stages and winning the King Of The Mountains jersey, achievements that would have him front-page news these days. Here was a man who was small, weedy, thin, not particularly handsome, grumpy, quite the loner and could do wonderful things on a bike. I could identify with all of those attributes and I could work on the "wonderful things on a bike" bit. I had my first hero. Two images from "The High Life" have stuck indelibly in my mind; the camera car trying to follow Millar as he shot down an alpine descent, greasing his way between on-coming cars and cliffs as he pulled away to finally disappear from shot around a bend, and him sitting in the back of the team car at the end of a stage peeling his team jersey off walnut-brown arms to reveal a torso of Scottish-White skin beneath. I was totally hooked. A spark had been lit. This would be the sport for me. I only saw it the once, if it was repeated I never caught it, the programme came out on video but is almost impossible to track down, and there are mere gobbets available on the web. So it is with a giddy heart that I find out that "The High Life" is finally available on DVD (apologies if this is old news to some), I do hope the damp mists of time have been kind to it and not let the memories sadly rust a bit. Where's my credit-card? www.bromleyvideo.com