The most important event of all that spring as far as Merckx’s long-term future was concerned was not a race. It was a meeting in the Italian ski resort of Cervinia between the Belgian and a small delegation of Italians including Enrico Giacotto, briefly Fausto Coppi’s manager at the Carpano team and now the manager at Faema, and the late Nino Defilippis, an ex-cyclist of some quality who had raced for Giacotto. ‘He wanted my advice,’ recalled Defilippis in his memoirs. ‘The idea was to get Merckx riding for an Italian team. At that time all the critics considered that he was a new Van Looy, a great champion for the Classics, but an unknown quantity for stage races. Giacotto wanted to see him climbing, have a good look at him, see what he was worth.’
‘He was stunning, the power he showed, the way he took the curves, the way he pedalled. Cervinia is not an easy climb, but I remember that as he got off his bike he looked at me and asked where it ranked among the great Alpine climbs. It was his way of showing how fresh he felt. I took Giacotto on one side and asked if they had a pen and a bit of card, anything, so that we could make this lad sign a contract for life, with no questions over figures, whatever he wanted. He was a prodigy. And as it turned out, Giacotto didn’t let him get away.’
Giacotto was not the only manager looking for Merckx’s services: Geminiani and Bic were again on the hunt. As Geminiani recalled it, he noticed after that Milan–San Remo that Merckx was not happy at Peugeot, and was aware that Bic were looking for a replacement for Anquetil. The biro company did not feel that Merckx was worth the 25,000 French francs’ asking price, and opted to hire the Dutchman Jan Janssen, then a more established talent. Geminiani got a chance to manage Merckx towards the end of his career, but forty-five years later he was still livid about missing out on him at this formative stage.
Faema was not a run-of-the-mill team. They had a longer history than most, having been founded in the early 1950s, when the man behind the Faema coffee-machine company, Carlo Valente, began putting money into sport, initially boxing, then exclusively cycling, with the former campionissimo Learco Guerra as direttore sportivo. By the time Defilippis and Giacotto fixed their sights on Merckx, Faema’s teams had been led by a series of greats: Federico Bahamontes, Charly Gaul – who raced in the distinctive diamond-logoed jersey of the Faema offshoot EMI – Hugo Koblet and, most famously, Van Looy, Merckx’s old boss at Solo. Giacotto was legendary as well: his way of working was to profess no knowledge of cycling tactics, ask his riders for their thoughts, then do as he felt best. ‘He was ahead of his time, a manager who believed in speaking to his riders as professional men, where in the past they had been treated like peasants,’ one writer of the time told me. He sought out the best hotels for his team, although there was a condition: he was famed as a chainsmoker who would occasionally go to bed with a cigarette in his mouth, fall asleep and set the sheets alight, so he would scout out hotels that had insurance for that eventuality. Lung cancer was to bring an early end to his life.
Valente was a man of huge ambition, one of the first to manufacture the espresso machines that are ubiquitous in Italian bars, then branching out into white goods of every other kind: fridges, ice cream makers, fans, toasters, fruit crushers. Faema had an annual publicity budget of about fifty million lire, of which two-thirds went on traditional advertising, with some sixteen million going on the cycling team. As Valente’s son Paolo later explained, they didn’t use Merckx and company to sell coffee machines directly: it was pure PR. ‘Cycling is close to the people, close to our public, and we want to make them feel good, all the time. Faema’s cyclists build the prestige of our company name through their exploits on the road. They uphold an image, a wave of affection for the Faema name throughout Italy, and abroad. Merckx is not a sandwich-boardman. He is a standard-bearer.’
A possible employer from Italy with a colossal budget waiting in the wings and a provisional contract in his pocket meant there was an additional edge to the Giro d’Italia of 1967 for Merckx. It was his first experience of a three-week stage race, and it was also a showcase for his talent on the home territory of his potential new bosses. For a twenty-two-year-old, who was relatively immature, the race was promising enough. There were two stage wins, one at the mountain-top finish at Blockhaus de la Maiela, 2005 metres above sea level, where he attacked to win from Italo Zilioli, the nearly man of 1960s Italian cycling. Given that he had wanted to use the Giro as a way of testing his ability in the mountains, that was encouraging. Another victory followed forty-eight hours later, in a bunch sprint at Lido degli Estensi, which pleased him even more. He rose as high as third overall, but faded towards the end for ninth: this was more than excusable. That Giro was contested amid rain and snow in the Dolomites. Having hung on to the front runners in the second Dolomite stage to Tirano, in heavy rain – a stage when all bar thirty-one of the field finished outside the time limit – Merckx struggled the next day en route to Trento, suffering from the beginnings of flu and the legacy of a heavy crash.
