That joke about the lorry has a serious side to it. The reaction the next day showed that the world of cycling simply did not know how to react. The length of the escape was colossal: about four hours’ constant effort on a hot afternoon, with no let-up, no assistance, no companions to shelter behind. Even before he got to the top of the Tourmalet – one of the longest and highest passes in the Pyrenees – he had conquered two lesser climbs, the Peyresourde and Aspin passes. These were not roads to be taken lightly.
He doubled his lead in the overall standings to sixteen minutes. It is this final fact that explains why Mourenx was so remarkable. Merckx had an eight-minute lead anyway. He had no need to do anything other than monitor the rest and progress to Paris. That set this afternoon apart from what he had already achieved: the epic escape to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo and the seventy-kilometre race into a headwind to win the Tour of Flanders had a logic to them. If he wanted to win on those days, that was what needed to be done. But at Mourenx, he could have sat tight and watched his rivals.
Road racing is a sport where calculation of physical effort matters immensely, and nowhere more so than in the Tour de France, cycling’s ultimate endurance event. The colossal physical demands of the race mean that the Tour lends itself to defensive riding. The classic way of riding it is to conserve energy as much as possible while not losing time, then make killer efforts when it matters. Once an advantage is gained, it is defended, and it is extended only if that can be done without incurring risk. Only the greatest champions of the sport – Fausto Coppi, Bernard Hinault – go outside that tactical framework, and only on very limited occasions. For a debutant in the Tour to do so with six days’ racing remaining was tactical madness.
The race was won, so the risks far outweighed the potential gains. This was not a straightforward ride to the finish over easy roads and there was a very real danger that Merckx would push himself too far and pay the price. The attack of hypoglycaemia showed what was at stake. He got over it, but even so he was not exactly ‘pottering along in the style of a superhero, which came naturally to a supernatural talent’ was how Antoine Blondin described it. In fact, he was teetering on the tightrope between glory and failure. Had he weakened and perhaps lost a little time, with a summit finish in the Massif Central and a time trial still to decide the race, that Tour could have been lost.
Mourenx was such an outlandish event that parallels in other sports are hard to suggest. Imagine George Best putting Manchester United 4-0 up in the Champions League final, then sending half the team off the field, and popping in another two on his own. Or Juan Manuel Fangio lapping the field at Monaco twice by half distance then opting to repeat the feat twice more rather than controlling the pace. Boxing’s reliance on the knockout means no equivalent can be suggested for Muhammad Ali, unless you imagine him offering a repeat of the Rumble in the Jungle with one arm tied behind his back.
Jacques Goddet for one realised that this was a unique occasion, in the Tour and quite possibly in the whole of sport. He wrote ‘one of the mysteries of human creation is the way that we can add lustre to shining light’ – think of great artists who feel compelled to produce one more masterpiece – and compared Mourenx to the ‘gratuitous acts’ of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialist heroes. Mourenx happened simply because Merckx felt he could do it and because he wanted to do it. There was no intrinsic need for it. ‘The feat achieved by this sublime athlete is different from anything written thus far in the annals of road racing, because Merckx accomplished a gratuitous act. His latest achievement was spontaneous and it has reduced all around him to rubble, including the minds of the opposition and the very concept of competition.’
The stage win in Mourenx can be said to be the ultimate expression of Merckx’s cycling career. The Belgian spent his cycling years surprising the world, in various ways. That was, after all, his fundamental goal at the start of his career, when he said he wanted to ‘give my fans new exploits every season. The ideal thing for me would be to go a bit higher each year. Do something better than the year before, every year up to 1974 or 1975.’ It was the most outlandish act of a career spent defying the norms and nostrums of professional cycling. Across his professional career, Merckx rarely saved his strength. He tried to win everything he could, no matter how big or how small the race, rarely ever recognising the politics of professional sport. He accepted, even embraced, the risks involved in not making friends, not calculating the value of every effort. Mourenx was the ultimate expression of the way he did things. To understand Mourenx is probably to understand Merckx.
