Another acquaintance from his teenage years was Patrick Sercu, a young sprint specialist from just outside Ghent who bore more than a passing resemblance to Eddy – high cheek-boned, solemn-faced, black-haired – and would go on to become the greatest six-day track racer of all time. The pair struck up a firm friendship from the day when they both needed a partner for a Madison race on the track in Brussels. Sercu’s father and Vervaecke were old friends and put them together: they were regular winners over the winter. ‘I went to their house often to eat when I was at the barracks in Brussels doing my military service,’ Sercu told me. ‘Eddy was timid, didn’t talk much, but I was the same.’ The sprinter described Jenny Merckx as being like an Italian mother, constantly filling his plate, while Jules was more reserved, darker in his moods. The pair were perfectly matched on the track – Sercu the sprinter, Merckx the stayer – and went on to win ten six-days together. Later, Merckx helped Sercu to the green points jersey in the 1974 Tour de France.
At Vervaecke’s insistence, Merckx rode only one stage race as an amateur. The Tour of Limburg, in May 1963, was a fairly flat five-dayer, which he won by taking victory in the time trial stage. One journalist of the time recalled a thin, timid-looking youth with dark black eyes, who turned into a dominant force once he was on his bike. Merckx turned down invitations to race in the biggest amateur events of the day, the Warsaw–Berlin–Prague Peace Race and the Tour de l’Avenir – run by the Tour de France organisers to discover future Tour heroes – but did take a trip to race in East Germany in 1963. There, he beat Gustav Schur and other Eastern bloc greats; all men who had amateur licences but were professional in all but name.
By 1964, with fifty-five junior and amateur wins to his name, he was established as one of a number of rising Belgian stars in contention to ride the world road championships. It was not smooth progress, in spite of his efforts to forge links with Lucien Acou. The generation of Belgian cyclists born in the years around the end of the war was extraordinarily strong, so competition to get in the national team was even more intense than normal. A key selection race was the Belgian amateur championship, on a tricky course, and Merckx was one of many riders to fall off, crashing twice. He had already fallen the week before at a circuit race in Woluwe – while sprinting for a prime, an electric razor as it happened – and the selectors had found out because an arm injury had kept him off his bike for the previous week. Merckx had ripped a tendon in his arm, which had been operated on without anaesthetic. They were not keen to select a rider who seemed accident-prone.
A far bigger problem emerged, however, when he underwent the compulsory medical examination at the pre-world championship training camp. He had a minor heart problem, the doctor declared, and ironically in view of the restraint Vervaecke and his father had made him show, the diagnosis was that he had been racing too much. Not surprisingly, Eddy was devastated. ‘It was like a hammer blow to the head. I thought my life was going to change just like that.’ This was not the first time Merckx had been turned down. In 1963, he had also been in contention for the world championship team, but his form deserted him at a critical moment and he was dropped from the shortlist.
This time round, Mme Merckx intervened. First the family doctor was called on: there was no problem with Eddy, he said. Next up, Merckx’s mother tackled the selectors. After a certain amount of bluster – Mrs Merckx was merely a proud mother, the trainer Oscar Daemers said, adding that her son couldn’t climb a motorway bridge – the team manager conceded that they might find a place for him in the team time trial. Jenny Merckx was no fool: if Eddy was physically capable of riding the team time trial, that surely meant he could ride the road race. A couple of phone calls later, the Belgian team doctor admitted he had been advised it might be a good idea to turn Eddy down. Soon enough, Eddy was invited in for a new test, which cleared him.
The only conclusion that can be drawn is that Merckx was being deliberately kept out of the team. According to his biographer Joël Godaert, the underlying problem was the national federation’s need to juggle the various local interests in Belgium. ‘Against all logical expectations, the best riders were not necessarily picked. The world championship selectors were partly guided by “interests” and by the strongest voices of provincial delegates. The selectors wouldn’t hesitate to favour riders belonging to a province with a larger number of racing licence-holders or to respond to pressure from delegates who wanted to give a helping hand to favoured riders.’