The Giro gave Merckx belief that he would win a major Tour ‘someday’. It was also enough to spark off abortive attempts to get the Belgian starlet into the Tour de France. In mid-June there were reports that an agreement had been reached to enter a second Belgian squad in the Tour – contested that year by national teams – on condition that Merckx started. He would, it was said, only have to race the early stages through Belgium; the money was being found by a group of Belgian industrialists. The plan came as news to Merckx – who first knew about it when he picked up a paper in his local petrol station – and he wisely resisted. Instead, he raced. A lot. Between 7 August and 30 September 1967, for example, he was on the start line thirty-five times. Midway through that exhausting spell, however, there were two major developments.
On 2 September, Merckx set his course for the next ten years, signing a contract for 400,000 Belgian francs with Faema the night before the world road race championships in Heerlen, Holland. It was three times the salary he was earning at Peugeot and it set the tone: until the end of 1976 Merckx’s sponsors were to be Italian and his teams would have a strong, if fluctuating, Italian element.
Merckx’s move to Faema was not financial, however, but strategic. It appears that if there was a disagreement with Peugeot, it was over a fairly insignificant sum. The key issue was this: Merckx’s experiences at Solo and Peugeot had persuaded him that he needed to be the undisputed leader of his team. At Peugeot, Gaston Plaud and the men above him in the cycle company were never going to let that happen. Peugeot was a team that dated back to the start of cycle racing and had a strict philosophy. There was no question that Merckx would receive team support when he needed it; it was just that Plaud and his bosses wanted freedom for others within the team. For Merckx, there was also the fear that in a French team any emerging French star would tend to be given precedence. As far as Peugeot were concerned, they had just won the Tour de France with Roger Pingeon, so why build a team around a Belgian, however talented he might be? Additionally, building the team around Merckx would mean hiring Belgians and firing French riders, which would be disastrous public relations.
In Italy, on the other hand, there was a tradition of having teams built around a single campione – of any nationality – with the best example Coppi’s team, Bianchi, where outstandingly talented riders would be hired solely to help the leader. The Faema manager Giacotto had cut his teeth by setting up the Carpano–Coppi team in 1957, so he had seen the campione system first-hand. He was also used to working with foreign campioni within Italian teams, as by 1957 Coppi was fading and the Belgian Fred de Bruyne was actually the one who brought in the Carpano–Coppi team’s results.
In the years after Coppi and Gino Bartali, Italy had become the place where professional cyclists were best rewarded and the best riders could obtain the best back-up. Peugeot, on the other hand, had its shambolic side as Simpson and Godefroot both observed, with claims that Plaud was more interested in glad-handing the company bigwigs than in running the team day-to-day. Merckx him
self said: ‘I bought everything myself at Peugeot: wheels, tyres … It was no coincidence that all the best riders of the time wanted to race in Italy. The teams were properly organised, had structure, and medical back-up.’ The contrast with Belgian teams was ‘day and night,’ sighs Godefroot. ‘Travel, clothes, food, equipment. It goes back to the days of Coppi, when teams like Ignis, Faema, Carpano were set up with better finances, and that made the difference.’ Belgian teams, even such outwardly imposing units as Flandria, were more worried about shaving off a few francs in travel expenses than saving time flying rather than driving, or spending time training in the warmth of the French Riviera.
