The 1968 test results were announced only after the Giro, and, with so many of the top riders implicated, that left the race with a sense of anticlimax. To avoid a repeat of this, the Giro organisers began using a mobile dope-testing laboratory sponsored by Hewlett-Packard to speed up the process of dope-testing in the 1969 event. It was a system that had not been validated, but the process had been accepted by all the team managers, apart from Merckx’s boss, Vincenzo Giacotto. Merckx’s sample was tested in that lab, which had been set up in the car park of the local police station. The first positive was apparently found at 4 a.m., the second test completed at 8 a.m. in the presence of a toxicologist, but, critically, without the Belgian being informed of the positive on the first sample.
The process was so full of holes that today it would not be contemplated for a second. The regulations stipulated that the rider should be informed of the first positive, then permitted to watch the second test with his lawyer, who could double check that the sample was sealed correctly before it was opened and tested. The second sample usually contained a small capsule holding a form that had been signed by the rider when he gave the sample. That meant that if he requested a second analysis, he could be certain it was his sample that was being tested in front of him and his lawyers. But to enable the ‘accelerated process’, the control sample at that year’s Giro didn’t contain that capsule and form. Without that safeguard, the process was just that little bit more open to abuse. Other objections were raised to the use of the mobile lab. There were questions over whether transporting the dope-testing equipment every day might affect its integrity, and whether it was appropriate for the personnel carrying out the dope-testing to be in daily contact with members of the race caravan due to the obvious risks of corruption and threats.
There was more than enough there for the conspiracy theorists, who felt that the sample had been tampered with or switched. In addition, it was likely that Merckx’s samples could be identified, although the testing process should have ensured complete anonymity. All the riders had to sign a register when they were tested, and the sample numbers were added to this. Merckx usually registered first, so his number could be identified by riders who signed after him, and by anyone who might be accompanying them. There are various theories about what actually happened. The most common is that Merckx was asked to let an Italian star win but, being Merckx, he simply didn’t take the question on board and kept on as usual. Not winning was alien to him. Merckx himself said, ‘they certainly didn’t want me to win in 1969. I was offered money which I refused and two days later I was positive.’ The person who offered him the money was not Gimondi, who went on to win the Giro, but another rider. Merckx was certain it was a set-up. ‘I think the money that they wanted to give to me ended up being given to someone else [to set up the test]. I can’t see any other explanation.’
The obvious implication is that Merckx’s sample was spiked to avoid a repetition of Faema’s dominance of the previous year. There were other theories: a water bottle swap while Merckx and other riders were attending mass; a dope-control officer who was befuddled and confused Merckx’s sample with that of another rider. In truth, all bets were off, but the one consistent fact is that whether Merckx was set up or not, the whole affair appeared to him and much of the public to be seriously unjust, because Gimondi had been let off for an identical offence the year before. Hence the graffiti reading ‘Gimondi the thief’ which appeared on the roadside, hence the Italian writer Indro Montanelli writing in Il Corriere della Sera that he felt more Belgian than Italian amid hints at a conspiracy. Hence also Gimondi’s embarrassment when he was interviewed about the affair, and his refusal to wear the pink jersey the following morning. Ormezzano notes, however, that Merckx’s big rival – the man who had most to profit from the leader’s ‘positive’ – did not take advantage. ‘I felt he behaved well, he didn’t try to profit from the incident by saying that Merckx was a cheat or anything of that kind.’
The resulting media storm was almost on the scale of a diplomatic incident between Italy and Belgium. Merckx had the support of the Belgian government which issued a statement saying that the accusations ‘were without foundation’ and that Merckx was the ‘sacrificial victim of a criminal plot’. After the scandal Claudine Merckx estimated that her husband received 10,000 letters of support. It took until the end of the Tour de France to answer them all, and she had to call on the help of her sister, a neighbour and her five children, with some opening the letters, others writing the addresses, and the rest sticking on the stamps.
