As one writer put it, the marriage ‘fixed the linguistic impression of Merckxism for good. Because he said “oui” instead of “ya” the Brabançon would never be totally accepted by the Flandrians.’ Merckx received aggressive letters after the news was revealed; the question did not go away: when he met the King in 1970, rather than what he said to the monarch he was asked in what language they had been talking. Similarly, there were calls from the Flandrian media, when he won the 1969 Tour, for Flemish fans to cheer him on in Flemish rather than French. ‘The most astonishing example of the linguistic worry came with the birth of Sabrina. She should not have been called Sabrina. Claudine had chosen Laurence for a girl, Didier for a boy. But it was too French,’ wrote Marc Jeuniau. Both the Merckx children, Axel and Sabrina, have names which are neither Flemish nor French. The issue also arose – again through the papers – when Merckx’s children grew up: was he bringing up his daughter Sabrina to talk Flemish or French, asked journalists. Every time Eddy donated to charity, Claudine said, he had to do it in equal parts, one for Flanders, one for Wallonia.
Regional identity within cycling was stronger in the time of Merckx than it is now, not merely in Belgium, although there it was particularly pronounced. The extensive calendar meant that cyclists could race largely in their home areas, and the teams would have strong local identities, because there were so many cyclists of talent coming out of the various bits of Flanders that managers could pick riders from their region rather than a little further away. For example, one great with whom I discussed Flandrian identity felt that even he was not really accepted, although Flemish was his first language, merely because he came from East rather than West Flanders. In this world of clearly delineated identities, Merckx could not be pigeonholed, in the same way that his region was linguistically ambiguous, neither Wallonia nor Flanders. Asked at the age of twenty by an Italian journalist which of the two he was, his answer was emphatic: ‘Belgian. Belgian and nothing else.’
Merckx’s status as a non-Flandrian had always mattered, from the day he began to race a bike. Here, his parents’ move from the country to the city immediately after the war ended played a role. The area where he was raised was not as cycling mad as the working-class villages of Flanders were, each of them boasting at least one former champion within the population, with Meensel-Kiezegem being no exception. In contrast, the more middle-class population of the Chant d’Oiseau locale in Woluwe was interested in tennis, hockey, fencing – one suspects because cycling was seen as socially inferior – and perhaps this was another reason why Merckx’s mother was initially against him racing. In the long term it was probably better for him. As he said early on, only a handful of people outside his family followed his racing. There were no outpourings when he won a race. Instead, he clearly felt he had to fight to prove his right to be a cyclist in the face of his mother’s doubts.
Merckx has said that not having a supporters’ club such as those found across Flanders helped as well: no one ever told him he was doing well when he wasn’t. There was a small party for his win in the Belgian amateur championship in 1962, but nothing more. He received little unconditional praise. ‘Morally, I had to work things out for myself and that was an advantage in the end.’ He also lacked the financial support a supporters’ club might have given him in his early years – that in turn meant his only obligation was to his parents, and there was less need to repay debts. Merckx could concentrate on what he wanted to do: race, and win.
Moreover, his attitude to cycling was not parochial in the slightest. It did not begin and end with the Tour of Flanders: Merckx was taken to watch the Tour de France by his father as a child and his earliest goal was a gold medal in the Olympic Games. As a youth, he was not interested in the Classics, only the Tour de France. His early heroes, Stan Ockers and Jacques Anquetil, never won de Ronde. The Tour de France was his dream, and not the Tour of Flanders.
Throughout his career Merckx simultaneously embraced and endured the status of a Bruxellois. He was on the edge of Flandrian cycling but participated wholeheartedly in its greatest races and pulled cycling in Flanders upwards as he rose to world domination and others tried to match him. He earned respect, won many hearts and minds but was never completely integrated. He was within it but was not of it. ‘Brussels is both the capital of the kingdom and the capital of bilingualism,’ wrote Léon Zitrone. ‘A Bruxellois can become the symbol of the whole nation, not so much because he comes from the capital but because he can use both languages. Being from Brussels means you gain the favour of the entire nation.’