Merckx was selected for the Belgian team alongside Walter Godefroot, Willy Planckaert, Jos Spruyt, Roger Swerts and Herman Van Loo. The race was at Sallanches, near Mont Blanc – later famous as the place where Bernard Hinault won the world title in 1980 – on a rainy day, over sodden, hilly roads. Merckx had been reminded over and over again by Acou and Vervaecke to hold back. He made his effort with thirty-five kilometres to go, after Swerts – later to be a solid second string in Merckx’s professional teams – told him that he was not going to manage to bridge to the main escape of the day. Merckx responded to the four-man move including his teammate Van Loo by making a series of attacks with Felice Gimondi the only rider able to hold him, initially, as he rode across to the break.
‘He fell on the quartet after a few kilometres of chasing,’ reported Robert Pajot of l’Equipe. ‘He had barely given himself time to breathe before he attacked again … one by one his erstwhile companions fell back. Accelerating again on the final climb of the road that climbed to Val d’Assy, Merckx forged a lead of a hundred metres in spite of the courage Luciano Armani showed in hanging on to his back wheel. It was enough of a lead to earn him the world title by a clear margin.’ He was the youngest world amateur champion to that date: nineteen years old. Twenty-seven seconds after Merckx crossed the line, his teammate Willy Planckaert won the sprint for second place, unaware that Merckx had escaped and convinced that he was the world champion.
Merckx achieved his dream of racing at the Tokyo Olympics later that year, but while the ambition to ride the event had driven him since his early teens, the race itself was anything but a defining occasion. As the amateur world champion, he was no longer just another rider. He was heavily marked by the entire field as he attempted to split the race apart – not the last time he was to find this happening. He suffered from cramp. He rode a less restrained race than in Sallanches, and was chased down by Gimondi when he made his move three kilometres from the finish. Fate had stepped in. The night before, his wallet had been stolen from his room in the Olympic village; in it were the 12,000 Belgian Francs he had brought to pay his teammates. That was the best way to be absolutely certain that they would help him to win. Instead the Belgian team rode for themselves: the gold medal went to an Italian, Mario Zanin, with Godefroot winning the bronze medal and Merckx twelfth. His meteoric amateur career was all but over.
Merckx turned professional on 24 April 1965 for the Solo-Superia team led by Rik Van Looy. He had been keen to make the step the year before but Vervaecke felt it was too early: he had his military service to do, and his training time would be limited. By mid-April, however, Eddy had won four amateur races out of the five he had started, and clearly he had nothing to gain by remaining in the lower category. The deal was orchestrated by Jean Van Buggenhout, a former six-day rider from the 1930s, and sometime art collector. Van Buggenhout had become young Merckx’s manager following the world championship at Sallanches, after trying to get Eddy on his books since his win in the Tour of Limburg the previous year. Inevitably, Van Buggenhout was one of the influential characters Jenny Merckx had phoned when she was trying to sort out the imbroglio of the ‘failed’ medical check the previous August: he had pulled strings to get Merckx into the team.
Van Buggenhout had far more clout than most: he virtually ran post-war Belgian cycling. He had been a member of a highly successful six-day team, the ‘Brussels aeroplanes’, whose jersey in the city colours of red and green incorporated an image of the Mannekin Pis statue. He was a talented rider, with the abi
lity to break away at the moment in a race that he knew would cause the crowd to get to their feet. If you pleased the crowd, the fee went up proportionately.
He was also an accountant who brought his negotiating skills to his six-day career then moved into race promotion just before the war. In the first criterium he organised he raced as well, turning up in his kit to collect money and issue entrance tickets to the circuit. Later he would supply promoting towns with a complete service from contracts to race staff to riders.