The rules stipulated Merckx should be banned for a month, which would have made it impossible for him to start the Tour, which began on 2 July, but on 14 June an extraordinary meeting in Brussels of professional cycling’s governing body, the FICP, cleared him on the basis of ‘benefit of doubt’. That was a double-edged sword: the statement was ambiguous, as it simultaneously backed the work of the doctors and accepted that the Italian Federation had the right to suspend Merckx, but at the same time said the chances were he was innocent ‘because of his irreproachable past and the dozens of controls he has been through’. Cynics might speculate that the fact that the Tour de France was due to visit Merckx’s home town of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre could have focused minds as well. Had the Belgian remained banned, the race would have been like the feast in Macbeth without Banquo.
The decision to clear him was not universally popular. Some professional riders threatened to strike. There were attacks in the press, with the French paper La Voix du Nord criticising the inconsistency. Adding to the confusion, the International Cycling Union – whose president was the Italian Adriano Rodoni – issued one statement supporting the dope-testing process, then another saying it was not valid under the rules. The fact is that at that time there were three accredited laboratories which were allowed to carry out drug tests within cycling: Paris, Ghent and Rome. Any test outside those three was irregular, making the entire Merckx ruling invalid. However, the FICP did not unambiguously clear Merckx on the grounds of incorrect procedure – as it should have done – probably because he might then have sued the Giro organisers. Merckx himself was not happy about the ‘benefit of the doubt’, on the grounds that it was ambiguous. ‘I didn’t take drugs, so there should be no doubt. They should have simply stated I was innocent,’ he said. More significantly, the FICP called for a complete overhaul of anti-doping measures and the upshot was the adoption of a suspended ban for a first drug offence.
The Giro went on, although it had little interest for most onlookers, who knew that Merckx would probably have won. ‘No one in Italy believed that Merckx was guilty, absolutely no one. Ninety per cent of people believed it was a trap,’ says Ormezzano. ‘Everyone was sure it was either a mistake or a set-up. The impression was that Merckx was the moral winner, but the race continued, and two days later, everything was forgotten.’ In Italy maybe. At his home in Belgium, Merckx cut himself off from the world. He did not touch his bike for fourteen days after the positive test, and he told Guillaume Michiels that he was going to give up cycling. His conviction today is that he was framed, because someone, somewhere, felt uncomfortable with his domination. Ormezzano feels the same. ‘I’m convinced it was sabotage. Many years afterwards, he told me he knew who put the substance in his bottle.’
The only person he talked to was the racing driver Jacky Ickx – the day after Ickx visited him he was seen to nip out on his bike for an hour. That evening he went down into his cellar-cum-workshop for the first time since the test to look at his bikes. He began ferocious sessions of motor-paced training with Michiels. He dragged his teammates out for 240-kilometre rides in the pouring rain. He started racing again on 18 June at the Criterium de Caen. On 23 June, Merckx won the kermis race in Ottignies, south of Brussels, where one group of fans spat at him, whistled at him and shouted that he was a drug-taker.
‘Savona’ was the moment when Merckx lost his innocence, when the sport that gave him fulfilment and deep joy revealed a d
arker and more sinister side. The blow was all the more cruel because of that curiously innocent side to his cycling. In many ways he had not changed a great deal from the teenager who woke up after taking his first victory and said to his mother ‘isn’t winning fun!’ For Jean Van Buggenhout he remained the small boy who couldn’t believe how good it felt to win. ‘He has some love of money, because you have to count your pennies in this day and age, but the way he talks each day is like an amateur. A winner’s bouquet makes him euphoric even if he doesn’t show it and defeat makes him grind his teeth. This juvenility in his feelings leads him to maintain the discipline of an athlete, day to day, without any great effort. He can train winter and summer and keep his mind on the task in hand without ever feeling mentally tired.’
Merckx said once that what drove him was ‘dreaming. It was stronger than me. I was a slave to it. There was no reasoning involved.’ All kids dream of winning. What set Merckx apart from his contemporaries was the totality of his involvement, a childlike quality – his ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of all else. ‘He always kept a beginner’s mentality,’ noted one contemporary, the 1977 Giro winner Johan De Muynck. ‘On the bike, he had the enthusiasm of a child, which used to surprise most of his colleagues, who saw things in a more routine way. He’s like a boy who is suddenly discovering the pleasure of tobogganing. Merckx just kept playing.’ Merckx never grew up in the sense that, over his career, he never thought about the long-term consequences of his actions, something his wife Claudine observed. ‘He would do something simply because he felt he should. He’s always had a spontaneity to him which defies logic.’
