As the gradient eased near the summit, Merckx responded with his own move, taking the descent flat out. This was not unexpected. Thévenet remembers now that the Belgian attacked on every descent in that race (apart from one, of which more later). ‘He knew I wasn’t as good a descender as he was, and he had won the 1971 Tour like that, when Luis Ocaña tried to stay with him and fell.’ The Frenchman had to change a wheel as the road plummeted down, getting back to Merckx after a long chase with his teammate Raymond Delisle.
Merckx, having worked out that his Peugeot rival might be vulnerable – and, according to his directeur sportif, Bob Lelangue, feeling under threat himself – put Molteni to work on the next climb, the Col d’Allos, longer than the Champs and higher, running through a bleak backdrop of high meadows, and with another appallingly tricky descent. Less than a kilometre from the summit Merckx made what he hoped would be the race-winning move, getting rid of Thévenet and Gimondi before the downhill. It was, says Thévenet, the most impressive moment of the stage. ‘Oh la la, du grand Merckx. I wasn’t feeling great, because I had made a big effort to get back to him, and he knew it. It was really quite something. Quite amazing. He was very very strong. I just couldn’t follow. He was really going well at that point.’
At the foot of the descent, Merckx had thirty-one seconds’ lead on Gimondi, one minute thirteen seconds on Thévenet. The Tour should have been won, with only the 6.5-kilometre climb to the finish remaining. But suddenly the great man cracked, on what was a far easier ascent than any of the other finishes that year. Thévenet doesn’t remember any key moment, just the sense that the race was turning again as the time gap got smaller, each time he heard it. ‘I felt I was coming back to him, then I saw the cars in front of me. But of course I didn’t know where he was in relation to the cars. To be honest, I rode so hard up that climb that it wasn’t a surprise when I caught him. I was flat out, but I had no idea he had slowed as much as he had. I didn’t think I was going to take nearly two minutes out of him. I was actually worried he might stay with me so I accelerated so he couldn’t take my wheel.’
‘The most incredible reversal the Tour has ever seen,’ wrote Pierre Chany. As Thévenet passed Merckx, four kilometres from the line, neither looked at the other. It is a telling image: the eyes of both men are fixed on the road ahead. Thévenet has the hungry look of a man who wants to devour the final kilometres as he lifts himself out of the saddle to accelerate past. Merckx has an air of pure desperation as if he dreads what may lie ahead. Thévenet admitted later he had no idea of the implications of the moment: Merckx losing the Tour for the first time.
He described that moment to l’Equipe in 2003: ‘It’s stupid, I was there, but I didn’t see it. If I had known all that, I would have looked at him as I overtook him.’ He was thinking only of the shining band of melting tarmac between the two of them, that, if he went to the right of it, Merckx would not want to ride across to take his wheel because he might get stuck. ‘It was as if we each had half the road, with a great gulf between us. I wasn’t thinking about him. He couldn’t catch me now. I didn’t know it was a historic moment, that this was the last time he would wear the yellow jersey in the Tour. I can only remember the shining band of tarmac. And the fact that I’d stuffed him.’ He heard his manager, Maurice de Muer, shout, ‘“he’s cracking, he’s cooked”. I didn’t hesitate.’
One by one, Gimondi, Thévenet and Merckx’s old rivals Zoetemelk and Van Impe had all gone past him; Merckx finished fifth, one minute fifty-six seconds back, a spectacular time loss, given that one minute per kilometre is about the norm for a non-climber compared to a mountain specialist. The image as he came up the finish straight left no room for doubt: he was hunched, uncomfortable, arms straight rather than pulling viciously on the bars as they did when he was pushing hard on the pedals. He looked resigned to defeat, tired mentally as much as physically. He was at a loss to understand why, having been in a position to attack Thévenet, he ended up losing the lead. It was not hypoglycaemia – the bonk, as cyclists call it – as he had no memory of devouring food afterwards, as cyclists do when they run out of fuel. The only conclusion that he could come to was that it was related to the medicine the doctor had given him before the start, plus the fact that his back muscles were full of tension from the punch. Perhaps a younger rider, more supple, who hadn’t pushed his organism to the limit for years, might have recovered more quickly.
