Events in Merckx’s other Tour wins show that he was actually not far from the edge on occasion, in spite of his utter dominance. In the 1970 Tour, he had a lead of nearly ten minutes over Joop Zoetemelk and had only to control the race for the seven days remaining until Paris when a small stone was thrown into the air from the road and hit him in the eye, about five miles from the end of the stage in Toulouse. He pulled into the side of the road and tried to clear his watering eyes as he could barely see. He regained contact with the bunch in extremis, his team unable to perform at his level as they tried to catch the speeding field. The 1971 Tour saw him short of form, and fighting off a brutal challenge from Luis Ocaña. The year after that he wound up with a saddle boil, and an upset stomach from drinking an over strong coffee. There were no issues in 1973, but the win in 1974, as we shall see, was achieved when circumstances were particularly tough. Merckx, seemingly so invulnerable, was actually not far at times from overload and collapse, as is normal for most athletes at this level.
There are echoes of another seemingly dominant racer, Fausto Coppi, who famously believed that something might go wrong even when he was half an hour in front of the next man with two days to go in the 1952 Tour. Mourenx was born of the need to seize every opportunity to build that lead. If Merckx had not taken the opportunity, then afterwards something had gone wrong, and he had lost by a few seconds – what then? And, indeed, such were his nerves that on the final time trial to the Parc des Princes he twice came close to crashing.
Not long after that 1969 Tour, Merckx’s manager Jean Van Buggenhout said that his protégé was actually no more ambitious than previous greats of the sport such as Rik Van Steenbergen and Fausto Coppi. All champions were superhumanly ambitious, believed the manager, but they were all different in the attention they paid to their profession. Coppi was fixated with detail and would never change his mind. Van Looy was equally obsessive, continually changing his bars and saddle during a stage race for example, examining every contract to the last phrase. Van Steenbergen, on the other hand, simply took life as it came. Merckx, in that context, was somewhere in the middle, ‘a worrier’. ‘He is permanently preoccupied with some problem or other. There is always something on his mind. He asks questions continually, and because he isn’t able to obtain closed, precise answers, he keeps on vacillating. He thinks, studies, examines, and weighs each problem.’
Van Buggenhout describes Merckx’s preoccupation with the details of his bike (compared with Jacques Anquetil who would simply get on the machine and race) but his punctiliousness went further than worrying about his position. ‘Eddy thinks about the future a great deal and already, even though he isn’t yet twenty-five years old, he is concerned with what he will do after he has finished racing. He is continually asking himself the question: what will I do with my life after my sporting career?’ One Belgian paper asked Merckx if he was a worrier and if it was a weakness. He answered yes to both, adding that he had trouble sleeping before a race, as ‘I wouldn’t want to disappoint myself or the team or the supporters’. In his eyes, worrying was a virtue, because ‘in cycling, being sure of yourself is an almost inevitable guarantee of not winning’. Insecurity meant minding every detail and never underestimating the opposition.
Merckx had, he said in other interviews, always been nervous, ‘almost irritable’. ‘I used to feel taken over by doubt, by fear. There were times when I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Sometimes my stomach wouldn’t keep my food down.’ It was a patronising parallel, but there was something in the assertion of a rival team manager who said Merckx was ‘like a little third category amateur who isn’t sure what the result will be’. The opposition might have been sure; he wasn’t.
As well as Mourenx, those emphatic solo wins in one-day races come down to insecurity. Merckx was a strong sprinter, but there were no guarantees if there were any other men present at the finish. ‘My sprint wasn’t strong. I was strong after a long distance but in a shorter race a lot of riders could beat me. Someone who’s faster in the sprint will attack less, but I was insecure about my sprint. You’re never certain of winning a sprint. You could puncture with a kilometre to go. Riders like Godefroot and De Vlaeminck weren’t easy to beat in a sprint. I could beat them, but I was never sure of doing it. The lone victories came from a need to win, rather than a need to show that I was stronger or the best. When you are alone you are always certain to win.’
