Still only in his twenty-third year, Merckx could not risk racing both the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in 1968. He might have wanted to tackle the French race, but in his first year representing an Italian sponsor the Giro was obligatory. The stage race lessons had begun before the start, when he turned up with three suitcases of kit and Adorni asked him ‘are you going on holiday to the Bahamas?’ Organising personal effects is a skill that helps save energy on a stage race: ‘you’re in small hotel rooms, two of you, only need personal stuff and two or three days’ kit – he had everything for three weeks. Most of it could go in the team van. We had a discussion about it, then we emptied the cases, and got them down to one.’ With his kit safely stowed in the team van, he landed two early stage wins: in Novara, where he embarrassed the sprinters by breaking away alone to win, and the next day in Aosta where he was asked by an RAI television reporter: ‘did you have it in mind to go for the win today?’ His answer was classic Merckx: ‘Why do you ask me that? Why do you think I’m here? To watch the others win?’ The man from Italian television was clearly unaware that Merckx ‘had it in mind’ to go for the win every time he raced.
As a result, Adorni had to rein him in. ‘In Novara, the gruppo was all together, he attacked with a kilometre to go, won the stage, and took the maglia rosa. I said to him “but didn’t we agree we would hold back?” He said he wanted to test the field a bit, so I then said we would have to let someone else take the jersey, to take the pressure off. I said “if you want to win the Giro, you have to be tranquillo.” He was all youthful exuberance: it wasn’t easy to hold him back. On every climb he wanted to attack, he was constantly asking if it was a good moment to go for it.’
At the start of the stage to Lavaredo, eleven days in, the race was still open. The pink jersey was on the shoulders of Michele Dancelli, who had finished fourth to Merckx in the 1966 Milan–San Remo. He was a strong one-day racer, but an average climber who would clearly struggle once the race hit the Dolomites. Merckx was lying second, two minutes behind Dancelli, and no one had yet emerged from among the favourites – Merckx, Gimondi, Adorni, Gianni Motta, Italo Zilioli – so the time was ripe for one of the little group to make a statement of intent. ‘It was raining at the start, it was a long stage, two hundred and fifty kilometres if I remember rightly,’ says Adorni. ‘Una tappa mitica’. A stage of legend.
By the penultimate climb, the Passo Tre Croce, a six-strong group looked set to fight out the stage, as they had a ten-minute lead. Merckx was chafing at the bit, as usual. The general feeling was that Gimondi would order his team to race hard from the off, in order to pre-empt an attack from the Belgian. Merckx wanted to get his response in first but Adorni warned him to wait. ‘He kept saying, “we will never get that move back”, but I would say “wait, it’s not the moment to declare war”. He attacked, two climbs from the finish, and got away. I asked the direttore sportivo to go and stop him, and he said to me “what if he says no?” I answered “if need be, run him off the road. Just stop him!”’ There was a difference of opinion, and eventually Merckx stopped, pretending to change a wheel so that it did not seem he had slowed down deliberately. ‘On the Tre Croce, he looked at me, I said “attack”, Gimondi was on his wheel and cracked.’ Then Adorni escaped in his turn, to link up with the Belgian. Not long afterwards, as the effort of catching Merckx told on him, the Italian said his leader should ride his own race. ‘I am a cyclist, not a motorbike,’ he said after the finish.
What took place that afternoon high above Cortina d’Ampezzo was essentially a handicap race, with Merckx carving his way through the riders spread out in front of him up the climb, passing the lesser lights as if they were standing. Both the groups, break and bunch, were in pieces. Giancarlo Polidori was the last man to fall, two kilometres from the finish line.
The images from Lavaredo are iconic: Merckx, bare-armed, barely visible through the driving snowflakes, several centimetres of snow on the roadsides, the people at the finish wrapped in macs and capes. He crossed the line, pushed away a few of the people attempting to help him stay upright, then was wrapped in blankets, still strapped to his bike. Motta and Zilioli finished more than four minutes behind, Gimondi at six minutes – incredible gaps for a single mountain top finish. Gimondi, the defending champion, and the race favourite after his win that spring in the Tour of Spain, was seen later on Italian television in tears, apologising for having let down the public.
