Merckx said later that Blois was the most traumatic event of his career, because of the death of Wambst rather than the actual crash. His nerves suffered and he insisted he was never able to climb as well after Blois. ‘[without the crash] I could have won races far more easily and performed greater exploits in the mountains. Before, they felt like demonstrations – the stage in the Pyrenees when I won by eight minutes, and the Tre Cime di Lavaredo stage in the Giro. I was a level above then; afterwards it wasn’t so easy. There was less sparkle.’ The upshot was that he tended to sit too low in the saddle and couldn’t use the gears he was used to when he was climbing in the mountains. Normal physical progression meant he should have got better in the mountains as he matured up to about 1973 – instead he didn’t improve but managed because he was stronger and more determined than everyone else. ‘Before the accident, I didn’t feel pain on the bike in the same way. After the crash, you could see the worry on my face. I was always afraid the pain would strike me again. I didn’t feel I could dominate in the mountains.’
Merckx had always had a hypochondriac side to him – the result, possibly, of the health issues he had had in his youth, but also due to his anxious nature. ‘He’s a decent man but who believes a word he says?’ asked Gimondi in the spring of 1969. ‘Last year at the Giro he had a headache and … he won, and you know how. In Paris–Nice this year he thought he was coming down with an ear infection and waltzed in first. The night before Milan–San Remo he was worrying about his knee. You know what happened. He may feel pain before a race, I don’t deny it, but once the start comes, the pain just disappears.’ Now there were more serious problems to be dealt with, and they would get worse as his career progressed. The spring after Blois, he suffered from the first of a long series of injuries to his crutch – the obvious result of trying to get comfortable on the bike and pedalling with one leg putting out more power than the other. On occasions he would race with one crank slightly shorter than the other, to compensate for the fact that his legs were not precisely the same length.
The demands Merckx made on himself can be seen in one single winter, the one after the crash in Blois. He should have taken time off to recover from his injuries, but was racing again eight days later, and put in another eleven days of competition before calling it a day on 26 October. He decided to accept a number of track contracts over the winter and emerged with decent form but was nursing a minor knee injury. Winning Paris–Nice in spite of the mild tendonitis was vitally important, he felt, to show himself and the opposition that he was back to his old level, but perhaps he should miss Milan–San Remo to save his knee? No chance with an Italian sponsor – the same company as before, but with the team rebranded Faemino to publicise a new coffee machine from the Valenti stable. Additionally, he had missed the team training camp in Alassio in January because Claudine was not in perfect health as she awaited the birth of their first child, Sabrina, who was born on Valentine’s day.
The only day in the whole of 1970 that Merckx felt like his pre-Blois self was 12 April, the day of Paris–Roubaix. That was a victory which set new standards for the ‘Queen of Classics’: a solo attack thirty-one kilometres from the finish to open a winning margin of five minutes twenty-one seconds, the biggest winning margin in the ‘Hell of the North’ since the war. As so often, however, early in the race Merckx didn’t think he was going to get to the finish. On this occasion it was because he had had a cold. Ultimately, he produced a devastating victory in a race so tough that only forty-three of the 155 starters made it to the finish through heavy rain that teemed down for the final three hours. It was a win taken against the odds, with an early puncture costing him time and forcing him into a brutal chase. There were five riders from the Flandria team at the front that day, including Godefroot and De Vlaeminck, but they were powerless. The last to survive was Eric Leman, who had just won the Tour of Flanders, and lasted until thirty-seven kilometres from the finish.
Roubaix was one of six major victories in eighteen days that April, which began with Ghent–Wevelgem, taken after a late attack, four kilometres from the finish. The Tour of Belgium of that year is legendary for the particularly wintry stage to Heist, in which Merckx, Roger De Vlaeminck and Godefroot left the bunch twelve minutes behind amid hail, snow showers and half a gale, with two-thirds of the field abandoning; the afternoon after that epic, Merckx took the time trial which guaranteed him overall victory. That led into the Roubaix spectacular. A week after that, Merckx tried to engineer a win for his new teammate Jos Bruyère in Flèche Wallonne – something he tried from time to time, as we will see later – but the domestique cracked close to the finish leaving his leader with no option other than to take the victory himself.