The Tour victory, emphatic and ecstatic as it was, would never entirely erase the memory of the 1969 Giro from Merckx’s mind. ‘Savona is not forgotten. It is the nightmare that haunts his sleep,’ recalled the journalist Théo Mathy. He added that Merckx ‘dissected every defeat with cold anger to better prepare for the next win’. I suspect that whatever anger Merckx felt was not ‘cold’ in the sense of controlled, but it was certainly directed. Mourenx was the act of an angry man. Merckx was powered by inner rage, he said. It made him ‘fight against journalists who said bad things about me, against the rivals I imagined wanted to beat me, against people who didn’t believe me. That aggression gave me the power to overcome the pain. I wanted to leave people with their mouths wide open.’ And after the injustice of his expulsion from the Giro d’Italia a few weeks earlier, he had reason to be angry.
Merckx felt a continual need to prove himself, to show his worth to the world. This is seen in his early fear that his amateur world championship would be as good as it got, and in the way he saw the 1967 Giro, where, astonishing as it might seem, he had been happier with the bunch sprint at Lido degli Estense rather than the prestigious mountain stage at Blockhaus. His explanation was as follows: ‘Up to now, everyone has underestimated me in the sprints. Everyone takes for granted that riders like Jo Planckaert [three-time stage winner in that Giro] and Dino Zandegu are instrinsically superior to me and if I can beat them at the end of a Classic, it’s more due to my pure power than speed. In other words, people believe that I only win sprints when the real sprinters are tired from the race distance. Perhaps I believed it myself. But at Lido degli Estensi, I beat pure sprinters on their favoured ground. That’s why it’s more significant for me. At the Blockhaus, I wasn’t turning over any established ideas: it was my first race in the mountains. It may be normal. Time will tell. But I am certain you wouldn’t have found anyone willing to bet on me in a bunch sprint against Planckaert and Zandegu after a flat stage of 160 kilometres.’ In other words, it was the challenge per se that counted. He wanted to turn people’s ideas about him on their heads. The 1969 Tour offered him the ultimate test: reversing the injustice of his expulsion from the Giro, and his designation as a cheat in some quarters.
His response to the challenge did not end once he had arrived in Brussels to a hero’s welcome. Eyebrows were also raised after Paris–Luxembourg, a few weeks after the Tour. The race no longer exists, but it was prestigious enough in its day for the best riders of the time to take part: Gimondi took the first of the two stages, and seemed to have a conclusive enough fifty-four-second lead in the overall standings.
Merckx saw it differently, and seized his chance in the final eight kilometres, attacking on the steep hill at Bereldange, getting rid of the field, and gaining a minute by the finish on Gimondi, who had Roger Pingeon, Michele Dancelli and Roger De Vlaeminck to help him in the chase. Up front, Jacques Anquetil, no less, had taken a forty-five-second lead with Guido Reybrouck before the hill was reached: Merckx overtook the duo in the final kilometre and flew past to take the stage win. No one, said Anquetil, had ever dropped him so close to the finish of any race. Merckx rode like a man possessed, and there was speculation that he was making Gimondi pay for the events of that June.
Mourenx had been a key moment in the Merckx story, the moment where it became clear that cycling now had to deal with a phenomenon that was completely new to it. The sport was in unknown territory. Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet had made epic escapes that had devastated their rivals. Jacques Anquetil had ridden Tours de France that married physical courage and tactica
l calculation. Charly Gaul had produced stupendous feats in the mountains. But none of these stars had looked to dominate when it was no longer necessary. As Goddet wrote, Mourenx was an acte gratuit. It was not even done to impress. Merckx was winning this way simply because he could. Driven by his insecurity, he was racing as if there was no tomorrow to revenge himself on his rivals. The Savona affair had made him believe, like the chief in Goscinny’s Asterix, that tomorrow the sky might fall on his head. Events later that year were to prove him right.
PART TWO
* * *
THE 1970s
DESCENT OF A GOD
‘In the 1970s, wherever a bike race went, the word God was spelt MERCKX’, Eric Fottorino
THE OVAL CONCRETE velodrome in the central France town of Blois was like dozens of others in communities across the country, used for local track meetings and the occasional professional event. Most came to life only for the traditional ‘after-Tour’ meeting, when a mix of celebrities and journeymen riding for appearance fees would draw in the local fans. The meeting on 9 September 1969 was typical: the Tour de France winner Eddy Merckx topped the bill along with Jean ‘Popov’ Graczyk, a Tour points winner in 1958 and 1960, of Polish extraction, now in the final weeks of a lengthy professional career. Others present included Raymond Riotte, Tour stage winner and yellow jersey, as well as the only Czech in the professional peloton, Jiří Daler.