Savona was the moment when the big kids in the playground ruined the dream. ‘Eddy is still the same man with the same faults and the same qualities but this scandal made him realise what life was,’ said Jean Van Buggenhout. ‘He was made brutally aware that life is not a bed of roses. Up to then, everything had worked for him. The episode made him more sceptical, less trusting, harder.’ As Marc Jeuniau wrote, ‘what was most beautiful and most pure in Eddy – his naiveté – had disappeared for good’. Savona was in a different, harsher register to the shenanigans before the 1964 world’s, or the machinations of senior pros such as Van Looy and Simpson: this was public humiliation, daylight robbery. Merckx was a man who liked things to be fair and the biggest injustice of that June was that he could not be formally proven guilty or innocent. There was no closure. It was not something he could forget. Inevitably, he became less trusting. Equally inevitably, he wanted to prove himself again. It was a potent mix.
‘The career of Eddy Merckx is divided,’ wrote Théo Mathy, ‘between the joy of winning for the pleasure of being the best, and the drive to dominate, to mete out a kind of personal justice, like the ancient law of talion [the Babylonian notion that the punishment for a crime should be equal to the offence] adapted to modern sport.’ But between the two extremes came something else: the desire for flight preceding the need to fight. Panic followed by regrouping and vengeance.
Merckx was not phlegmatic. He did not have a peasant’s fatalism. Compared to the tough upbringings of Coppi, Anquetil, or Van Steenbergen – who was rolling cigars at the age of ten to bring in a few francs to the family – he had been spoilt. He had had the support of his parents, of Vervaecke and Michiels. He had been given the option of school or cycling, with his mother there to cross swords with the Belgian Federation when he was excluded from the world championships. As a result, in adversity, he would always initially have the urge to flee, to give up cycling, to go home. Then he would react.
Savona coloured the whole of the 1969 Tour, which Merckx rode as if brimful of confidence, although actually the opposite was the case. He felt obliged to win everything in his way, to carve out the biggest possible advantage, to make absolutely certain that nothing could happen to rob him of the win he had wanted for so long. But he made no bones about having another reason to show his strength: he wanted to show he was clean by being tested every day, and to erase the Giro from people’s minds.
Ironically, however, Savona may have helped in another sense, one which would never have occurred to Merckx at the time. With his form already close to a peak, Merckx was forced to have an unaccustomed rest, taking two weeks out of training and sixteen days away from racing. He raced only five times in the twenty-six days before the Tour started. For him this was, briefly, an incredibly light programme: it looks similar to the ‘tapering’ a modern-day cyclist would do before a major competition. For once in his career, Merckx was actually rested at the start of a major Tour, with no travelling or racing for a decent period during the heart of the season. The result was to be a display of pure strength, in a register that cycling had never seen before and has not seen since.
1 There are reports that a private test was carried out that day, in the presence of Ormezzano and two other journalists. The Italian’s version of events clearly suggests such a test never happened.
REVOLUTIONARY MERCKXISM
IN LATE JULY 1969, a new joke began to do the rounds in cycling circles. It ran like this: Felice Gimondi and Raymond Poulidor were fined fifty francs for taking a tow from a lorry up the Col du Tourmalet. But what about Eddy Merckx? He was towing the lorry.
The point where Merckx went from being merely superhuman to borderline supernatural came close to the top of the Tourmalet on 15 July 1969, and there was no lorry involved. The mystery started when Merckx was seen fiddling with his gears. Initially his rivals thought he had a problem but actually he was preparing to change gear. On a mountain such as the Tourmalet, the cyclist will use a low gear, with a chainring of 39 or 41 teeth, a sprocket on the back wheel of 21 or 23. Merckx was shifting to 53×17. That is a massive gear for a mountain-top sprint. For a motor vehicle, it would be like first gear versus fourth.