Not surprisingly, Merckx was not keen to return to the Giro d’Italia after events the previous year at Savona but Van Buggenhout and Faema’s boss, Paolo Valente, proved too persuasive. Merckx was at the heart of the publicity campaign for Faema’s new coffee machine: there were 50,000 posters with his picture on them waiting to be put up all over Italy to coincide with the race. A figure of 80,000 Belgian francs per day was quoted as his start money. The Faema leader would only return if the methods of doping control were changed, and samples were sent to a laboratory in Rome that year rather than being tested on the spot. That 1970 Giro was a controlled win, the first time Merckx had won a major stage race when he was not at his best. Ironically, his adversaries were so struck with the idea that Merckx was unbeatable that they let him keep the psychological whip hand although he was nothing like the star of the 1969 Tour.
On the third stage of the race he felt shooting pains in his left leg similar to those he had noticed in Paris–Nice. Three days later, his chain jumped as he was responding to an attack from Martin Van Den Bossche, his former Faema teammate, now riding for Molteni, and his left leg was deadened with pain. As a result he was dropped on the climb of Croce Domini and left behind again later in the stage. The Italian newspapers speculated that there might be a new fragility about him, making him vulnerable to pressure, but Gimondi and company were unable to respond. Merckx was riding in a new style, more watchful, less willing to expend his formidable strength, partly because he had half an eye on the Tour de France, partly because of his physical problems. He was keen to keep the race in a firm stranglehold. It was not a popular win in Italy, where the press derided his rivals as Lilliputian puppets.
There were similar feelings in France five weeks later after the Tour de France win that put him among the true legends of the sport: at that time, only Jacques Anquetil and Fausto Coppi had managed the double of Giro d’Italia and Tour de France in the same summer. Merckx’s dominance was clear early on. The lack of suspense about who was going to win the Tour prompted Jacques Goddet to open one editorial meeting at l’Equipe a week into the race with the words: ‘Messieurs, c’est le catastrophe.’ Even if Merckx was not in the same stunning condition as before, the fact that it was clear he was heading for victory was a nightmare for the promoting newspapers l’Equipe and Le Parisien Libéré, which needed high drama, if possible featuring a home rider, in order to boost sales. A Belgian crushing all before him was not going to send French readers rushing to newsstands.
Merckx began by winning the prologue at Limoges by substantial margins, given that the course was only 7.4 kilometres. After that, tactical niceties set in. On the stage to Angers, Driessens attempted to create a diversion by sending Faemino riders Italo Zilioli and Georges Vandenberghe away in an early escape. In a bizarre scenario, which probably contributed to Driessens’ departure a year later, Faemino ended up chasing – with Merckx in the vanguard – as their own riders worked in the break in front. Zilioli earned the yellow jersey by four seconds, but Merckx was disgruntled at the team wasting energy in this way on behalf of the Italian, who was not the most robust of riders and might be needed later in the race. It had also made him and his team look foolish.
The next morning Faemino won a short team time trial – 10.7 kilometre
s – by a massive forty-seven seconds from Bic, and five days later their leader retrieved the yellow jersey at Valenciennes in curious circumstances. Zilioli punctured and none of the team waited for him, again raising questions in the press about the running of the team. Driessens explained, against all logic, that no one had seen the Italian, and it was Zilioli’s own fault because all the team had to stay at the front with Merckx and the Italian had been in the middle of the bunch. Goddet’s consternation was understandable, as the Tour was effectively over even before it reached the mountains. Merckx and the young climber Lucien Van Impe escaped on the stage to Forest, on Merckx’s home turf near Brussels, then Merckx narrowly lost the afternoon’s solo time trial to the Spaniard José-Antonio González Linares, but ended up two minutes clear in the standings.
The organisers were distraught at the notion that the Tour had no interest remaining, but in the first mountain stage, through the Jura to Divonne-les-Bains, it was the same picture: Merckx won and extended his lead to five minutes, having covered the 243 hilly kilometres at forty-three kilometres per hour. He was almost apologetic in his explanations: it was hot, his team was weak, he wanted to control the race. Two more stage wins followed in the next three days: first the time trial at Divonne, where he was three seconds faster than in 1969 over the same course, then, the day after that, a solo effort at Grenoble. The day after that came a body blow: after the stage finish in Gap, Merckx and Zilioli were taken to one side by the Italian journalist Gian Paolo Ormezzano – he of the Savona urine sample – and told that their manager, Enrico Giacotto, had succumbed to lung cancer. As well as the two riders, Ormezzano was close to the direttore sportivo – which was why he had received the news first – and all three men were in tears.