The parallels with Coppi, on Italian roads, were obvious and were duly made. The headlines the next day included ‘SUA MAJESTIA MERCKX’. Jean Bobet wrote: ‘He has revived and brought new honour to the concept of the all-round champion, which is refreshing for all of us. The last generation of champions was a generation of specialists. Van Looy in the Classics, Anquetil in stage races and time trials, Gaul in the mountains. Merckx is a champion on winter indoor tracks, in Paris–Roubaix and the Tour de France.’ Bobet praised Merckx’s wisdom, characterising him as ‘mature, grounded, thought through, and owing a large part of his success to his organisational sense. He is not running a season but a career.’ Lest we forget, he was not yet twenty-three.
The rest of the Giro was a formality, as might have been expected after a killer blow of that kind. It was Belgium’s first victory in the Italian Tour, but that little piece of history was insignificant compared to the importance of the win for Merckx himself. Since turning professional he had won Milan–San Remo, the world championship and Paris–Roubaix. He had made a high-profile, big-money move to take sole leadership of one of the biggest teams in cycling, and had then delivered victory in the Giro d’Italia. Lavaredo was the moment of confirmation. ‘It was a logical win given how he had ridden, given his physical strength, but there he truly understood what he could do,’ says Adorni. ‘Before, in stage races he didn’t know what he was physically capable of. He didn’t know what would happen, what strength he had. Afterwards in the Giro and Tour he did what he wanted.’
It was a critical turning point for Merckx in another way: he lost his fear of the mountains. He realised that none of the climbers were strong enough to threaten him if he could ride at a sustained, high speed – they might gain a little bit of ground, but then he was sure to catch up. It was a rule that Coppi had followed, so too Anquetil, and one which Hinault and Indurain would follow in their time. Merckx also became aware that the effort of chasing down a climber on a mountain was no more demanding than chasing down a rival on the flat – and he recovered just as quickly. He now felt he could look after himself on all terrains. He was ready for the Tour de France.
At the world championships in Imola in northern Italy that summer, however, the team leadership issue came to the fore yet again. Unlike in 1967, Van Looy was allowed to ride for the Belgian team and he was determined to ride his own race, Merckx or no Merckx, defending champion or not. He felt excluded, he told me, when the Belgian team set off for the start without him, leaving him on his own in the hotel. The only option left to The Emperor was that chosen by Tom Simpson in Milan–San Remo the year before: an early, speculative escape. Van Looy took with him Adorni, who had a dual role: protecting both Italian team interests and those of Merckx, his trade team leader. The lead was around ten minutes with about sixty miles to cover to the finish when Adorni got rid of Van Looy. Merckx had no intention of setting the Belgian team to chase his trade teammate, so Adorni enjoyed a triumphant procession to victory, the high point of his career. The victory brought nothing to Faema, however, as Adorni transferred over the winter, to cash in on his rainbow jersey at another team.
Stage five of Merckx’s rapid progress to world domination was completed at the end of 1968, when he overcame Gimondi yet again, this time to win the Tour of Catalonia. Gimondi had been the precocious new star of Italian cycling: handsome and urbane, son of a postwoman and a lorry driver who initially could not even afford to buy him a bicycle. He was three years older than Merckx and, at twenty-six, approaching full physical maturity. On the bike, he was a styl
ist: spinning the pedals far more smoothly and with less impression of effort than the brutally physical Merckx. Watching him ride, the purists purred.
Their careers had run parallel since he won the Brussels– Alsemberg amateur classic ahead of Merckx in 1963. In 1964 Merckx won the world amateur road race championship with Gimondi fifth. At the Olympic Games, Gimondi had been responsible for Merckx being caught after a late attack. Unlike Merckx, the Italian had broken through immediately he turned professional in 1965. That year, he became one of the youngest ever Tour de France winners, and he added the Tour of Spain and Tour of Italy in the following two seasons, plus Paris– Roubaix and the Giro di Lombardia. It was all enough for the Italian media to crown him as the obvious successor to their late lamented darling Fausto Coppi.
Suddenly, however, Gimondi was confronted with a rival who was faster in every area, and who was considerably younger. After Merckx defeated him in the time trial in Catalonia the Italian lay awake that night in a state of torment, wondering what he had got wrong: had he made a poor tyre choice? Had he selected the wrong gears?
