Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1. Folgorazione

  2. Something in the Water

  3. Fire and Ice

  4. Eddy, Ciao

  5. New World Order

  6. End of the World as We Know It

  7. Benefit of the Doubt?

  8. First Man on the Moon

  9. Down and Out?

  10. A New Merckx

  11. The Gypsy and a Nomad

  12. Deplumed

  13. If

  14. Hour of Need

  15. Sign of the Times

  16. Knockout!

  17. Cannibalised

  18. A Spoonful of Sugar

  19. Reinvention and Reappraisal

  Epilogue

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  ‘The whole point of a race is to find a winner … I choose to race so I choose to win’ EDDIE MERCKX

  Between 1965 and 1978 Edouard Merckx took over the world of cycling, amassing an unequalled 525 victories and demolishing anything and anyone who got in his way. Merckx was cycling’s Pelé, its Ali, even its Elvis. He was better and stronger than his rivals, but he was also different to anything that had come before. His fourteen-year reign would revolutionise the sport.

  The man who raced was a cannibal who devoured his rivals, with eyes only for victory. He was unmatched and insatiable; some even said he had magic in his legs. But the man who stepped onto the podium was an enigma. Unable to get to the bottom of what gave the Cannibal his hunger, frustrated journalists concluded that Eddy Merckx must simply be a machine.

  The truth was more complicated. Merckx was plagued with nerves and self-doubt, which he could only escape when racing. Off his bike, he obsessed about every ache, despite enduring enormous physical pain to be first to cross the line. His peers reconciled themselves to defeat, but Merckx feared losing more than anything else. And when the inevitable end of his career dawned he was ill equipped to recognise or admit his decline.

  Merckx’s era was a golden age full of memorable characters who, at any other time, would have become legends. Daniel Friebe has interviewed Felice Gimondi, Roger De Vlaeminck, Freddy Maertens, Bernard Thévenet, Raymond Poulidor, Walter Godefroot and many more of Merckx’s favourite victims to recreate the Cannibal’s successes and torments in vivid detail, and finally uncover the truth behind this unique athlete.

  About the Author

  Daniel Friebe is among Britain’s best known and experienced cycling journalists, having covered ten Tours de France and all of the major races on the international calendar. After working as the features editor of Procycling magazine for five years, he is now that globally respected publication’s roving European editor. In 2008, Daniel collaborated with 2010 road race world champion Mark Cavendish on the bestselling Boy Racer. He is also the author of Mountain High: Europe’s 50 Greatest Cycle Climbs. Daniel has written on cycling, football, golf, cricket and tennis for publications including the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, FourFourTwo, Spin Cricket Monthly and Outdoor Fitness magazine.

  To Mum, Dad, and everyone who got eaten

  prologue

  Through the gloom a blink of white, suspended between the twin strobes of a car’s headlights. Seconds pass, the murk recedes. The scene sharpens. The picture acquires light, but also urgency, movement, violence. Two eyes blaze, two shoulders sway, two lips purse. Two thighs thump, pound and pummel.

  A hundred metres closer to us – no 90, no 80, no 70 – another figure advances on his bicycle. Here, somewhere in the dwindling airspace between them – 50 metres, now 40 – the similarities end. They are as different as tiger and a tabby cat, a flail and a combine harvester. Not in stature but menace. Both gazes are fixed on the road, but the quarry’s legs and heart now beat as though to the rhythm of death’s chime.

  Twenty, fifteen, ten metres…

  A raindrop topples off the hunter’s nose. He doesn’t twitch. He kicks and breathes harder. The prey wipes sweat from his forehead, then lowers and tilts his head to face the triangle of daylight between bicep and ribcage.

  He watches, waits and listens.

  One second, two. Two metres, one…

  Eddy Merckx’s old teammate, Vittorio Adorni, used to say there was a key difference between Merckx and Jacques Anquetil, the cyclist he usurped as the world’s greatest. Anquetil appeared without warning, as silent and deadly as a dagger in the back. His pedal stroke was ‘soft’, ‘velvety’. He arrived with a murmur. He was gone with a whoosh.