Perhaps the impact of this devastating news was behind the signs of weakness Merckx showed on Mont Ventoux, the bleak ‘Giant of Provence’, which the Tour cyclists had not tackled since Tom Simpson had collapsed and died there in 1967. This time, famously, the Belgian collapsed in his turn and had to be given oxygen at the summit. Goddet’s account in l’Equipe has obvious echoes of the Simpson catastrophe: Merckx ‘arrived at the summit in a comatose state, collapsing on the finish line. Lengthy attempts at reanimation using an oxygen mask were required before the Tour’s medical men made the champion breathe again.’ It was not quite that simple, however.
By the Ventoux stage he was six minutes clear, with victory assured and no real challengers, but when the Portuguese Joaquim Agostinho threw down the gauntlet on the mountain he responded. He had already reconnoitred the climb and had chosen the spot where he would lift the pace: just before the road leaves the trees after Chalet Renard and enters the bare moonscape close to the summit, where the gradient is still steep and there is just a little shade. He was ninety seconds clear as he passed the Simpson memorial a few hundred yards from the summit, but he slowed down as he approached the finish. He took his hat off in honour of his former teammate and crossed himself, then forged on to win by seventy-one seconds from Martin Van Den Bossche. At the line, in the freezing cold, he quickly answered questions from Belgian television.
As other television cameras approached, the race leader’s legs buckled and he needed assistance as he crossed the road to join Van Den Bossche in the race ambulance. Around him was what the writer Roger Bastide described as ‘a demented throng which has lost any sense of sympathy for his suffering and has thrown decency to the winds in the urge to see and know everything, no matter the price’. He was given oxygen, but as a precaution. He was then driven to Avignon in the race ambulance, but not because there was any emergency: it was simply the fastest way for him to get to his hotel. He was given an ECG by the race doctors and the feeling was that his moment of weakness was a temporary blood pressure issue, due to his not taking any time to recover after the stage.
The picture drawn by Théo Mathy and others diverges from Goddet’s account suggesting that his overwrought writing was probably down to subliminal memories of the Simpson catastrophe, and a wish – conscious or otherwise – to create drama by looking for possible chinks in Merckx’s armour. Merckx himself blamed the gases from the race vehicles all around him, and the fact that no one allowed him to sit down for as much as a moment when he had crossed the line. ‘It was bad, but it only lasted a short time,’ said the Danish film director Jørgen Leth, who was on the spot. ‘There was a shock effect among the journalists. It was a sign that he was not invulnerable. It was a moment of weakness.’
Collapse or no collapse, Merckx had extended his lead to nine minutes twenty-six seconds and, apart from a blip at La Mongie in the Pyrenees where the newcomer Bernard Thévenet landed the stage ahead of Van Den Bossche and Van Impe, his progress through the rest of the race looked straightforward. Victories in the last two time trials of the Tour left him twelve minutes forty-one seconds ahead of Zoetemelk when the race reached Paris. It was not that straightforward, however. Luis Ocaña’s biographer François Terbéen wrote ‘there were times when Eddy Merckx was vulnerable, after too many repeated efforts’. Hence his inability to match Thévenet when he escaped at La Mongie. The familiar pain in his left leg had troubled him on the Ventoux, and before his stage win in the final Paris time trial he changed first his frame, then his forks, because he was so unsure of his position on the bike. Even so, he won the contre la montre one minute forty-seven seconds ahead of his future great rival Luis Ocaña, another huge margin. It was his eighth stage win, a record for a single Tour which has only ever been equalled, never bettered.