The evening had been drizzly, leading to doubts that the meeting would go ahead – an eternal bugbear for promoters on outdoor tracks – and the uncertainty meant the crowd was correspondingly sparse. For Merckx, the evening was just another in the lengthy round of ‘after-Tour’ events, when, like most professionals of the time, he raked in most of his annual income from start money. The previous afternoon he had won a prestigious Breton criterium, the Circuit de l’Aulne at Chateaulin, after which he had enjoyed a lengthy, alcohol-fuelled evening with Jacques Anquetil and the other stars.
The 1967 Tour winner Roger Pingeon recounted the evening to the historian Jean-Paul Ollivier. The session had begun at a post-race reception where Anquetil decided to see how much champagne Merckx could put away. Afterwards, Anquetil, Merckx and Pingeon headed for a nightclub where the five-times Tour winner and the new king of cycling held a whisky-drinking contest, won clearly by the younger man once they had moved on to doubles. They moved on from the nightclub after the somewhat unstable Anquetil had an altercation with a photographer. ‘Master Jacques’ was taken back to his hotel by his wife Janine, while Merckx suggested dinner and was joined by Pingeon, Lucien Aimar and Jan Janssen. The three of them were a little the worse for wear and they could not believe their eyes when Merckx devoured onion soup with grated cheese, a chicken breast, and a large steak on top of the alcohol. His appetite, clearly, was not limited to winning bike races.
The evening in Blois, sadly, would have a different, tragic ending. The meeting comprised a three-round omnium, each of the rounds contested behind Dernys, little custom-made motorbikes which could take the riders to a speed of about forty miles per hour. They were pedal-assisted, partly to boost the small engine, but also because the gyroscopic motion of the pedals provided stability on a banked track. Racing behind the machines was far more common then than it is now. The end-of-season Derny-paced Criterium des As over one hundred kilometres in Paris was a fixture on the calendar and de rigueur for stars of the time. The Blois meeting came a couple of days after the Bordeaux–Paris one-day and included several of the star Derny drivers who had featured in the 360-mile, fourteen-hour ‘Derby of the Road’. Merckx was paced by Fernand Wambst, at fifty-six probably the best pilote on the circuit, with twenty-three years’ experience behind him. Wambst earned his living from Derny racing, and had paced Merckx’s erstwhile teammate Tom Simpson to victory in the ‘Derby’ in 1964. Jiří Daler was paced by the Frenchman Bruno Reverdy, in whose house he had stayed after finishing eighth in the ‘Derby’.
Derny racing was not regarded as particularly dangerous, not compared to racing behind the ‘big motors’, full-sized motorbikes which could reach speeds of up to sixty-five miles per hour. Head protection for the riders was minimal – they all wore ‘hair nets’ made of slender leather strips, while the drivers wore more substantial, cumbersome-looking ‘pacers’ hats’ with large bands made of boiled leather. Ever the perfectionist, even for a race of this insignificance, Merckx dithered over whether to wear his usual hat or his spare and opted for the spare. Whether or not it was more robust cannot be proven, but it probably saved his life.
In the opening race, Merckx and Wambst won the first intermediate sprint, then the duo began to accelerate a couple of laps before the second. It was not yet a flat-out effort, but they were travelling at almost forty miles per hour. Merckx’s factotum – he was not yet his soigneur – Guillaume Michiels was watching, having driven Merckx up from Chateaulin. ‘During the first round, Eddy felt the race was dangerous, and shouted to Wambst “ahead, ahead”, meaning that he wanted to stay in front.’ Merckx wanted to avoid potential trouble, but the driver’s reply was ‘spectacle, spectacle’ – in other words, they should hold back then surge forward to please the crowd. ‘They came from behind, passing everyone, and as they came past the first Derny’ – driven by Reverdy, with Daler in his slipstream – ‘we never knew whether the pedal came unscrewed, or if it broke, but that Derny lost control, went up the banking, and hit the publicity hoarding at the top of the track. It left a twelve-metre long scorch mark.’