His teammate Martin Van Den Bossche, a classic climber with lanky build, long legs and slight shoulders, moved a little way ahead: he had asked his leader if he could be permitted to take the prestigious prize on the summit, but Merckx was not having it. Two days before, Van Den Bossche had let it be known that he would be leaving the team to ride for Molteni and Merckx was in no mood to do him favours. He sprinted past his teammate for the summit and began the descent on his own, with the rest of the field initially a few seconds behind. He admitted that the notion of catching Van Den Bossche, nipping past him at the top, then dropping him on the descent, was too much to resist. There was a tactical consideration as well; descending on his own would reduce the risk of a crash or a mechanical problem. Merckx was, however, ‘certain that once I hit the flat I would be caught’.
He had a forty-five-second lead – relatively insubstantial – at the foot of the steep descent which ends with a dead straight section to the town of Luz-Saint-Sauveur, which he would have hit at one hundred kilometres per hour. On the valley road afterwards, he eased up and ate as he rode through the ravitaillement (feeding station) at Argelès-Gazost. His directeur sportif, Lomme Driessens, told him to keep something in reserve, so he slowed down, but the lead group still had not caught up. ‘Turning round, he felt how ridiculous waiting would be, what a loss of dignity,’ wrote Jacques Goddet. ‘He began riding hard, so that at the very least there would be no stain on this Tour de France. The others would surely join him but at least it would feel like a race.’
He had a minute’s lead at the foot of the Col du Soulor, a ten-mile series of twists and turns that leads on to the still higher Col de l’Aubisque: after that he upped the ante, and extended his lead to five minutes at the summit. ‘On this torrid day, Merckx was fresh, not just physically, but mentally,’ wrote Léon Zitrone in Merckx, La Rage de Vaincre. ‘He took, out of the front pocket of his yellow jersey, a small piece of card on which he had stuck the “stage profile” from the morning’s newspaper. He studied it closely and read a kilometre post on the left of the road. A smile crossed his lips briefly: it was obvious to him: soon he would tackle the foot of the Aubisque.’
After
the Aubisque – which follows the Soulor, on the opposite side of the plateau – seventy-five kilometres remained to the finish in the ‘new town’ of Mourenx and Merckx had eight minutes’ lead. From then on, the stage might have seemed like a procession, but it was not that simple. His team car broke down, which meant that Driessens had to hitch a lift in a press car, taking a couple of spare wheels with him (this is why in some accounts Driessens is said not to have been there to watch Merckx doing the ride – he was there, but the highly visible Faema car was not). What sounds like one of the most straightforward stage wins in the Tour was anything but: Merckx got hypoglycaemia at Laruns, fifty-six kilometres from the finish, losing two minutes in just sixteen kilometres. Suddenly, his strength ran out. His style was no longer smooth. He was sweating heavily. He did not panic, however, merely steadying his pace so that he could eat, before going on. Later he described being in pain, all over his body, during the last twenty kilometres.
It was an epic that called for absolute commitment over more than four hours. During escapes like the one to Mourenx, he told me, he felt something of what the Irish star Stephen Roche described as ‘the joy of the exploit’ – the feeling of euphoria at the knowledge he was putting something special into the history books – but tempered with the need to keep his head, ‘concentration on the race, giving yourself utterly, thinking that your adversaries mustn’t catch up, thinking about getting to the line first. You get pleasure because you have proof that you have worked well. All the effort and sacrifice has been rewarded. You suffer but at the same time there is a sort of joy.’
‘I hope I have done enough now for you to consider me a worthy winner,’ he said afterwards to the journalists. They were as hyperbolic as might have been expected. ‘MERCKXISSIMO’ was the celebrated headline over Goddet’s story the next morning, while the French writer Antoine Blondin described Mourenx as ‘one of the most convincing attempts at world domination that I’ve ever seen imposed on cycling’. Merckx, he wrote, ‘is going to sleep in the purple cradle where living Gods are born’. For the also-rans such as Herman Van Springel, getting to Mourenx was merely about ‘hanging on as best I could’. The film-maker Jørgen Leth, who would immortalise Merckx in Stars and Watercarriers, described the stage as ‘extraordinary. He outclassed the others but was testing himself to an enormous degree as well. Pride was his dominant characteristic, so he was doing far more than he needed to do to win.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 11