The following day the Tour travelled to Serre-Chevalier over the Vars and Izoard passes. Merckx’s plan was to attack Thévenet on the Izoard, using the twenty-kilometre descent to Briançon before the uphill finish to put his rival under pressure. But he threw his plan to the four winds. Again he was forced to take a painkiller during the stage because of the aching in his back from the punch, and again he attacked, this time following an early move on the descent from the Vars – where again Thévenet was not at his ease – joining a lead trio of Zoetemelk, Francisco Galdós and Mariano Martínez. They refused to collaborate with him on the valley leading to the Izoard, although they had a minute’s lead, and Merckx sat up to wait for the bunch. Over the Izoard Thévenet made his move, gained over two minutes, and the Tour was as good as won. It was, says the Frenchman now, the critical day, rather than Pra-Loup, but it is Pra-Loup that is talked about now. ‘I won the Tour at Serre-Chevalier, that was where I opened the gap. I was lucky, as Eddy was stronger at the start, I was a bit better in the mountains, but we were pretty much at the same level in the final week. I wasn’t that good at Pra-Loup, but over the Izoard, he had a not-so-good day, I had a good one.’
Merckx’s sufferings, however, were just beginning. The next morning came the crash with Ole Ritter, in the neutralised zone between the start in Valloire and the départ réel outside the ski station, as the peloton prepared for the brief climb up the Col du Télégraphe, followed by the far longer descent into the Maurienne valley.1 ‘I remember this stage clearly,’ the Dane told me. ‘Everyone wanted to get to the front, and pushed and shoved for a better position before the twenty-one-kilometre-long descent. Eddy Merckx yelled at me “Ole, move over!” but I too wanted to get ahead so I remained where I was. This resulted in Eddy’s front wheel hitting my rear wheel and he went down on the tarmac.’ Thévenet first had an inkling that something might be amiss on the descent, when Merckx did not put in his usual attack going down the lengthy series of steep hairpins. He recalled that this was so unusual – ‘I said to myself, “tiens, c’est bizarre”’ – that, once they arrived in the valley, he went to find the Belgian at the back of the bunch. ‘His cheek was covered in ointment. I didn’t know how bad he was. The thing was, he often complained, and often when he said something was wrong with him, that meant he was going well. I didn’t know what state he was in for the rest of the race, whether he was good or bad, and it wasn’t until after the Tour finished that I found out he was in a really rough state. I was used to him trying to kid us a bit, exaggerating a bit so that we would all let him race as he wanted to. What I remember from the end of that stage is that I was really annoyed when he took those two seconds from me. He hadn’t managed to attack me before. I felt overconfident, and that put me back in touch with reality.’
Instead of going home as common sense and the doctors suggested, Merckx regained a little more time during the time trial stage from Morzine to Châtel – although his silk world champion’s jersey, with race number pinned on, was stolen from the bed in his hotel room, so he had to use a less aerodynamic cotton one. He regained fifteen seconds on Thévenet, who was suffering the after-effects of a crash while warming up, but the time trial was probably the most painful experience in his racing career since the Hour Record. ‘When he got off his bike, his jerky gestures, livid skin, strangely focused look, his eyes sunk too far into his skull and the tic on one cheek twitching gave him the look of a madman. He was frightening to see,’ wrote Théo Mathy.
Half an hour after the finish the same journalist went to visit him in his room, only to find him ly
ing on his bed, unconscious, in the foetal position, still in his dirty race kit. It was another hour before he found the strength to take a bath. He could not eat solid food. He refused point-blank to take any antibiotics, on the grounds that he had taken thousands of units to get rid of the throat infection he suffered in May, and they would weaken his system.
He pulled back another sixteen seconds on Thévenet before the finish in Paris, when the Frenchman fell near the stage finish in Senlis, but the victory was pyrrhic. Thévenet triumphed overall by two minutes forty-seven seconds, the first time Merckx had failed to win the Tour in six starts. The race finished on the Champs-Elysées for the first time, and the 100,000 crowd that had come to see the first French winner in eight years instead got to see a final act of panache from the fading champion. ‘He had never known as much sympathy in France as when, beaten for the first time in the Tour, he completed the final laps on the Champs-Elysees,’ wrote Nicholson. ‘He [Merckx] has not lost the Tour, he has finished second,’ said the French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing as he awarded Thévenet his final yellow jersey.