When Merckx began making a name for himself nationally, he had to fight for his place in the face of the Flandrians, for example when he struggled to get his place in the 1964 world amateur championship. Later, he had to overcome a pro-Flandrian bias in the papers of the time. ‘If you didn’t come from East or West Flanders you had to have a serious case if you wanted people to believe you were a star. There was a sort of “Flandrian reflex”,’ said one journalist. Belgian cycling was not short of stars, and Flandrian stars at that: a young lad from French-speaking Brussels didn’t get the media that excited. Having seen how the press dropped Van Looy at the end of his career, Merckx learned to be restrained in what he said and vigorous in what he did on the bike. The best response he could provide was to be seen on days such as 30 March 1969.
It was raining heavily in Ghent that day, but this was entirely in the order of things. The Tour of Flanders is not always rained on but it is an event that needs wet and cold to be truly epic and so it was for Merckx’s first victory in de Ronde. The rain poured, a wind howled out of the west. The race remains legendary. The day’s events hinged on a change in the course direction after a hundred kilometres, when the race reached Torhout after heading west from Ghent: there the gale changed from a pure headwind into a crosswind, favouring action at the head of the bunch. The hostilities were started by Frans Verbeeck, who epitomised the Flandrian professionals who lived for and through the April Classics. Merckx then took charge and the bunch split to bits with over 160 kilometres still to race. Only twenty-three riders survived the wind-lashed selection to make it into the front group, including four Italians – Gimondi, Franco Bitossi, Dancelli and Marino Basso. Merckx made his first move on the Oude Kwaremont, a narrow strip of windswept cobbles running through the fields above the town of Kluisbergen, up a hill that ran parallel with the newer main road. A puncture held him up, but he attacked again on the Kapelmuur – a one-in-four brute out of the town of Geraardsbergen to a hilltop chapel – where Gimondi and his countrymen kept him on the leash.
He kept on attacking and with about seventy kilometres remaining – before the race returned into the wind to finish in Gentbrugge, close to the start – he got clear, simply by pressing a little harder on the pedals. Rather than making an intentional, dramatic attack, he ratcheted up the pressure. The journalist Théo Mathy described the scene: ‘Going through the village of Tollembeek, after doing his turn at the front of the group, he gained a few bike lengths on the others. He moved across to the side of the road, turned round and assessed the situation. Then he went on. There were 70km left to the finish. It was raining and the gusts of wind were bending the trees. No matter.’ Merckx’s thinking was simple but typical of him: riding back to the finish into the headwind, it would be far easier for the other riders to hang on in his slipstream. That meant they had to be eliminated beforehand. In this version of the course – which has changed several times since then – there were no major climbs in the run-in to the finish. If the lead group remained together, it was by no means certain that he could beat Basso, who was particularly rapid in a sprint. During the slog to Gentbrugge, the time gaps stretched out to a ridiculous extent. Gimondi came in second, five minutes thirty-six seconds behind. The lead group was eight minutes back. Van Looy, now definitively yesterday’s Emperor, was a quarter of an hour off the pace.
Merckx’s status had changed since his world title and his Giro d’Italia win. He wa
s now expected to win everywhere he raced but the paper that sponsored the Tour of Flanders, Het Niewsblad, had speculated that maybe Merckx lacked that little something special it takes to win their race. There has always been a strong element of nostalgia to Flemish cycling, best expressed in the fact that ‘the Last of the Flandrians’ is an honorary title that has been bestowed several times, notably on Schotte and Museeuw. With this implicit concern about how the present matches up to the past, the question was clear: could the new, Bruxellois, champion match the Flandrian legends of yesteryear? Merckx said to Guillaume Michiels that he could answer his critics if the weather cooperated, and so he did, leaving the strongest cyclists of his generation floundering in his wake.
