Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Yes, time has passed and will eventually run out even for Eddy Merckx, and herein lay my final motivation: I never saw Merckx race and neither, in not too long, will anyone have witnessed him in action. Merckx’s generation is getting older, dare we even say, old. In the hours I spent talking to them, they mentioned ailments and operations quite different from the ones that might once have kept them out of a Tour de France or cost them seconds in a time trial. The truths they never told, the memories they never shared, are nearing expiry. As this happens, a new and less gilded recollection of their era begins to take hold, and open creaks a window of both opportunity and responsibility: those who grew up watching Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich, as I did, must now decide how Merckx will be consigned to that dim, distant, two-dimensional place in history where some vibrancy is lost but a different kind of lustre can be gained.

  1

  folgorazione

  ‘You see that kid over there. That’s Eddy Merckx.

  He’s going to be a champion.’ EMILE DAEMS

  AN ELECTROCUTION. ‘UNA folgorazione’ – literally, in Italian, what happens when two pairs of eyes meet, the air sizzles with electricity, the spine tingles and the heart gulps.

  It had happened in the spring of 1967. Not to Claudine Acou, a 21-year-old language student from Brussels who married Eddy Merckx on 5 December 1967. No, their romance had begun four off-seasons earlier in the room above her father Lucien’s café, near the abattoirs in Cureghem. Eddy would come to the café, greet Lucien, the Belgian national amateur team selector, then they would both head upstairs to talk bikes, while Claudine pottered about, pretending not to listen. Soon Eddy’s visits were becoming suspiciously frequent. Claudine was right to sense an ulterior motive. Which was fine by her; she liked his eyes, his smile. Which was fine by him; he liked her grace, her poise.

  The real electrocution in 1967, though, was the one which had befallen Nino Defilippis in the third week of April, a month before the Giro d’Italia. It was a kind of blind date: Vincenzo Giacotto, the matchmaker, had called Defilippis, his former star rider from the Carpano team, and invited him to Cervinia, the resort on the Italian side of the Matterhorn. Giacotto said that he had someone for Defilippis to meet. Truthfully, he wanted Defilippis’s advice; there was a new Italian team in the offing, Giacotto had been lined up as its manager, and he now needed a headline act, preferably one to take the fight to Felice Gimondi in major stage races. Giacotto had seen Merckx win Milan–San Remo in 1966, excel in Paris–Nice the following spring, then retain his Milan–San Remo title, and now he wondered whether the kid couldn’t be turned into more than just a flat-track bully. Giacotto thought he might be on to something, but he couldn’t be sure, not 100 per cent. That was why he had called his old friend Nino.

  Whether Merckx knew it or not, it was a kind of blind date, but also a sort of trial. The climb to Cervinia begins in Breuil and rises for 28 kilometres at an average gradient of 5.1 per cent. It is, Defilippis recalled in the book he wrote in 2004, six years before his death, ‘a climb of a certain difficulty’. Giacotto and Defilippis wanted to see how Merckx would fare. Until that point, he had never raced in the high mountains.

  They cleared the car seats and dashboard, sunk into their seats, and peered expectantly through the windscreen. It was then, moments after the engine started, as the road lurched towards the Matterhorn, Merckx shifted forward in his saddle and began devouring the slope, that Defilippis was ‘electrocuted’.

  ‘The power, the way he attacked the curves, the way he pedalled, I was bowled over,’ Defilippis recalled. ‘I can remember him getting off the bike at the end and asking me how Cervinia measured up to other Alpine climbs. Almost as if to say that he still felt fresh, and was this not a bit too easy?’

  There was a third privileged witness to Merckx’s marvellous ascent. Teofilo Sanson, an ice-cream maker from Turin, had sponsored a team managed by Giacotto in 1965. Surely the best excuse he’d ever have to return to professional cycling was now staring him in the face. That, at least, was Defilippis’s view. ‘I remember that I took Sanson and Giacotto to one side and asked them whether they didn’t have a pen, a scrap of paper, something. Why? To get the kid to somehow sign a lifetime contract, money no object. He could put down whatever he wanted, because this was a real prodigy. And in fact Giacotto didn’t let him get away, unlike Sanson.’

  Giacotto’s new backer would be Faema, the Milan-based coffee-machine maker. Formerly the title sponsor of the team where the last great Belgian, Rik Van Looy, had spent his best years, but absent from the peloton since 1963, Faema now prepared to make its grand re-entrance.

  Its leader, the man Giacotto thought could win Tours and Giros if only he learned to ‘think and race Italian’, was a 22-year-old from Brussels who, before the spring of 1967, had barely if ever ridden up a proper mountain. Its leader would be Eddy Merckx.

  Even with 45 years of hindsight, contemporaries of Eddy Merckx dispute the idea of an ‘electrocution’, some kind of juddering epiphany, when the full magnitude of what was about to strike professional cycling suddenly revealed itself.

  In that respect Nino Defilippis was unusual. But it made sense: the Italian had retired from racing in 1964 and had kept his distance from professional cycling ever since. He had not seen Merckx in 1966 or the spring of 1967. He had probably paid scant attention to the way the defending champion had grabbed the peloton by the scruff of the neck at Milan–San Remo in March ’67, like some uncouth ruffian, then dragged them at record speed along the Ligurian Riviera. To Defilippis, the uniqueness, the difference of Merckx, the way the bike became a threshing machine between his thighs, was surely striking. Giacotto had talked him up as Anquetil’s potential successor; to Defilippis, who competed for years against the Frenchman, they must have seemed as equally brilliant yet as different as Mozart and the Rolling Stones.