Given that the 1969 Tour de France now epitomises complete and utter dominance, Merckx began the campaign with a rare mistake. It was Lomme Driessens’ idea that he should start the prologue time trial in Roubaix first of the 130 starters, the notion being that Merckx would be resting in his hotel room by the time the other favourites started. As with other teams which have tried something similar more recently, it backfired: a wind got up while he was riding but died down and didn’t affect the others. The organisers took longer than expected to clear the publicity caravan off the circuit and put the start back by five minutes, disrupting Merckx’s warm-up. Finally, affected by nerves, he started too fast. The upshot was that he came second by seven seconds to Rudi Altig, the German who won the 1966 world title. Merckx was not happy about it and he did not repeat the experiment. Presumably it did nothing for his relationship with Driessens.
The following afternoon, however, in his home town of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre – close to the White Star football club’s stadium where he used to play – Faema won the team time trial and he took the yellow jersey. The next morning the route began with a detour through Tervuren, the Brussels suburb where Merckx and Claudine lived: in the best tradition, he escaped as soon as the start flag dropped and rode alone in yellow in front of his home crowd. After that it mattered little that the yellow jersey ended up on the shoulders of his Faema teammate Julien Stevens.
That was the stuff of schoolboy dreams, but the atmosphere around Merckx outside the race was particularly tense: after Savona, he and his team were afraid of sabotage. He accepted not a single bottle from the hundreds held up by supporters in the mountains. His hotel room was declared out of bounds (something which was not normal at the time), and Faema appointed bodyguards to restrict access to the hotel each evening. One writer described the atmosphere as ‘akin to a bad cops and robbers drama’. Another complained ‘we were not permitted to cross the threshold of the hotel, in the same way that we were kept out of his room by Faema’s gorillas. There would be a fifteen-minute wait, with radios holding on for live broadcasts and photographers with their fingers on the shutters.’ By the standards of the twenty-first century it was mild stuff, but for a sport in which journalists took for granted their right to interview the stars when and where they wanted it was new territory. There were banners by the roadside: ‘The Italians stole the Giro from Eddy Merckx, take revenge in the Tour, Eddy!’ and ‘Rodoni is a Judas!’ One rider was designated to collect Merckx’s bottles from the team car, and he was only permitted to bring bottles with his leader’s initials on, which had been prepared either by Merckx himself or by Driessens.
There was an amusing episode later in the race when Merckx himself tried to go back up to his hotel room after dinner only to find he couldn’t open the door. His soigneur had locked it but because he didn’t use the right key he had damaged the lock. The race favourite ended up sitting in the corridor with two Belgian journalists waiting for a locksmith, and had to take his evening call from his wife in reception. Similarly frivolous, in the view of the press, was the brief spell Stevens spent in the yellow jersey, compared by Antoine Blondin to Beau Brummel getting his valet to ‘wear in’ his clothes. By day six in Mulhouse, with the first mountain stage through the Vosges looming large, Merckx was just nine seconds behind the race leader Desiré Letort of France. The first big climb of the Tour that year was the Ballon d’Alsace, with the finish at the summit, and i
t set the tone for the Merckx years in the Tour.
Faema were the pacemakers and Merckx escaped well before the climb, along with Altig, the Dutchman Rinus Wagtmans, the Spanish climber Joaquim Galera and De Vlaeminck. At the foot of the Ballon they had a two minute forty second lead. Relentlessly, Merckx rode the quartet off his wheel as the climb progressed. Wagtmans and De Vlaeminck were the first to go – and De Vlaeminck would never again start a major Tour thinking he might get the better of his fellow Belgian – while Galera cracked seven kilometres from the top. That made Altig the last survivor, but all Merckx had to do to dislodge the German was to cut through a couple of hairpins four kilometres from the top, raising the pace as he did so, and Altig blew up, rivulets of sweat running down his forehead. So complete was his collapse that he lost two minutes in four kilometres and by the summit only Galera was within reach of the Belgian. Ten per cent of the field finished outside the time limit due to the high speed set by Merckx and the organisers had to extend it. Even so, those men eliminated included Rik Van Looy, a symbolic moment if ever there was one.