There were other statements that spring: Merckx had won Milan–San Remo for the third time in four years. That classicissima victory came at the end of a seventeen-day winning spree in which he took nine victories – the overall and three stages in both the Tour of the Levant in Spain and Paris–Nice – which would have been a more than satisfactory season for most professionals. He won in San Remo after a descent of the Poggio which was so insanely fast that no television or stills motorbike could keep pace with him: at the summit his advantage was a mere ten metres over a chase group; at the foot it was thirty seconds. ‘I thought he was going to kill himself,’ said Vincenzo Giacotto. Going downhill fast on a bike sounds simple to the outsider, but to do so that much faster than a chase group in the final miles of a major Classic is only possible if a cyclist is physically in the finest shape, so that he can sprint out of each hairpin in the biggest gear possible, and mentally has pitch-perfect reactions, to calculate each corner faultlessly. Merckx backed up victory in Flanders with another hugely dominant Classic win, in Liège–Bastogne–Liège, taken with a seventy-kilometre escape in pouring rain together with his teammate Vic Van Schil. The margin was eight minutes. There may have been shock at the emphatic nature of the win, but there can have been little surprise.
That Tour of Flanders was marked by one particularly celebrated episode, which marked another little step in Merckx’s emergence as a champion in his own right. Faema’s biggest signing over the winter of 1968–9 was not a cyclist, but a new team manager, Lomme Driessens. That completed the transformation of Faema from a mixed Italian–Belgian team to a largely Belgian squad. Vittorio Adorni left, and the number of Italian gregari dropped from thirteen out of twenty-six to seven out of twenty-four. That had effectively sealed the squad as being completely focused on Merckx, with one proviso: relations with the new manager were never easy. Driessens was unsurpassed as a self-publicist. His fame was based on his claims that he had managed Fausto Coppi, whereas in fact he just looked after Coppi’s Bianchi team only when they raced in Belgium. ‘Lomme’ was also nicknamed ‘Guillaume the liar’, ‘not a perjorative term in cycling, just a tribute to his ability to play his cards close to his chest,’ wrote Roger Bastide. Not long after Merckx had made his escape in the Tour of Flanders, Driessens drove up alongside in his Peugeot and asked him the question: what was he doing, had he gone mad? Merckx’s answer was short and to the point: ‘kiss my ass’.
Driessens’ appointment had been Van Buggenhout’s idea. It was his way of sorting out undercurrents of conflict between the Italian and Belgian elements within Faema, and, some claim, also a way of ‘selling’ Merckx to Flandrian cycling fans through Driessens’ big personality. Lomme had close links to the Flemish press, the idea being that he would smooth Merckx’s path with them. That had a side effect, however: Driessens tended to exclude the francophone media while sweet-talking the Flandrian writers. Driessens had made friends with Merckx during the 1967 Giro, when he was managing the delightfully named Romeo-Smiths team. None of their riders were up to the job, so he offered advice to Merckx on a daily basis, whether Merckx wanted it or not one suspects. But Merckx had little time for actors and he soon found out that Driessens was all mouth and no trousers.
Driessens’ rigid notion that his riders should race to a plan was at odds with Merckx’s view of competition as guerrilla warfare. In a race, Merckx was constantly ready to improvise, always looking for a chance to surprise his rivals. Merckx tended to attack, then ask Driessens if he should go on. Driessens usually had no option but to agree, telling Merckx what he wanted to hear, but – so it is now said – with trepidation at the thought that if Merckx cracked he would be held accountable.
This was the background to the now legendary incident at that Tour of Flanders: a new manager, not yet quite sure what his protégé was capable of, and well aware of the press opprobrium that would follow if he failed. Merckx broke away, opened a gap, but there were still over an hour and twenty minutes’ racing until he reached the finish. For most cyclists, this would have been a pure suicide move. On paper, nobody was capable of staying away alone for such a distance, into a powerful headwind, with a strong group chasing behind. The little exchange with Driessens followed, and the relationship never really worked out. In the summer of 1971 Driessens was looking for another job. Freddy Maertens would be his next protégé. The point was this: Merckx would run his teams in his own way, bringing in his own man, Bob Lelangue. In future, his team managers would never question his way of racing.