He said later he felt that his fate was sealed. ‘I had had a vertiginous rise and suddenly I had to be happy winning far less. I can’t say I hated him. It was tough. I had trouble adapting to the problem he set me because all he wanted to do was win. That was all. I had to change my mindset. There were a couple of years when it was very hard to get used to. I had to begin again from nothing, take the initiative less in a race because when he was there it was hard to get a grip on things.’ While Godefroot, and later Roger De Vlaeminck at least managed to cling on to the idea that they might stand a chance against Merckx in the Classics, Gimondi seemed broken. Between 1968 and 1972 he would not beat Merckx in any head-to-head confrontation in a major race.
The year 1968 had marked the point when Merckx gained such a psychological hold that most of his rivals had no option but to wait for him to make his move and then see if they could hang on, and if so, for how long. COMINCIA IL CICLISMO – cycling starts here – ran one headline after Lavaredo, and it was true. A new era had begun. The Cannibal had been unleashed.
OUI OR YA?
THE EDDY MERCKX METRO station lies on the outer reaches of the Brussels underground, the Bruxellois equivalent of Cockfosters or Alperton. Line five crosses the Belgian capital from east to west, a modern, airy mass-transit system. The Merckx station, penultimate stop on the south-western branch, is bizarrely understated given that it is named after the country’s leading sportsman. You can leave by the north exit without even noticing the tiny display that commemorates the great cyclist, although when you come back through the south exit you can’t miss it: the small glass case on the platform, with a track bike, a section of the wooden boards from a cycling track and a handful of photographs. And that’s it. Other than the Merckx display, there is a very fine Magritte-style surrealist mural – which holds the attention for far longer than the Merckx artefacts – and, outside, a large stand for supermarket trolleys.
Forty miles away in Oudenaarde the travelling cycling fan gets a very different experience indeed. The Tour of Flanders museum stands in a brand new building opposite the vast church just outside the main square. Up top is a fine café and a shop crammed with memorabilia, while the basement is devoted to a huge display that celebrates the great race that has crisscrossed the area since 1913 and the men who have forged its history. There are the obligatory woollen jerseys, vintage bikes and fading race programmes, a glitzy film that underlines the connection between Flandrian cycling and the area’s strong Catholic tradition, but most amusing is the exposition of what it means to be a Flandrian cyclist. Homo flandriensis is epitomised by Briek Schotte, a professional for twenty seasons and a double winner of the Ronde van Vlaanderen. It is Schotte who is the model for the statue De Flandrien, in his hometown of Kanegem, a statue unveiled by the Flemish minister of culture. The picture of Schotte bent over his bike on the museum wall is accompanied by a list of attributes of the Flandrian cyclist. It is only partly tongue in cheek: races best in foul weather, rides his bike until he can’t remember the name of his parish, silent and never complains, physically strong and persevering, inexhaustible, best as an underdog. Plus, most critically: comes from East or West Flanders.
Regional identity lies at the core of this race and the entire cycling culture that is built around it. They are so closely entwined that it is impossible to say whether the race stems from the culture or the identity comes from the race. The founder of de Ronde, Karel Van Wijnendaele, ‘linked the sporting battle of “his” Flandrians to the quest for a more self-aware Flanders’ says the museum literature. He also wrote a best-selling book that underpinned this cycling subculture: Het Rijke Vlaamse Wielerleven (The Realm of Flemish Cycling Life). Hidden among the panels on the walls is a rather smug one which underlines that this whole race and the cycling culture that goes with it is about separateness, the sense of difference. The panel deals with how cyclists from Wallonia, Belgium’s French-speaking region, have fared over the years in the Ronde. It describes a single victory and a few podium places, and points out that Van Wijnendaele was not above Flandrianising the names of the rare Walloons who made it on to the podium, so that they fitted better into the race’s identity – Karel for Charles, for example. Elsewhere, there is little about the hat-trick scored by the Italian Fiorenzo Magni between 1949 and 1951. This is a happily chauvinist, inward-looking institution.
