Another description came from Marc Jeuniau in Qui Êtes-Vous, Eddy Merckx? ‘Merckx is not a joyful champion. His look is dark, his face closed, his smile rare. He’s calm, pleasant, polite but distant and cold. He is certainly neither exuberant nor warm. He speaks little and never confides, even in his closest friends. No one ever knows what his next plan is. He’s secretive, worrying and discreet … Cycling is not a joyous adventure for him. It’s a hard, demanding, pitiless profession in which he needs to make a small fortune as quickly as possible.’ Watch any extended footage of Merckx off the bike and he rarely seems calm: he is variously closed, mistrustful, worrying, a little animated. But never at peace.
It was the essential paradox of any sporting great: Merckx was winning so often and so brilliantly that it was expected of him; it had become banal. As a result the press and fans looked intently for cracks in the carapace. As Blondin wrote: ‘May the best man lose, but not too often.’ Merckx’s defeats became a better story than his victories. Like other dominant figures since, Merckx did not understand and was hurt by that. Some of it was wishful thinking: journalists hoping for a Merckx defeat in the same way that writers like me would optimistically watch for Miguel Indurain or Lance Armstrong cracking in the 1990s and 2000s. For example, during the 1970 Tour one journalist recalled listening to commercial radio as the commentator excitedly proclaimed that Merckx was struggling. The dramatic news was eagerly picked up by the radio commentator’s colleague, the only problem being that, as he did so, the writer who related the story was watching Merckx stamping out his rhythm at the front of the bunch.
The year 1970 saw the first hints of hostility towards Merckx, which would become more marked throughout his reign and would culminate in the incident at the Puy-de-Dôme in 1975 when he was punched by a spectator. Spectators spat in his face as he ascended the Col de Porte and there were whistles at some of that year’s stage finishes. France-Soir explains: ‘There is more applause than there are whistles, but it’s true that Merckx’s apparent coldness and his haughty attitude do not make for a sympathetic reception. And the French feel uneasy about his dominance.’ Part of the lack of sympathy stemmed from the fact that Merckx himself was unable to play to the crowd. His mother had noted when he was a boy that he didn’t really manage to ‘sell himself’ to customers in their shop. Spontaneous public gestures of joy did not come naturally to him: he was too worried for that.
Publicly, Merckx was restrained in what he said and did. As Geoffrey Nicholson wrote: ‘Merckx is a good-looking man but he has the high-cheeked, graven features of a totem pole and they break into laughter about as often. So much so that it has become a kind of game with the press to record instances of him smiling.’ He was nicknamed il mostro – the monster – in Italy. According to Ocaña, many riders referred to him as ‘the crocodile’. Presumably this was for the same reason that he was given his most famous nickname, The Cannibal, because he devoured the opposition. But describing Merckx as sphinx, despot or vampire was simplistic. There was a resounding dissonance between the Belgian’s public and private personae. ‘Are you an introvert?’ asks one television interviewer. ‘I suppose so’ is the muttered answer, with a shrug.
Like his father, Merckx was ‘shut in on himself’, he said. ‘I was a fairly secretive person. I didn’t have a big mouth, because I wasn’t like that, and I was brought up in a different way. You can be charismatic, but keep quiet. There were moments when I felt far better than everyone else, but I never said so. I didn’t care about my image.’ The parallel he always drew was Rik Van Looy: adored in his pomp, abandoned when the new star – Merckx himself – came along. He had worked out early on that the emotions of press and public were transient and fickle. Behind the dominance on the road, the picture that emerges of Merckx is of a shy man who became public property and responded by putting up a barrier between himself and the more extreme elements.
It was Antoine Blondin who noted ‘a certain nervousness’ in Merckx and concluded that, contrary to the image of him as a two-wheeled robot, he was ‘not a cold-blooded being’. Blondin got it right, and not just the nerves. Those close to Merckx recorded his good humour. Mario Milesi, one of his mechanics, said: ‘Unlike most of the champions I worked with, Merckx didn’t treat his mechanics with disdain. He never asked me to do anything without first using the word “please”. It seems like only a little thing but it’s still nice working with someone as friendly as he was.’ Others such as his close friend Jacky Ickx, the racing driver, would note his sensitivity. Imperious he may have been on the bike, but he was the opposite away from it and after retirement.