After San Remo in 1966 and Lavaredo in 1968, that day in Flanders was another landmark. Merckx’s identity as a Bruxellois was the more pronounced, and his struggle for acceptance among the Flandrian media all the harder, because he raced against an incredibly strong generation of Flandrian cyclists born at or just after the end of the Second World War: Van Looy, Eric Leman, Godefroot, Van Springel, Sercu, Maertens, De Vlaeminck, Johan De Muynck, Michel Pollentier, Ferdinand Bracke, Lucien Van Impe, along with a host of strong second stringers such as Verbeeck, André Dierickx, Ward Sels, Willy Planckaert and Marc De Meyer. The late 1960s and early 1970s were the high-water mark of Belgian cycling, which is still hankering after those golden years.
After Merckx had beaten the Flandrians on their home roads in the only race that truly mattered to them, and done it in such emphatic style, his dominance was no longer under discussion. The matter had been settled because of the huge number of world-class adversaries who had been left trailing over the last two years, with no idea how to respond. ‘Merckx is Van Looy plus Coppi’, said one team manager.
March the thirtieth 1969 also marked the end of Van Looy’s struggle to assert himself against the Bruxellois upstart, which had continued in Milan–San Remo a few weeks earlier when The Emperor initiated an early break to get away from Merckx. The rivalry with Van Looy has to be seen in the Flandrian context of incestuous enmity: this was a tightly knit little world composed of rival clans and teams and personal interests. ‘It was an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,’ as Godefroot recalled. ‘We would fight fit to burst for a win or an insignificant prime.’ It was only partly about money, more a battle for prestige and bragging rights in that milieu; within the borders of Flanders it all mattered intensely, while outside it was perhaps not accorded major significance.
A profile in Time magazine painted an evocative portrait of The Emperor, a man who lived only for his bike: ‘On those rare occasions when he is home, Van Looy is all work: before dawn each morning, he struggles out of bed, climbs on his bike and does his “daily 50” – a fifty-kilometre grind over the quiet roads around Herentals. He has little time for friends, even less for his fans. He smiles only under duress, refuses to sign autographs, pose for pictures or answer questions before a race. His vocation has deformed his body, leaving him with a bony chest and shoulders, arms that are stumpy and weak. He runs only with difficulty, and he cannot even walk very far without agonizing cramps.’
The rivalry between Van Looy and Merckx was not the stuff of Corinthian romance. Merckx would tell the story of how Van Looy would chase him down in a criterium when he attacked to take a prime, and then would sit on his wheel, saying, ‘you’re the greatest, you’ll have to do it all yourself you know’. He would then sprint past young Eddy for the prime
with a comment along the lines of ‘so, you only win when you’ve got ten teammates alongside you, is that it?’ Merckx’s explanation was that Van Looy had never got over the fact that he, Merckx, had left his team. ‘I’ve tried at least ten times to calm things down between us but each time he provokes a new argument. I’ve reached the end of my tether. I don’t talk to him any more.’ Van Looy is aware of this, and told me that if he clung to Merckx’s wheel it was because it was the obvious thing to do, the sensible tactic. ‘When I was the best guy, it was the same for me,’ he said.
In 1970 Merckx said of Van Looy, ‘I admire the champion, I like the man a lot less. The relations I’ve had with Rik leave me few good memories.’ Merckx cited a criterium, in 1968, on his home turf at Woluwe-Saint-Lambert, when Van Looy ‘played dead’ then outsprinted him. ‘A champion of his dimension should have stopped earlier, with more panache.’ The pair received an eight-day suspended ban (a slap on the wrist in essence) for negative racing after a criterium in 1969 when Van Looy held Merckx’s back wheel as if glued to it, and Merckx responded by slowing up so drastically that they were both lapped by the field. That evening, in another race, Merckx attacked out of every corner until Van Looy was dropped and humiliated.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 9