According to Michiels, Wambst made a split-second decision to avoid the skidding motorbike by going below it, although the usual wisdom on a banked track is that a rider should try to go above a fallen colleague, because if they land higher up the banking, they will slide down into your path. ‘Eddy shouted “go up, go up”, because Reverdy’s Derny was always going to come back down.’ The two motorbikes collided, and Merckx’s pedal touched one of the motorbikes – as Michiels pointed out, twenty centimetres the other way, and he would have stayed upright. Both Merckx and Wambst landed head-first on the cement track. The impact was so great that the front wheel of the cyclist’s track bike was bent into a banana-shape, the tightly fixed handlebars turned through ninety degrees.
Daler, who raced with the Frimatic–De Gribaldy team, has not spoken about the crash for over forty years, and is surprised when the phone rings with an English journalist quizzing him about it. The surface of the track was good, he recalls, the evening dry, the field only six or seven riders. He had been given the contract by his manager, a Dutch former track racer named Jan Derksen. ‘Reverdy crashed on the banking at very high speed, I didn’t fall, because he fell in front of me, and I went up the track as he went down. Wambst and Merckx were below, and hit him. They both fell together. It was such a bad crash that they called an end to the racing and I went back to my home in Besançon. I didn’t find out what had happened to Wambst until later. It is a terrible memory. I have seen Merckx since then, but we have never spoken about it.’
Wambst died, while he was being taken to hospital, of a fractured skull; he was buried a few days later at Bagneux, close to Paris. Merckx hit his head on the concrete at the foot of the track, just fifty centimetres from the grass in the track centre, and only just avoided the same fate as his driver: he remained unconscious for three-quarters of an hour and woke up on the operating table in the local hospital. He had narrowly avoided serious head injuries. Guillaume Michiels found his crash hat broken in two, the leather bar that came over the rider’s upper forehead held together only by the membrane. Merckx had injured his left leg, was concussed and had stitches in his scalp – the scar would cover half the left side of his forehead. The rest of his injuries were down to whiplash from the impact with the concrete: he had displaced his pelvis, trapped nerves in his back and bruised a vertebra. He spent a week in hospital before being repatriated to Belgium in a military plane.
‘I was never the same again,’ he told me. ‘Back then, there was no rehabilitation if you w
ere an athlete. I spent six weeks in bed in a clinic and at home. My pelvis was completely twisted. Later I visited osteopaths and physiotherapists but the damage was done.’ He was advised to rest for two months but was racing eight days later; in mid-October he won a criterium at Scorzè, near Venice. Nowadays a cyclist would spend the entire winter recuperating from a crash of this severity but Merckx came back to top-level racing at the Baracchi Trophy two-man time trial in Italy in early October barely a month later. After finishing third with the Italian Davide Boifava, he was hardly able to walk when he got down from his bike.
It was not the first or the last time that Merckx would return to competition after accident or illness far sooner than was good for him, but Blois was the occasion that mattered most. It was one of a handful of truly serious crashes among the estimated seventy or eighty that he had during his career – the next worst being in Paris–Nice in 1972 when he cracked a vertebra, and in the 1975 Tour de France, when he broke his cheekbone. A quarter of a century later, Merckx was still being treated weekly by a physiotherapist for the after-effects. His left leg and his lower back were where the trouble was concentrated. The compression from the crash had aggravated the stiffness in the lower spine that is common to most cyclists, and the sciatica it induced in the long term obliged him to change his position on the bike constantly. Sometimes, a massive wooden board would be placed under the mattress of his hotel bed during a stage race to ease his discomfort.
There are two sequences in the film A Sunday in Hell which illustrate Merckx’s obsession with his position on the bike. Early in the film, which centres on the 1976 Paris–Roubaix, Merckx is shown on the eve of the race in the team’s hotel spending several minutes checking and double-checking the position of his saddle and brake levers. Fastidiously, he employs a spirit level, long metal ruler and tape measure. The following morning, when the race is stopped close to the start by a demonstration, his first instinct is to head for a rival team car and borrow a spanner so he can tinker with his saddle again. After Blois he tweaked his position time after time, always experimenting in a constant search for improvement. He even had two large mirrors set up next to the rollers in his cellar so that he could observe his position as he rode, from both front and back.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 13