Those close to Merckx – Jos Bruyère, Guillaume Michiels, his directeur sportif Bob Lelangue – clearly enjoyed the experience of being in his orbit, as I shall explore later. It was not just his intimates who saw his humorous side. Once, when a Tour de France stage was en route to Catalunya, Merckx – having had the political situation in the Basque country explained to him – told the Spanish climber Santiago Lazcano that he would shout ‘Long Live a Free Basque Country’, in Basque, when the race entered Spain, at a time when speaking the language was forbidden by Franco. ‘We were absolutely panic-stricken because if he had done it we’d all have gone to prison,’ recalled one of Lazcano’s teammates.
The most intimate picture of Merckx is drawn by his manager and confidant Jan Van Buggenhout, quoted at length in Qui Êtes-Vous, Eddy Merckx? ‘He never discusses the figures in his contracts. He has blind confidence in me. But when it comes to business he is less trusting. He examines every detail and does nothing lightly. He can hesitate a long time before signing up for a lucrative deal.’ Van Buggenhout added that Merckx needed to be guided rather than led or driven. ‘When it’s something delicate or unpleasant you have to use a lot of psychology. The key thing is never to tackle the issue head-on but take him there by a roundabout way.’ Merckx, he said, would ‘listen, but wouldn’t hear. Sometimes he seems as if he is open to being influenced; in fact he’s not that interested in what those around him have to suggest. He has his opinion and sticks to it. If he hesitates, it’s due to the questions that he himself is asking rather than what is being asked by those around him.’
The king of cycling was certainly not mechanical or robotic in his diet and lifestyle. He did not follow the lines drawn up by Fausto Coppi and Louison Bobet, who were legendarily strict in their diets and lifestyles. He was not an ascetic semi-monk like Gimondi. He was fond of a beer. Smoking was actually recommended by some team doctors to wind down after a race; the Faema doctor advised Merckx to have the odd one so he would occasionally nip into Roger Swerts’s room to get a cigarette, Swerts being the team’s smoker. If anything, he veered more towards the bon vivant lifestyle of Jacques Anquetil, although without the excess of Master Jacques, said Van Buggenhout. Vittorio Adorni came across Merckx and his teammates knocking back beers in his hotel room one evening during the 1968 Giro.
The evening before the fatal track meeting in Blois he had shown he was no ascetic. Jørgen Leth recalls a similar episode when Merckx visited Copenhagen for a criterium. Naturally Merckx won the race, and he and the Danish time trial specialist Ole Ritter then spent much of the night in a famously louche nightclub knocking back whisky, after which the great man flew on to his next appointment in Spain, where he won again. ‘It made a huge impression on Ritter, the fact that, like Anquetil, Merckx could let his hair down,’ says Leth. Over the winter he would tend to put on five kilos, getting down to seventy-five at the start of the season and seventy-two by the start of the Tour. A cycling god he may have been, but he had human frailties.
For cycling, the next three or four years were those of what Antoine Blondin termed, with no apparent sense of irony, ‘the glorious certainty of sport’. The irony was, of course, that the certainty among fans and media that Merckx would win stemmed largely from Merckx’s personal fear of losing. Théo Mathy summed it up: ‘Bike races live through Merckx. He gives them meaning, logic and lustre.’ It was not mere
ly that Merckx would be expected to win, he would dominate every area. The only parallel for this in recent years in cycling has been Lance Armstrong’s ascendancy over the Tour de France from 2003 onwards. The difference is clear, however: Armstrong did it only in one three-week race, once a year.
Merckx achieved dominance in spite of the after-effects of Blois, but paradoxically also because of the crash. Put together, the fatal accident in central France and the doping scandal at Savona brought an abrupt and brutal end to Merckx’s precocious youth. After 1969, he knew that nothing could be taken for granted. His innate tendency towards insecurity was firmly established. The death of Fernand Wambst scarred him, and his own serious injury at Blois showed that everything he had could evaporate in an instant. The ‘positive but not positive’ episode at the Giro proved that human duplicity could rob him of any victory. Before those two events, he was by far the strongest cyclist in the world both physically and mentally; afterwards it was hardly surprising that he would consume everything his sport had to offer, amid complaints that he was leaving too little for the rest.