The effects of the 1975 Tour were long-lasting. Merckx regretted the courage he had shown. One teammate claimed he stayed in the race for their sake, because he knew they would lose money if he pulled out. ‘I was dumb,’ said Merckx later. ‘I could have compensated my teammates.’ It was one of the few things in his time in cycling that he would have done differently if he had the chance. It was, he believed, a turning point in his career, the moment at which he started to go downhill because he had asked too much of his system. ‘But what made me go on? That time, it was pure madness. But I wasn’t suicidal by nature, and I had no desire to die on the bike.’
Although early in his career Merckx had been adamant that he would not race beyond his thirtieth year – because as early as 1970 he had recognised that his extravagant racing style would not permit him to last long – at the start of 1976 he was convinced he could win that sixth Tour. That was understandable: two outside incidents – the punch and the crash – had contributed to his defeat the previous year, and he had still finished 1975 at the top of the Super Prestige Pernod standings. It was his seventh consecutive win in the Pernod, a record, naturally.
The year 1976 started promisingly, but went downhill rapidly. Milan–San Remo was his final masterpiece but also, according to one of the riders present that day, a win taken when he was actually struggling, the successful attack made in spite of the fact that his strength was running out, and Vandenbroucke was actually the stronger on the road. The rider who told the story did so as an example – yet another – of the physical extremes to which Merckx could push himself as he sought a win, no matter how unlikely eventual victory might seem.
By now his system was so fragile that it took only the slightest reverse to throw him entirely out of kilter. He was still suffering from violent headaches as a result of the crash in the previous year’s Tour. His position on the bike was so delicate that when he hurt his arm in a crash the slight shift of position brought on back pain. He still had trouble with his crutch dating back to the 1974 Tour. ‘Every time I had a health problem or some little difficulty I realised how much I have asked of myself for so many years.’
Mentally and physically he was close to the end of his tether, although he was too proud to realise it. In the final stage of Catalan Week, which he won overall, he fell when a bag got caught in the chain of his bike. He landed on his elbow and spent the whole Classics season trying to race and get over the injury. Meanwhile, Maertens was enjoying the form of his life, winning three Classics, and clearly attempting to throw off accusations that he was a mere sprinter by racing in the style of Merckx. He was attacking well before the finish to win by large margins, as he did in that spring’s Amstel Gold, and that summer’s Belgian national championship.
Merckx regained sufficient health in time to start the Giro, where he finished eighth, the first time he had gone through a major Tour without winning a stage. But he was suffering from a saddle boil. He had the option of stopping the Giro – which he had no chance of winning, and which he had to ride in considerable pain – to have the boil lanced. That might have enabled him to heal in time to race the Tour de France, and possibly win it for the sixth time.
As Nicholson writes, Molteni may have wanted him to finish the Giro – the final day’s time trial was in the company’s home town, Arcore, just north of Milan – but the decision came down to the rider himself. ‘Merckx can make his own terms. It was just as consistent with his own stubborn nature that he should see the race through to the end.’ Abandoning was not his way, as he had shown the year before in the Tour. A few days after the Giro finished he surprised no one by announcing his and Molteni’s withdrawal from the Tour. In the event it turned out to be a curious race, where Thévenet was out of form and neither Lucien Van Impe, the eventual winner, nor the runner-up, Joop Zoetemelk, was at first willing to take the initiative. It is not certain that Merckx would have won it, but he would certainly have changed the race’s complexion.
For the first time since 1968, the Super Prestige Pernod Trophy went elsewhere, to Maertens as it happened. And for the first time since 1966, Merckx ended his season before October. After a full August, including fifth place in the world championship at Ostuni, won by Maertens, he struggled in Paris–Brussels and came down with desperate back trouble after winning the criterium at Bourges in central France in the last week of September. He had to spend six weeks lying down, part of the time on a sheet of wood. So much pain, so little reward: it was hardly surprising that, yet again, he contemplated putting an end to his career, as Molteni pulled out of sponsorship.
1 The stage had started in Valloire, which lies between the Col du Galibier and the Col du Télégraphe. It had taken the brief climb up the Télégraphe in the opposite direction from the Galibier; after the Télégraphe came the far longer descent to the Maurienne.