  Here was the difference between ‘Master Jacques’ and Merckx, said Adorni. You heard Merckx. Felt him. Not necessarily sounds but signs, a sense. The feeling of something brewing, stirring at your back. A creeping intuition. Not the normal whirring of pedals and wheels but a thudding through the atmosphere. ‘A different way of pedalling from the rest of us,’ as Dino Zandegù, the 1967 Tour of Flanders champion, put it. A trouble. The rustling wrath of the ‘one-man forest fire’ that Italian rider Giancarlo Ferretti said came upon professional cycling in the late 1960s – and destroyed everything in its wake for nearly a decade.

  You still know when Eddy Merckx is close by today but for different reasons. On a chilly April morning in Merckx’s 66th year, his movements can be traced by the bulges and constrictions of a vast crowd in Bruges’s Grote Markt, like an egg passing through a snake’s abdomen. This is the most important day in the most important sport in Belgium. Yet it seems the tens of thousands here for the start of the Tour of Flanders only have eyes for Merckx. A good 15, maybe 20 kilos plumper than in his racing days, but slimmer than a decade ago, he has the air, the attire and the practised smile of a dignitary. An urban legend goes that, in the late ’60s and ’70s, his one-time hunting partner the King of Belgium would occasionally put on street clothes and head out for a drive in his Mercedes. No one would recognise him. The yarn continues, though, that Merckx ‘was better known than the king’. He would ‘cause a riot’ if he ever tried the same trick.

  A Flemish journalist observes the scene, his arms folded in admiration. Arms that 15 years ago, when he prepared to interview his boyhood idol for the first time, were prickly with upright hairs. ‘He grabbed my wrist and said, “Talk!”,’ the hack recalls. When it comes to writing about or talking to Eddy Merckx, one of his colleagues tuts, Belgian journalists sometimes stop being journalists.

  Everyone who is anyone who rode a bike in the ’60s and ’70s remembers the moment they first met Merckx. But they also remember their first ‘Merckx moment’. Usually it involves that noise, a jangle in the bones, and a glance over the shoulder. A silhouette appears, the wind seems to flinch, the features reveal themselves then recognition kicks in. And with it panic.

  At the 1967 Tour of Flanders, Barry Hoban heard the engines before he heard Merckx. ‘I thought, what’s going on? Then I looked back at these cars arriving through the rain – it was a rotten day – and in front of them saw him, Merckx. Then I thought, “Uh oh.”’

  A couple of months later, the Italian Italo Zilioli had a similar experience. Alone off the front, within a few hundred metres of the summit of the Blockhaus climb and the finish line of Stage 12 of the Giro d’Italia, Zilioli sensed an imminent commotion. His instinct told him to turn. ‘You couldn’t say he really loomed, because it was two separate images,’ Zilioli recalls. ‘He was maybe a hundred metres behind me and then he was in front. Immediately. A few seconds must have elapsed in between, but not in my mind… My feeling at that moment was, well, it was like being struck by lightning.’
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br />   Merckx’s peers all have stories like this. In the 1990s, the advent of the new wonder-drug EPO caused what those not in the first wave of abusers described as a sudden and vicious jolt. ‘The speed suddenly went up by five kilometres an hour,’ they complained. Worse still, they didn’t know why. But as word of the drug’s potency spread, the mystery disappeared; EPO-enhanced blood could deliver 10 or 20 per cent more oxygen to the muscles in some cases. It stood to reason that performances should also soar.

  The former French rider Raymond Riotte recalls a similar phenomenon in the sixties. But that wasn’t drugs, or at least not new ones that weren’t available to and taken by the bulk of the peloton. ‘It was Merckx,’ Riotte says. ‘I rode the Tour that Roger Pingeon won in 1967, and Jan Janssen’s in 1968, and I swear that everything felt ten kilometres quicker when Merckx arrived in 1969. The difference was, it was…c’était terrible.’