As well as his various criteriums, he also ran the Brussels velodrome, and he had an office there. It was a good place to spot emerging talent such as Merckx in the youth events. He had branched out from promotion into managing six-day riders and moved seamlessly to running the careers of the two Riks, Van Steenbergen and Van Looy. ‘Everyone was afraid of him,’ recalls Patrick Sercu. ‘He was a hard man, didn’t say a lot, but was imposing. He really knew his cycling, he wasn’t just a moneyman.’ He had more riders on his books than the other great wheeler-dealer of the day, Daniel Dousset of France, whose biggest name was Jacques Anquetil. The pair seemed to have had an unspoken pact that each would keep off the other man’s turf. Van Buggenhout also ran the Solo-Superia team, led by his brace of Riks, so it was the obvious place for his new protégé to go. Unfortunately it just happened to be completely the wrong team for an ambitious, talented young Belgian who didn’t come from the Flandrian heartland.
Van Steenbergen was not the stumbling block. He had pretty much retired from the road and was riding criteriums and track races, scooping up one start purse after another before hanging up his wheels. Merckx was no threat to him, and he wasn’t bothered about the new lad. He just wanted to make his money. Van Looy was another matter, however. He was the most dominant member of the little clique of a dozen or so stars, the grands coureurs, who effectively controlled professional racing across Europe. Those who crossed him tended to find that their careers were brief: the criterium contracts dried up and there would just happen to be a dozen riders on their coat tails when they attacked in a race, all of them keen to be seen doing what they felt The Emperor wanted. Rik II was probably the greatest Classics hunter cycling has ever seen, the only man ever to win all the major one-day races: the feat would elude even Merckx himself.
The team Van Looy had built for himself was legendary. It had taken him three years to pull together, and the riders were collectively nicknamed ‘The Red Guard’, as they wore the crimson jersey of Faema. The Red Guard is credited with inventing the lead-out train, in which the riders control the final kilometres of a race so that the team’s sprinter can do the business at the very end. They were paid more than the norm and were more talented than average. Discipline was rigid: those who stepped out of line were sacked. They were big, fast men, and included such talents as the Dutchman Peter Post, winner of the Paris–Roubaix Classic in 1964 at the fastest average speed recorded for any one-day race at the time.
Solo was Van Looy’s team. The squad was managed by his brother-in-law, and the two of them had already proved too much for the previous directeur sportif, Robert Naeye, the man who had persuaded the margarine company to back the team in the first place. Ominously for Merckx, Van Looy already had a protégé under his wing in Ward Sels, nearly four years older and already Belgian national professional champion. Merckx would eventually eclipse Sels by a massive margin and would be more celebrated than Van Looy, but that problem did not raise its head in his first season. Merckx was not yet that good. It came down to this: recruits to Solo had to fit into Van Looy’s scheme of things, but Merckx was his own man.
To start with, the youngster was from Brussels, not the Flandrian heartland. It was not the first or the last time that this would be an issue. He was friendly with several of Van Looy’s rivals from around the capital, riders such as Daems, who was one of the few to refuse to work for Van Looy in the Belgian national team at the world championships. Merckx was young, serious and sensitive, and had not been away from home a great deal. The team’s banter was hard for him to take. Van Looy’s domestiques nicknamed Merckx ‘Jack Palance’ – because of his black quiff perhaps – and teased him over his love of rice pudding with flavoured syrup.
This was trivia, but Merckx was sensitive, just turning twenty, and it hurt. According to one witness, Jos Huysmans, Van Looy was a character who liked to get under another man’s skin, and quickly made him aware that he was taking the mickey. ‘For Merckx it must have been terribly humiliating and he never forgave him.’ The only instance of Van Looy holding Merckx back in a race came in that year’s Belgian national championship, when the Solo leader advised the youngster not to go after an early move, and he just happened to miss out on the win. The advice might have been well intentioned, but it was later interpreted as the old champion trying to restrain the upstart.
When I interviewed Van Looy about his career, he spoke about Merckx without being prompted, insisting he only wanted the best for him. ‘He was only nineteen when he turned professional. It was normal that when he came into the team, the guys would have a bit of a laugh. They were all about thirty, they would say “petit, what are you doing here?” I didn’t want him to leave. For me, it would have been better if he had stayed in the team. We would have been together, won races just like that.’