With that contract in his pocket, Merckx moved seamlessly on towards supremacy. One of his biggest fears after taking the world amateur road race championship in 1964 had been that few cyclists won the amateur title and moved on to successful professional careers. The day after he settled his future, that fear was consigned to the past. To avoid conflict in the Belgian team at the world championships that year, the Belgian selectors had ruled out Van Looy and Godefroot on the grounds that they might ride against Merckx. Even so, hedging their bets, the selectors were unwilling to put the whole team at the youngster’s service. The same rumours had surfaced about his ‘heart problems’ as in 1964, and a heavy crash at the Belgian championship (held that year on 31 July, five weeks before the world’s) had left him concussed for several days.
Each of the team was invited to a pre-race meeting, to state openly what his form was and what his intentions were. The upshot was that the Belgians had four leaders, but only nominally: Guido Reybroeck, Daniel Van Ryckegehm and Josef Boons were not of Merckx’s ability, although they were all older and Boons was the national champion. There were four domestiques – Merckx was allotted Willy Monty as his personal assistant with the rest dividing their attention between the other leaders – and a 25,000 Belgian francs’ prime for each of the team if they won, which was less than in the days when Van Looy led the world’s team. Critically, each of the team agreed to work for whoever was in the best position, and not to race against each other.
The race itself was bizarre. Traditionally, the world championship builds to a climax. The opening laps see a waiting game, the pace increases lap by lap, and the final few circuits are decisive as the distance tells. In Heerlen, on the other hand, there was an early move from the Italian Gianni Motta, winner of the previous year’s Giro d’Italia, who attacked on the first of the ten laps. The attack decided the race. Merckx, Ramón Sáez – a burly Spanish sprinter nicknamed ‘Tarzan’ – and two others went with Motta; Merckx had been warned to hold fire, but felt the Italian was worth taking seriously. Plus, being in front guaranteed him the support of his teammates, who would be forced to mark any chasers. The key moment in the race came when the Dutch team leader Jan Janssen bridged to the break with the help of his teammate Raymond Van der Vleuten. Merckx and Motta decided not to push on to keep Janssen at bay, after which the quintet were able to forge ahead with the Dutch team blocking along with the Belgians and Italians. In the final sprint Van der Vleuten led out, Merckx countered, then led in his turn, worrying about what Janssen had left in the tank – he turned twice to look at the Dutchman as he launched the sprint – but he had enough to hold on as Janssen and Sáez came back at him, with barely a wheel between the trio at the line. It was a little piece of history: only two cyclists before him had worn the rainbow stripes as world amateur and professional road champion, his fellow countryman Jean Aerts (1927 and 1935) and the Swiss Hans Knecht (1938 and 1946).
Merckx’s world title and three Classic wins notwithstanding – at an age when most of the greats had barely begun winning – the Peugeot manager Gaston Plaud did not believe his rider had had the perfect season. The Frenchman felt his protégé had been too ready to compromise success on the road by accepting lucrative contracts to race on the track. At the end of the season, Plaud lamented that Merckx had not won the Giro di Lombardia and Tour of Flanders because he had compromised his preparation by track racing. ‘It’s as sure as two and two make four: he has missed out on the most amazing season imaginable. Add up what he has won and what he should have won, and tell me Eddy has not missed out on a unique chance to go far better than any of the greats managed at the height of their careers. I hope he has the chance to repeat the same combination of favourable circumstances that will enable him to have the glorious season that he didn’t manage to have this year. But I doubt if it’s possible. You can’t have it twice in one lifetime.’
Merckx continued racing into early November, with the last victories of the year coming in the traditional Flandrian season closer at Putte-Kapellen, the motor-paced Criterium des As in Paris, and the Baracchi Trophy two-man time trial in Italy, where he was paired with his Peugeot teammate, the newly crowned Hour Record holder Ferdinand Bracke. After that there was more unfinished business to attend to. On 5 December, Merckx married Claudine Acou, daughter of the national trainer, Lucien. The relationship had taken a while to develop. Being a cyclist left little time for going out; and, as Claudine put it, her parents were strict and she was ‘a serious daughter from a good family’.