One parallel for Flanders’ place in cycling would be rugby and South Wales. In both sports and regions, wrote Geoffrey Nicholson, ‘a people who feel themselves exploited and outsmarted have come to use sport as a means of demanding recognition of their worth and separate identity’. In a region of ‘industrial grime and domestic spit and polish,’ as Nicholson wrote, Flandrian cycling culture is one of stern tradition, handed down through generations. There are many cases of brothers being professional cyclists, of fathers, sons, grandsons. It is a world of Catholicism, big families, unswerving loyalty to one’s birthplace and the language. Writing about Roger De Vlaeminck, the English humorist Harry Pearson was only partly joking when he said: ‘He speaks Italian, a bit of English, a smattering of Spanish, but he regards French as the language of the enemy.’
Outsiders can be co-opted as Flandrians if they come here and live and breathe cycling – the Australians Scott Sunderland and Phil Anderson, the Russian Andrei Tchmil, Ireland’s Sean Kelly and the Americans Joe Parkin and Tyler Farrar are all examples – but cycling here is about localism. The Tour of Flanders itself is based in one small area: the hills between the rivers Schelde to the west and Dender to the east. Known as the Flemish Ardennes (as if to underline that hills are not restricted to the Ardennes of Wallonia) the hills are peppered with cobbled lanes with legendary names: de Oude Kwaremont, Patersberg, Koppenberg and, on the east side of the Dender valley, the Kapelmuur at Geraardsbergen. Each Flandrian cycling hero has his own supporters club, based in a local bar that in turn is likely to be run by a former professional.
The linguistic divide cannot be understated in cycling terms. Over the years, relatively few Belgian cyclists racing at the highest level have come from outside the Flandrian heartland. Merckx is one of those few, along with his henchman Jos Bruyère, a Walloon from the French-speaking area between Liège and the Dutch border. (Ferdinand Bracke, winner of the Tour of Spain in 1971, was brought up in Wallonia, but came from a Flandrian family.) Bruyère actually spoke Dutch as well, because he had a Dutch mother and that was what they spoke at home. ‘Eddy spoke both languages but the team spoke Flemish. There might be ten riders, one Walloon – me – eight Flemish riders and Eddy talking both [languages],’ he says. The Flemish riders did tend to look down on the Walloons – ‘they would say we weren’t courageous, because we were used to riding on hilly roads where the bunch would split, and it was said that the Walloons would race three years then quit.’
As for where Merckx fits into the linguistic and cultural divide, the answer is simp
le: he is on neither side, in the same way that the metro station that bears his name seems a slightly awkward add-on. Merckx was born into a Flemish-speaking family and has won de Ronde twice, both in epic circumstances, but that doesn’t make him a Flandrian. One great Flandrian snorted derisively when the question was put to him. Merckx merits respect as a double winner of de Ronde, and receives his due in the museum displays, but he still does not have the credentials of, say, Johan Museeuw – born Varsenare, near Brugge; a triple winner, the third time on a route that had been modified to take in his home village; the man who said winning de Ronde was more important than taking the yellow jersey in the Tour de France.
‘In Flanders, though personal style is much admired, local patriotism is the dominant passion,’ wrote Geoffrey Nicholson. ‘The rage for success breeds strong attachments and deep jealousies. To respect Merckx is to despise [Freddy] Maertens. Every man who fights his way to the top is avidly searched for the flaw in his character.’ So it was with Merckx, with elements of the Flandrian media at least. The importance of the linguistic identity is shown by the bizarre story of Merckx’s marriage vows, which became, briefly, a major national issue after the newly crowned world professional champion married in December 1967. The question concerned the choice of language for the ceremony. It became a matter of national debate, because the implication was – erroneously – that Merckx must have a preference for one Belgian language over the other. In fact he speaks neither perfectly, most probably because he spoke Flemish at home as a child, but was educated in French. Sometimes he mixed the two: he is most at his ease in Bruxellois dialect, which is primarily French, with its own adjuncts from Flemish. The Merckx marriage ceremony was in French, so the Flemish newspapers took that as a statement. In fact, Claudine happened to pick up a marriage certificate which was in French, and the custom at the time was that this meant the ceremony would be in French as well. The curé asked Merckx’s mother if she wanted anything said in Flemish, and she said it wasn’t worth it. It probably wasn’t but Flandrian sensitivities meant that it was taken the wrong way.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 8