In the early 1970s, Merckx seemed to have no limits, but the other side of the coin was that racing Merckx-style implied complete domination. This did not make the Belgian popular in France. The equivocal feelings among the French towards Merckx were best summed up by Jacques Goddet, who had been similarly undecided twenty years earlier about Fausto Coppi. For all his stature in French sport, Goddet clearly could not reconcile his triple role as race organiser, l’Equipe head and enthusiastic sports writer. In fairness to the Frenchman, no one could have steered an even course through this set of conflicting interests.
‘Merckx arrived in Paris to seal an imperial feat, admired but surrounded by a rather indefinable halo of embarrassment,’ wrote the great man at the end of the 1970 Tour, responding to his own criticisms of Merckx forty-eight hours earlier. ‘We have ended up with a disconcerting paradox, because we get tired rapidly of watching a super-athlete winning every day and imposing himself on an event merely by the fact that he is there. We almost resent the fact that such a phenomenon exists. Power wears us down, dictatorship leads to rebellion.’
As early as the end of the 1970 Tour, Goddet was almost pleading for Merckx to show signs of weakness: ‘In order to idolise a sportsman we have to see the object of our affections occasionally struggle and show fear, go through dangers without necessarily being able to overcome them. At the end of this Tour, all those who follow the race are asking the same question: what do we have to do to avoid Merckx gagging cycling thanks to his permanent supremacy? What particular formula must the Tour adopt – assuming we consider it the main event in cycling – to escape the effects of Merckxism?’ Goddet didn’t know the answer, but it was actually simple: call in the Spanish.
SCORCHED BY THE SUN KING
‘The finish of today’s stage of the Giro will be transmitted at 3.30 for Merckx, 4 p.m. for Gimondi’.
Italian joke of the 1970s
THERE WAS A talented cyclist who happened to be born at the same time as Eddy Merckx. Like so many others, the cyclist spent the best years of his career trying to beat Merckx but was constantly frustrated. Time and again he knew he was in perfect form, time and again The Cannibal defeated him. When he died, the pro went to Heaven and was greeted by St Peter. The saint put him on the start line of a race on the smoothest velodrome he had ever seen, on the finest handbuilt Italian frame.
All the greats who had predeceased him were on the start line: Fausto Coppi, Maurice Garin, Ottavio Bottecchia and so on, but, even so, our cyclist knew he could win. He rode the perfect race, timed his effort just right, and had victory in the bag on the final lap. As the line approached, however, he sensed a wheel coming past, glanced to the side and saw the face of The Cannibal.
Afterwards, in a state of some distress, the cyclist went up to St Peter and said, ‘Eddy isn’t dead yet, what’s he doing here?’ St Peter replied gravely: ‘That wasn’t Merckx. It was God. He likes to pretend he’s Merckx.’
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Merckx’s rivals are rarely given the respect they deserve. It’s not just the jokes. In his 2011 history of Italian cycling, Pedalare! Pedalare!, John Foot describes the pop songs that were written in Italy about Gimondi’s constant defeats by Merckx. ‘I am even more alone than before, and The Cannibal is already at the mountain top and I have to press on to catch him,’ sang Enrico Ruggieri. In the song ‘Sono Felice’ (I am Felice or I am happy) Elio e le Storie Tese wrote, ‘Sometimes he [Merckx] rides off, he doesn’t wait for me, he leaves me with Bitossi, it drives me crazy’. The press – who wanted to see epic battles and nothing else – derided Merckx’s rivals as dwarves and Lilliputians. Jacques Goddet’s report in l’Equipe the day after his epic ride to Mourenx set the tone: ‘For 120 kilometres they proceeded in a sad, desolate retreat, men resigned to their fate, soldiers who seemed almost demobilised. It was not a glorious attitude but you can understand how heartbreaking it must be faced with such a basic inequality in opposing forces and relative strength.’ The same newspaper described Merckx’s opponents in the 1970 Paris–Roubaix as ‘reduced to bit-part players, poor creatures covered in mud, flattened, dazed, incapable of understanding why they had such contrasting status’.