The consensus was that the race was already over. L’Equipe’s correspondent described it as ‘one of the most remarkable spectacles I’ve ever seen in sport’, while Merckx himself was surprised by how simple it had all been. Like a card sharp upping the ante to weed out the weaker hands, his goal had been to get rid of as many of the field as possible before the climb so that his task would be easier. There would be fewer men to watch and follow. He was defying convention by doing more work than anyone else and still remaining fresh. He would do it again and again. Among the other favourites, only Roger Pingeon of France remained defiant, stating that he and the rest of the favourites simply failed to realise how hard the finish at the Ballon would be – because they had not taken into account how hard Merckx would make it.
Pingeon was clutching at straws. With the Alps beckoning, the next stage was the 8.8-kilometre time trial at Divonne-les-Bains: Merckx won, at an average speed of over 49.6 kilometres per hour, with Altig – still a possible rival at this point – only two seconds behind. The very next day, he left the entire field apart from Pingeon behind en route to Chamonix although, for some bizarre reason, he had decided to fit longer cranks on his bike and was not entirely at ease. Gimondi was over two minutes back, while Altig was seventy-sixth, and now completely out of the picture. The next day the Tour climbed the Col de la Madeleine for the first time, then the Col du Galibier. Here there was another reckoning: De Vlaeminck was one of fourteen riders who abandoned. The margins were surreal: Janssen, the 1968 winner, was more than twenty-five minutes back, Altig was at forty minutes, and Lucien Aimar, the 1966 victor, was three-quarters of an hour behind.
The only remaining opposition seemed to come from Pingeon, who attacked the next day on the Col d’Allos, as the race headed south through the Alps to Digne – Merckx responded with a counter-attack of his own, with the Frenchman and Gimondi chasing a couple of hairpins below him. He overhauled two Spaniards, Mascaro and Santamaria, who had broken away earlier in the stage, waited for Gimondi and his group, then attacked again on the descent from the Col de Corobin, ten miles from the finish, to win the stage. The next day it was a similar story. Fifty kilometres from the finish in Aubagne as the race passed through the Massif de l’Espigoulier in the Marseilles arrière-pays, Merckx went after an attack from the rider lying fifty-fourth overall – the little-known Jacques de Boever – and although Gimondi won the stage, this time Pingeon was the one who was caught out and lost time. Overall, colossal time gaps were already opening up, with the tenth rider in the standings twenty-five minutes back. And this was only stage twelve.
Merckx was showing the Tour de France something that had not been seen on la Grande Boucle since the days of Coppi, Hugo Koblet and Louison Bobet in the early 1950s. The Tours after Anquetil’s fifth victory in 1964 had been ‘interim’ races, each taken by a rider who had come from left field and would win only once: Gimondi, Aimar, Pingeon, Janssen. Anquetil’s 1964 win had been a tight affair taken by a whisker from Raymond Poulidor; he had dominated the previous three Tours but in a way that was more calculating and tactical, based on his supremacy in the time trial stages. Of Anquetil’s 1963 victory, Jacques Goddet wrote: ‘For the entire three weeks, Jacques was the master of the race, in the sense that he gauged the capacity of his principal adversaries, he strictly controlled their movements, he limited the dangers that arose whenever they showed any aggressive intent.’ Goddet compared Anquetil to Fangio, ‘taking only necessary risks, contenting himself with total clarity of mind, with giving each adversary the response that sufficed to keep him quiet’.
Merckx’s style, clearly, was as different as ‘total football’ compared to catenaccio. Any calculation was based on what he felt he could do rather than what he needed to do. One comparison was with a gaoler who plays with the prisoners’ minds – every day the fellow cyclists expected some bizarre new punishment so when Merckx attacked they just let him get on with it. There were jokes among the riders that they could do with some Faema coffee themselves, and the inevitable allegations that Merckx had a superdrug of some kind, but Doctor Dumas (the man who tried to revive Tom Simpson and led the fight against drug-taking at the end of the 1960s) had this to say: ‘Merckx is the cleanest rider I know.’