Relations between Merckx and the Tour organisers became a little tense that year after an incident at Saint Gaudens in the Pyrenees. Faemino and other riders were lodged in a school in the town but the sleeping accommodation was in dormitories which had not been partitioned. They booked into a nearby hotel and were preparing to sleep there until the organisers turned up brandishing the rule book, which stipulated that the riders had to sleep in the accommodation provided for them. As far as they were concerned the riders had to abide by the rules and the leader of the race had to set an example. It was the night of 14 July, Bastille Day, so Merckx and company didn’t sleep due to the fireworks. At the start the next morning, on top of the complaints about accommodation, Merckx showed the journalists the contents of the musette, the official race food provided by the organisers. He tipped the inedible apricots and hard rice cakes on to the tarmac, then ground them under the heel of his racing shoe. He was beaten that evening at La Mongie by Thévenet, and Goddet produced an editorial entitled ‘the moods of the affronted king’, stating that Merckx’s complaints were an excuse for his defeat – ignoring the fact that they had preceded it.
‘Since the Ventoux any interest in the Tour hinges on Eddy Merckx’s health … we can’t see anything that will hinder his progress towards Paris apart from an extra-sportif virus, a cursed fever or bubonic plague’, wrote Antoine Blondin wryly. ‘Has Merckx got the beginnings of a headache? Will he get a stone in his eye?’ The only illness Merckx had, joked Blondin, was jaune-dice, due to the colour of the jersey. As in 1969, the opposition did not seem to know how to respond. This was partly because it was a year of transition. There was a marked decline among the old guard such as Lucien Aimar, Jan Janssen and Roger Pingeon, all Tour winners in the 1960s. There was a wave of new, younger rivals, who were not yet mature but would dog Merckx to the end of his career: Van Impe, Ocaña, Agostinho, Thévenet and Zoetemelk. The Dutchman, in his first year as a professional, followed the leader for most of the race: later he was, rather unfairly, nicknamed the ‘wheelsucker’, and the ‘rat’. A rather clumsy joke began to do the rounds: why does Zoetemelk end the Tour as pale-skinned as when it started? Because he spends the race in Merckx’s shadow.
Images of Merckx from the 1970 Tour make up part of the experimental film Eddy Merckx in the Vicinity of a Cup of Coffee, a blend of poetry and images by Jørgen Leth, better known for the documentaries Stars and Watercarriers and A Sunday in Hell. Leth told me he was fascinated by
Merckx’s face. ‘I shot the material myself in 8mm, because I was close to Merckx at various times, in the start village, at the starts and finishes. The images are close up because that was how I observed him. I was fascinated by him as a man. He has this Asiatic face, high cheekbones, very central eyes – “bedroom eyes”, with long eyelashes. He is handsome in a very unorthodox way. The close-ups were almost sensual.’
Leth’s fascination with Merckx is at odds with the public view of the Belgian at the start of the 1970s. The common feeling was that he was an implacable, almost inhuman, machine. That view began to circulate during 1969 and 1970 and would be prevalent until Merckx’s decline began during 1975 and 1976. The tone was set by the French writer Lucien Bodard in 1970, in this celebrated passage. ‘Merckx, a super-winner in unprecedented style, walks away, without a hint of fatigue, with nothing to say, just a hint of boredom. He has robotised himself. There are no aspirations, no sense of destiny, just an awareness that he is set apart, unique. So he has transformed himself into a machine with the utmost meticulousness. He is half-man, half-bike.’
Bodard, in turn, was echoing the Breton writer Georges Perros, who saw Merckx at the Circuit de l’Aulne in Chateaulin the day before Blois, and portrayed him as ‘the man with no shadow’, a reference to the inhuman yet supernaturally powerful vampire Count Dracula created by Bram Stoker. ‘With an absence of nerves he pedals as if in a dream, in I don’t know what kind of a secondary state, with fatigue banished, eyes fixed on the tarmac, fishlike mouth half-open. We will learn nothing. There will be no sign of complicity, no connivance, nothing but bloodless hyperactivity. He seems to feel no pleasure, no difficulty. He pedals, that’s all. Where is Eddy Merckx? Who is he? What’s he thinking of? Of whom? Of nothing, obviously. Of no one. He is indifferent to everything apart from the act of dominance, inexorable, monotonous … He suggests a rather unhappy god who descends to earth here and there. He is a man with no shadow who can look straight into the sun without a quiver of his beautiful eyelids, and his destiny is one from which weakness and any joy at merely existing seem to have been excluded.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 14