The Solo experience also underlined that Merckx had a relatively low key start to his professional career. It would have been astonishing if he had found it easy, as the jump in distance and speed from amateur racing is considerable. He turned professional before his twentieth birthday – young even by the standards of the 1960s – and his training had been curtailed by his military service, first in Ghent, then closer to home in Brussels. His first race was the Flèche Wallonne, a long, hilly one-day Classic, one of the hardest events on the calendar. It was run in horrendous weather that year and not surprisingly Merckx cracked with thirty kilometres to go. After that, the novice spent the bulk of the summer riding kermis races and track races. He took the first pro race of his career soon enough, at Vilvoorde in the Brussels suburbs – later to be the home of Ireland’s Sean Kelly – on 11 May. The man he beat was none other than his erstwhile training partner Emile Daems: a significant scalp for a twenty-year-old, although Daems was close to ending his career. ‘It was a hard circuit,’ the older man told me. ‘I escaped towards the end, but he caught me one kilometre from the finish and beat me in the sprint.’ By the close of the season, Merckx had clocked up a more than respectable nine wins in kermis races.
Fortunately Merckx and Van Looy didn’t race together a great deal, because the youngster wasn’t yet at the level of the old champion, but clearly by the end of 1965 Merckx had worked out that he had no option but to leave. There was an approach from the Bic team at that year’s world championships in San Sebastian, as the manager Raphael Geminiani recalled. Merckx was recommended by Van Looy, and, as Geminiani tells it: ‘I thought “shit, this is Van Looy talking, I’ll take two contracts’ – presumably a copy for each party – ‘and I’ll go and see the Belgian team in their hotel”.’ Geminiani’s offer was 2500 francs a month – a tenth of what a star such as Anquetil might earn – but Merckx accepted. ‘I had my two contracts signed and I say to myself that’s great, but Merckx was a minor, and when he gets back to Belgium and he talks to his manager Van Buggenhout, and he says “is it true that you’ve signed a contract with Gem?, it’s not valid, it’s your father who has to do that”. And he signed for Peugeot!’
Permitting his protégé to move to the French team Peugeot was a masterstroke by Van Buggenhout. He kept his options open with both Merckx – the future, perhaps – and Van Looy, the best-paid star in the sport. France’s oldest team might have seemed a curious choice for a Belgian, but the manager Gaston Plaud was an eclectic recruiter, given to signing Germans and Britons. Merckx spoke French, which obviously helped, the contract was worth 20,000 francs per month, and Peugeot was not run with the same rigid discipline as Van Looy’s teams. If he wanted to race
in his own way, Merckx would have the opportunity.
In March 1966, Paris–Nice was the first major stage race of the year, and the first stage race of his professional career. In fact it was only his second stage race ever, as in 1965 he had avoided multi-day events. He was not that keen to race, having just finished the Antwerp Six-Day. His initial goal was merely to race conservatively and get to know his new teammates. There were immediate hints that he would have to fight for his place: towards the end of stage one, at Auxerre, he set off in pursuit of a three-man escape, his team leader Roger Pingeon, Michele Dancelli and Adriano Durante. With Merckx closing, Pingeon decided not to slow down a little to allow his teammate to catch up, so that the two of them could take on the Italians on equal terms, but pushed as hard as he could. Not surprisingly, when he caught up, Merckx was tired and could only finish third.
There was another key indicator for the twenty-year-old, on the stage to Montceau-les-Mines. Here he finished ‘best of the rest’ as the five times Tour winner Anquetil and his big rival Poulidor, no less, did battle on the toughest climb of the race, the four-kilometre, one-in-five Col d’Uchon. Merckx pulled on the white leader’s jersey, and held it for a stage, but the key moment came in the time trial in Corsica, late on. He caught and overtook Van Looy, who had set off two minutes ahead of him. He didn’t look at him as he sped past. It was only the second time trial of his career, and the longest. The time trial win went to Luciano Armani of Italy, while Anquetil triumphed in the overall standings, but fourth behind the Frenchman was a promising performance.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 5