One thing cannot be said often enough: Merckx was the greatest, but the men who contested the races with him, and usually lost, were far more than also-rans. They had several things in common with him. They were all part of a highly talented generation that was born in the second half of the Second World War, or just after: Gimondi, 1942; Godefroot, Van Springel, 1943; Luis Ocaña and José Manuel Fuente. 1945; Eric Leman, Lucien Van Impe and Joop Zoetemelk 1946; De Vlaeminck, Guimard, 1947. Raymond Poulidor was the exception, being born in 1936, and having turned professional six years before Merckx. He, Gimondi, Godefroot, Van Springel, Van Impe, De Vlaeminck and Zoetemelk all enjoyed far longer careers than the average, as indeed did Merckx himself. Ocaña’s career, at ten years, was definitely one of the shortest, along with that of Guimard, who lasted eight years, and Fuente, who quit after just six. This trio all burned themselves out physically and mentally in trying to match Merckx.
The reason why Merckx is not perceived as having any opposition is that, unlike with Anquetil or Coppi, there was no single specific rival to contrast with him, no figure to be his equivalent of Raymond Poulidor or Gino Bartali. Ocaña’s challenge only lasted for three years. Apart from the Spaniard the assault came from disparate sources, like waves crashing on a battleship, and to about as much effect. The boat was rocked on occasion, but no more. There was no other dreadnought on the horizon. However, Merckx’s leading rivals forged considerable records in The Cannibal’s shadow, winning enough major races to be placed firmly among the greats of the sport. In spite of the number of races Merckx won – and they did not – Godefroot, De Vlaeminck and Van Springel still rate among the top Classics riders of all time. Gimondi ranks fourth in the all-time hierarchy of Italian cycling, while Van Impe, Zoetemelk and Raymond Poulidor have their place among the most prolific and most consistent Tour de France finishers.
They were great cyclists. But they were unable to compete with Merckx on a daily basis. ‘I remember the days when I was in the same form as Eddy,’ said one. ‘There must have been four a year. About as many as Eddy had bad days.’ ‘At a certain point you just give up. You have no option. If [winning] doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen,’ said Van Springel. Godefroot recalled being dropped together with Van Springel as Merckx went to the front one day: ‘he [Van Springel] looked at me and we just said “welcome to the club”.’ ‘You would be happy to be second in a Classic after Merckx,’ said Frans Verbeeck, who went to considerable lengths to try to match Merckx. He would train up a one-in-five hill using a large fixed gear (50×18) to build his thigh strength, tackling the climb forty-five times in one day.
‘I never thought Merckx was in a class of his own,’ says Walter Godefroot, who felt that some riders tried to avoid direct confron
tation with Merckx, but he just went in there ‘with his visor open’. ‘For me he was a competitor like any other. Now, when I think back, it’s clear perhaps I would have won more races if Merckx hadn’t been there. But I gave it all I had without being fixated by Merckx. I respected him as a competitor, because you could see what he was capable of. If I did two-hundred-metre turns in a break, Merckx’s turns would last a kilometre. If he got away, you would never get him back.’ For the lesser riders, merely beating Merckx once was a career highlight. ‘To see a photo with yourself in front and Merckx behind is truly satisfying, even if it only happened once and in some chipper of a race,’ said the Spaniard Domingo ‘Txomin’ Perurena. ‘Most of the time, you spent looking at his arse.’
Because of Merckx’s dominance the opposition had no option but to base their race around him, if only to hang on as long as they could. Most top-level cyclists are attuned to the idea that they will encounter opponents who are better on certain days, and on certain terrains. That is part of the great mystery of road racing. They in turn will be better on their day. What baffled Merckx’s rivals was that they had never had to cope with an opponent who was better on a daily basis, and not just in major events. Contemporaries recall secondary races – stages of the Tour of Belgium, one-day races in Italy – when Merckx would race as if he were contesting a Classic. Van Springel recalled a Giro del Piemonte when Merckx attacked sixty kilometres from the finish, and spent the rest of the race 200 metres ahead of the best Italian riders, all of them chasing like fury. He never turned his head, apparently never contemplating giving up.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 15