And so onwards, implacably, Merckx proceeded towards Mourenx. The third time trial stage, at Revel, underlined his superiority: over a distance of only eighteen kilometres, Pingeon was a minute behind, Gimondi one minute thirty-three seconds, losing five seconds per kilometre. These were immense gaps in a time trial this short, and Merckx’s race was effectively won, a week before the finish in Paris. In the overall standings he had 8 minutes 21 seconds on Pingeon, 9 minutes 29 seconds on Gimondi, 12 minutes 46 seconds on Poulidor. Thirty-six hours later came the great Pyrenean set-piece stage, 214.5 kilometres long, over the classic quartet of cols: Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque. After staying close to the front on the Peyresourde and Aspin, Merckx changed gear on the Tourmalet and the next 145 kilometres went into the history books.
Not surprisingly, the stage to Mourenx ended the Tour as a contest. The final mountain-top finish at the Puy-de-Dôme was an anticlimax, won by the lanterne rouge, a window cleaner named Pierre Matignon. The final day belonged to Faema, with Jos Spruyt winning the morning stage to Creteil, and Merckx, in the natural order of things, taking the afternoon time trial to the velodrome at Vincennes for his sixth stage win. In spite of his massive lead, he was so het up that he nearly fell off close to the start when he hit a barrier, and he misjudged a bend just before the entry to the velodrome, almost turning right rather than left. That sealed a total triumph, with Pingeon seventeen minutes fifty-four seconds behind, Poulidor at twenty-two minutes thirteen seconds, margins that compared with those opened by Anquetil and Coppi in their greatest days. As well as the overall standings, Merckx added the mountains, points, team, combine and most aggressive rider awards, a whitewash of every prize on offer. No cyclist has ever matched this.
It was, he said a few years later, the highlight of his career. ‘The win overwhelmed me. When I was a child I went into every tiny detail, with a passion that consumed me. Jacques Anquetil was my idol. Of all the champions in sport, he was the one that I most wanted to resemble one day. So you can imagine how I felt when I raced the Tour for the first time. Since winning the world professional road title I had been convinced that my mission was to be the first Belgian to win the Tour since 1939.’
Special trains had been laid on from Brussels to Paris to take the fans, who thronged the metro; the Cipale velodrome in Vincennes became ‘un vélodrome Belge’ for l’Equipe’s man on the spot. Among the onlookers was Sylvère Maes, fifty-seven years old, who had cut short his seaside holiday to be there to applaud the man who succeeded him as Belgium’s first winner since 1939. That night the Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens dined with Faema. It was the day that Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and Merckx was rush
ed from his celebration dinner to a Belgian television studio where he talked live as they broadcast the moon landing. ‘Merckx’s win had as much impact in Belgium as events in space,’ wrote René Jacobs in Gotha. The victory was probably amplified by the bitter defeat of the previous year when two Belgians, Ferdinand Bracke and Herman Van Springel, were in contention for victory on the final day, only to be defeated by, of all people, a Dutchman, Jan Janssen. The morning after his win, Merckx and Claudine rode through Brussels in an open-top Mercedes, hailed by crowds that completely filled the main square. The King, Baudouin, made a point of being the first to receive Merckx officially before the country’s national summer holiday and was duly presented with a yellow jersey.
It is hard to conceive that Merckx might have lacked confidence. His racing style is so dominant, based as it is on showing the opposition precisely what physical reserves he has, that the notion that it is born of insecurity is difficult to take on board. But when I asked Merckx to explain Mourenx he said simply: ‘You’re never certain of winning. You can always have a bad day, no matter how much of a lead you have. The bigger the lead you have, the more time you have to play with. You can lose ten minutes on a bad day. It can always happen.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 12