  Riotte’s voice still tremors with aftershocks 42 years later. What, indeed, was going on? Who was this prodigy, this phenomenon? This, this brute. Football had Pelé, golf had discovered Nicklaus, but weren’t they just an upgrade on everything their sport had seen before, mere offspring of evolution? Higher, faster, stronger, said the Olympic ideal, its three pillars the very synthesis of sporting advancement – but nowhere did it mention difference. For when, as early as 1968, newspapers started saying that Merckx was ‘in another league’ and ‘racing against himself’, they weren’t only saying that he was much better than the rest. ‘No, at times it was actually like a different sport,’ observes former opponent Johny Schleck. Different from the past, from the sport Anquetil had dominated before Merckx, and the Italian Fausto Coppi before him. Different from the one practised now by his contemporaries.

  Bicycle racing is a strange game. Such are its vagaries that even the strongest cyclist will lose far more often than he wins. One rider, the Italian Marzio Bruseghin, once declared that his chosen profession boiled down to ‘two hundred idiots trying to cross a white line’, and you could sort of see what he meant. Some riders will go through an entire career without winning a race yet still be admired. Ace climbers flounder in sprints, the best sprinters hate having to climb. Even the most successful and prolific rider will start perhaps 60 per cent of his races in any given season knowing full well that he has zero chance and zero ambition of breaking the tape. If you don’t think you can win, don’t bother taking part, goes one of sport’s oldest clichés. Well, if a professional peloton heeded this advice, that number of idiots would be down to double, and in some cases single, figures.

  Merckx’s brilliance and difference revealed themselves in this context over several months in the mid and late 1960s. Silly as it sounds, history and logic indicated that the biggest idiot in that period was the one who arrived at every race thinking that he could win. Except that Merckx was no fool, and win often he did. Over 500 times by the end of his career in 1978. Still, though, the concept that one could and should race to win on every outing – and that anyone was capable of attempting it – seemed utterly alien. Where was the catch? Why didn’t everyone ride like this? Perhaps those vagaries were just excuses. Ah, but you see, sceptics consoled themselves, Merckx would soon burn out. The newspapers said it, commentators echoed them, his rivals too, and even Merckx made mutterings to the same effect. But on he rolled, confounding everyone and every precedent. ‘Often we thought he was crazy – but in the end he was the one who ended up making us look like fools,’ admits Giancarlo Ferretti.

  Merckx’s French biographer Philippe Brunel is right when he says that it wasn’t just how he approached his sport, but also his life. ‘He had a different way of attacking life from the rest of us,’ Brunel says. Again, that word: ‘different’. In a sport that glorifies suffering, sacrifice and endurance, Merckx turned them from a kind of martyrdom into forms of private elation and personal compulsion. The hunger for victories that prompted a teammate’s daughter to christen him ‘The Cannibal’ – and the world to adopt that moniker – was really a craving for what he found only at the outer limits of his physical and mental capabilities. ‘The whole point of a race is to find a winner. How can you take part without trying to win? How can you be criticised for doing what is the object of your chosen work?’ he pleaded almost ad nauseam.

  A simple sport for a complicated mind – that was cycling as seen by Merckx. ‘I’m only truly happy when I’m on my bike,’ he admitted in 1970. Thus, one man’s search for simplicity found its outlet in perfectionism. Or perhaps absolutism was a better word. For when Merckx said ‘when I’m on my bike’, what he really meant was ‘winning on his bike’. And that meant battling not only his adversaries but also himself. Especially himself. To the point where he suffered nightmares, nerves that tied knots in his stomach, and endless, labyrinthine self-doubt.

  All of which gave us two Merckxes: the pedalling despot, blunt and guileless, and the Sphinx who stepped off his bike and on to race podiums. Joy would flicker briefly across otherwise inscrutable features, relief would exhale from his lungs, but the overriding impression was one of impatience or at least restlessness. The opposition may have been far behind – sometimes, literally, still racing on the road – but Merckx’s ears already thumped to a familiar beat. This was the noise drumming at his back. Where was his bike? – the same question he asked wife Claudine within moments of returning home after the crash that nearly killed him in Blois in 1969. Where was his next race? When, if ever, would his appetite be sated?