ALL PASSION SPENT
‘Thinking of the day he would have to retire would be simply too tough for Eddy’. Claudine Merckx, in the film La Course en Tête.
IN THE 1990S, I rode occasionally with a former professional, Ian Banbury. He had been British national champion during a golden age for the sport, when Robert Millar and Sean Yates were in their prime. He had won an Olympic medal on the track in the days when few Britons managed it. He was one of the best British track cyclists ever. He had plenty to boast about. But the story he liked to tell wasn’t about one of his many achievements. It was about the day he saw Eddy Merckx give up.
It happened somewhere in the South of France, some time in the spring of 1978, in a training race, most probably the Grand Prix de Montauroux on 19 February, the first of the five races Merckx rode that season. The way Banbers told it, Merckx went to the front of the bunch, did a massive stint at the head of the line of riders, stretched them out like elastic, then turned round and looked at them all. Then he swung off to one side, slammed on his brakes and pulled into the edge of the road. It was obvious, Banbury believed, that Merckx’s heart wasn’t in racing any more, notwithstanding his five wins in the Tour, five more in the Giro and who knew what else. He quit the race.
As I used to hear the story, it sounded like Merckx’s illustrious career came to an end there and then, but it wasn’t that neat. He raced for the last time on 19 March 1978. But the point for Banbury wasn’t that he had been present at a landmark moment, when history was made. That was precisely the thing. What he saw was a portent. He just felt in his waters that Merckx wasn’t going to last much longer when he saw that little incident. It was of minor significance, but it was his personal Merckx moment. And it meant a lot. As Banbury told it, that little episode seemed more vivid to him than any of his victories or medals.
The greats of cycling rarely make exits that are truly worthy of their careers. Fausto Coppi faded away into nothingness before premature death; Rik Van Steenbergen and Jacques Anquetil frittered away their final years making lucrative appearan
ces. Rik Van Looy just stopped one day because he was fed up. Miguel Indurain rode a Vuelta he didn’t want to be in and simply upped and quit. Lance Armstrong couldn’t keep away and made a comeback to ride one Tour de France too many. Raymond Poulidor, on the other hand, wound up with a Tour podium place at forty before quitting the following year after eighteen years as a professional, but Bernard Hinault achieved the classiest retirement ever, setting the date years in advance and having a massive party in the autumn of 1986. Sean Kelly went out in similar style, with Merckx, De Vlaeminck, Hinault and many more racing around his home village in Ireland to celebrate the last of the old-style champions.
The question through 1977 was how and when Merckx would call time. He had his obligations to fulfil: a new sponsor, FIAT, who wanted to see him race, and an entire team of domestiques dependent on him for their income. In a curious twist, the team was managed by Raphael Geminiani, because it was sponsored by FIAT France. Geminiani had wanted to direct Merckx at the start of his career, but in the long term ‘The Big Gun’ and The Cannibal did not make a winning combination. The season started well enough when Merckx took the Grand Prix d’Aix en Provence and the Tour of the Mediterranean. It was not the stuff of dreams but enough to make him dream. Another win followed, the Paris–Nice stage finishing in Digne, where he ran in one second ahead of the bunch sprint won by Patrick Sercu from Freddy Maertens, who took five of the twelve stages that year. He was unable to finish Paris–Nice, however, although he made it to the final stage, then came down with sinusitis – which was linked to the crash at Valloire in 1975 – then glandular fever, which was never truly diagnosed, at least not until he had virtually recovered.
As in the previous spring, he was merely coming close to winning races he had dominated outrageously in the past: 9th in Amstel Gold Race, 11th in Paris–Roubaix, 6th in Liège– Bastogne–Liège. At the criterium in Camors, Brittany, on 10 April, he finished first, ahead of a young Breton with a brutally determined face: Bernard Hinault. Another criterium, a couple of months later, took him to the newly opened circuit at Temple Mills in London’s East End, a race instigated by the boxing promoter Mike Barrett, where he finished second.1 Merckx rode respectably in the Dauphiné Libéré and Tour of Switzerland, where he won the stage into Bellinzona, his last major victory, all of which was just enough to suggest he might be able to challenge in the strangely structured 1977 Tour de France.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 26