Their relationship was, not surprisingly, measured out in bike races. They had begun going out around the time Eddy turned professional, in April 1965, and the marriage proposal – Eddy asked her father – was made at a track meeting, between races, so that there was little room for discussion. There was pressure from Jules Merckx to delay the marriage but Claudine insisted: now or never. After the marriage, she devoted her life to supporting her husband and bringing up their two children. Much of the organisation of The Cannibal’s career would be down to this strong-minded, strong-faced lady. Claudine would answer fan mail, filter out the journalists, cook his meals and deal with his moods. She seemed capable of handling any situation, be it escorting her husband home after a brutal crash, or dressing up to meet the king of Belgium, all of which would happen within two years of their marriage. She was far better at public relations than her husband, who could be painfully shy or withdrawn, and she was a better judge of character. Merckx was fortunate to encounter her early in his career, in the same way that he was lucky to find Michiels, Vervaecke and Van Buggenhout at the right time. Giacotto was another key influence and not just in cycling: it was the direttore sportivo who found a secluded hotel where Eddy and Claudine could stay for their honeymoon.
As the winter ended, Merckx began to tap into the reservoir of knowledge at Giacotto’s Faema, which could be traced back to the experiments that Fausto Coppi had made with diet and training and team structure in the 1940s and 1950s, and which had in turn filtered out to Louison Bobet, Raphael Geminiani and Jacques Anquetil. The team boasted a co-leader: the experienced Vittorio Adorni, eight years older than Merckx, his chosen roommate, and the man Giacotto intended to mentor the starlet as he turned from a Classics specialist into an all-rounder who could dominate stage races as well.
‘We spoke Italian and French,’ recalls Adorni, whom Merckx called – and still calls – professore. His task was to channel Merckx’s talent and physical strength. ‘There were things he had not thought about. They had a different approach in Belgium. They hardly ever thought about stage races, only Classics. Eddy was really strong, but didn’t have the tactical ability for a twenty-day stage race. Experience matters there: I had lost two Giri because of juvenile errors I’d made. I think he learned pretty much all he needed in one year, knowledge that had taken me eight years to pick up. He was esuberante, uninhibited, youthful, he wanted to get away, constantly: but in a stage race you have to choose your moment. He had such a massive engine inside him, however, that he was easy to teach.’
With Faema, for the first time in his career, Merckx followed the custom that went back to Coppi, and attended the first pre-season training camp of his career. He changed his diet and his weight dropped to seventy-two kilos – the principal reason why suddenly he turned into a great climber. ‘We Belgian riders, the Flandr
ians, had a habit of eating en bon bourgeois, I’d say, perhaps too much [after the race], then in our [hotel] rooms we’d have biscuits, chocolate and so on. That means your body has to work too hard. And the Italians, especially Adorni, helped a lot in this area.’ The Faema squad for 1968 was half Italian, half Belgian, with the massively experienced and highly intelligent Adorni alongside the core of the great Merckx teams: Jos Spruyt, Roger Swerts, Martin Van den Bossche.
At the start of the 1968 season, Merckx made an immediate impression by winning a stage of the Tour of Sardinia by more than six minutes, after Adorni had told him to wait for the toughest day, a stage lashed by rain and snow. Seasoned followers of the sport felt he couldn’t possibly go on like this. ‘We found out later that this was Eddy Merckx’s way of racing and that he had the wherewithal to sustain such a prodigal use of energy, but at the time we had the right to think: he’s doing too much and will break his neck,’ recalled the French journalist Roger Bastide. Lack of restraint, followed by lack of results: the world champion abandoned Paris–Nice because of a knee injury, lost Milan–San Remo to Rudi Altig, was unable to match Walter Godefroot in the Tour of Flanders. Van Looy, who always had a weather eye on his apparent successor, began saying to the press that it was time Merckx started to act like a leader.
Merckx, on the other hand, claimed that the rainbow jersey was making him an easy target. The fact was that all the Belgians, led by Van Looy, were racing against him, partly because he was riding for an Italian team and sponsor and it was obviously better for Belgian sponsors if any Belgian won, but also because it was the only way for anyone other than Merckx to win. But the twenty-two-year-old could afford to be patient. Paris–Roubaix turned Merckx’s early season around: no one could match him in a memorable race of elimination through punctures and crashes, with only forty-four riders making it to the finish. Merckx ended up with only Herman Van Springel for company and took the sprint.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 7