  For all that has been written about Merckx, so much of his persona remains unexplained. Flemish journalist Walter Pauli said that continual losses and humiliation harboured one consolation for his rivals and a curse for their perpetrator: ‘In one sense, they saw more of life than him. They became more real. They realised that losing was a fact of life, not just sport. For Merckx, on the other hand, losing always meant that something had gone wrong.’ In other words, as a group of boys became men, Merckx remained cocooned in a child’s illusion of omnipotence, imprisoned by the very regime he had imposed. ‘In order to be human, Eddy Merckx would have had to be superhuman,’ is Pauli’s wry conclusion.

  So who really knew Merckx? His teammates? Not according to Roger Swerts, one of the best and longest-serving, who said he was still none the wiser after 25 years in the Merckx orbit, during and after their careers. Misty-eyed former comrades describe the Faema and Molteni teams which grew around him as ‘a band of friends’. The more clear-sighted among them, though, also speak of a latent, inescapable, asphyxiating tension. At the dinner table, the captain’s mood dictated that of his lieutenants. There was nothing unusual about that, but it became troublesome when not even they could tell exactly what he was thinking. It was maybe no coincidence that, for many years, Merckx’s best friend in cycling was the painfully sensitive Italo Zilioli – a man in the grip of his own torments. More straightforward characters like Martin Van Den Bossche grew weary of the aura that came to resemble a fortress. ‘If he ordered a Trappist beer, everyone ordered a Trappist beer. As an individual, you might as well have been dead when you were next to Merckx,’ Van Den Bossche told Rik Vanwalleghem in the 1993 book, Eddy Merckx – De Mens achter de Kannibaal.

  It seems clear, then, that a lot remains to be deciphered. As well as Merckx himself, there is the peer group he eclipsed, practically effaced, but which formed as bright a constellation as cycling has ever seen. The swashbuckling Ocaña, the mercurial Fuente. The pride of Van Looy and the De Vlaeminck brothers. Gimondi’s tenacity, Maertens’s audacity. These were rich, textured, vulnerable personalities. As rich and textured, no doubt, as Merckx, but with the freedom of expression which only fallibility affords.

  It was an age, too, when humanity itself was in flux. While Merckx was making his first grand tour appearance in the 1967 Giro d’Italia, 100,000 hippies were preparing to converge on San Francisco for their ‘Summer of Love’. The following year, he rampaged through the Giro as students and workers tore through cities across the world and American
troops through Vietnam. In July 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon within hours of Merckx going where no one had been before in the Tour de France – to a 17-minute winning margin in his very first Grande Boucle. A month later, across one long weekend, Merckx won criteriums at Londerzeel, Saussignac and Moorslede on the days that half a million people watched Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young make musical magic at Woodstock.

  Nine months of interviews and meetings with these individuals form the basis of this portrait of Eddy Merckx. In amongst it all there are characters to decrypt, relationships to unpick, with friends, family members, teammates, enemies and observers. Merckx himself declined my request for an interview, as did his wife Claudine. In an email they informed me that they are contractually tied to their own, official project. But instead of proving a handicap, this turned into a blessing. In researching this book, painstakingly poring over dozens of volumes written about and with him, and hundreds if not thousands of interviews, I was struck by something curious: whatever he says and attempts to explain, the essence of Merckx, what they called ‘Merckxisme’, somehow remains elusive. A mutual friend, the Het Nieuwsblad journalist Hugo Coorevits put it like this: ‘He was born as Eddy Merckx, he lives his life as Eddy Merckx, but he still somehow doesn’t know what it’s like to be Eddy Merckx in the eyes of other people.’ Precisely: at the risk of stating the obvious, Merckx can’t quite understand the fuss because his life is the only one he has ever known.

  The public has a tendency to want to demystify, normalise, pare down the great and the good until we understand them on our own terms, as ordinary folk with the same humdrum habits and tastes as the rest of us, but also a single remarkable talent. This, patently, is how Eddy Merckx perceives himself. And because of that, his past musings may help us to understand certain actions and reactions, but they will never assist us in understanding a bigger, important part of Merckx – the essence and aura that will outlive him and his records.