  For those who had been around since Merckx turned pro in 1965, the revelation, or the end of self-delusion, was much more gradual. The boat had been rocking for some time, the ripples near the surface were becoming ever more ominous, yet most continued to ignore the evidence. ‘We knew he was a good rider, but he was one of several in Belgium and even more in the world. It was a kind of golden generation,’ says Walter Godefroot, the man who up until the summer of 1967 had staked at least as strong a claim as Merckx to be Belgium’s next world-beater.

  Patrick Sercu endorses the view that ‘we would still never have imagined at that point what he would go on to be’. Primarily a track rider, Sercu had swept on to the scene in the Belgian talent tsunami that included Merckx, Godefroot, Willy Planckaert, Roger Swerts, Joseph Spruyt and the two Hermans, Van Loo and Van Springel. In one sense, Sercu was the most precocious of the lot, having amassed Olympic, European, national and world titles on the track by the age of 23. He had won three of his national titles with Merckx in the Madison. Nonetheless, Merckx remained ‘just a guy who had won a lot of races as an amateur, like a lot of others who had done the same, then totally disappeared,’ Sercu says.

  Years later, in an early glimpse of the anxieties that could gnaw at Merckx, he would reveal that this had been his own greatest fear on winning the world amateur road race title in Sallanches in 1964: he would turn pro and then sink without a trace. He feared the different speed, the longer distances of pro races, their reputation for violent and unexpected changes of pace, so unlike the cruising speed of most amateur competitions. Claudine, whom he had begun to woo within weeks of that 1964 Worlds win, watched apprehension threaten to overwhelm him.

  The truth was that Merckx’s problems in his first professional year would come mainly off the road. They began when he signed for Rik Van Looy’s Solo-Superia team. This had been his manager, Jean Van Buggenhout’s idea. An accomplished track rider in the 1930s, ‘Van Bug’ had reinvented himself as the burly, bespectacled big kahuna of Belgian cycling, some said its most powerful man. He was part agent, part promoter and, says Patrick Sercu, ‘p
art dictator – absolutely terrifying’. He was also undeniably passionate about his sport, and had been immediately struck by the same quality in Merckx when they became acquainted in a brasserie opposite the Palais des Sports in Brussels in 1963. The previous day, Merckx had claimed victory in his first ever stage race, the amateur Tour de Limbourg. ‘The way you talked to me about the race that day won me over. You sounded like a young man full of fervour,’ Van Bug told Merckx years later. Needless to say, when Merckx became amateur champion in Sallanches, it was Van Buggenhout who acted as his agent, and who went on to fulfil that role for the next ten years.

  On the face of it, Solo seemed the ideal place for Merckx. He was, after all, already being tipped as the new Van Looy. But therein lay the problem: as far as Van Looy was concerned, there would never be another Rik Van Looy, let alone a younger and potentially even better version in the same team. The Belgian cycling journalist and Merckx expert Walter Pauli says that this is because one word summed up, and still sums up, Van Looy: ‘Pride’. It came from his modest upbringing in Herentals, in the far north-east of Belgium, a region of which Walter Godefroot remarks with a smirk ‘the people are the most intelligent in Belgium…they say so themselves’. It came also, though, from Van Looy’s uncompromising character, which had been sculpted like his extraordinary calf muscles as he hauled newspapers around Herentals as a teenager. Van Looy’s early successes as a cyclist, including back-to-back Belgian national amateur titles, had then hardened his conviction that the very zenith of professional cycling was where he belonged. The condescending nickname ‘Rik II’ – and the inference that Rik Van Steenbergen remained the original and best of Belgium’s post-war cycling superstars – merely reinforced that belief still further. His other moniker, the Emperor of Herentals, would soon more accurately reflect a palmarès bejewelled with every one of cycling’s one-day Classics, and sit snugly alongside its owner’s reptilian smile.

  Van Looy’s jealousy was, then, the brew resulting from many more or less organic ingredients. As is often the case with sportsmen, his pride and passion had also inspired the same fervency in his followers, which in turn fed Van Looy’s own vainglory. Says journalist Walter Pauli, ‘If you were Van Looy, you never left Van Looy, even when Merckx arrived. My grandmother, for example, was a die-hard Van Looy fan. He was mythical, he was strong…but he was also a very bad character.’

  ‘Bad’ or understandably frustrated, having warred for years with Van Steenbergen, finally outlasted him, then seen the nouvelle vague of Belgian riders threaten to engulf him. Moreover, early in 1965, Van Looy was still blissfully unaware that he was about to embark on his final season as the finest one-day rider in Belgium and probably the world. Supported by his now legendary ‘Rode Garde’, the ‘Red Guard’ which had first formed in his Faema days and which some still describe as cycling’s first true sprint train, Van Looy was in no mood to make way for or groom possible heirs. The closest he came to endorsing a young rider was faint praise for Godefroot – who happened to be riding for another team, Wiel’s-Groene Leeuw. Today, Godefroot is emphatic about why Van Looy and the Rode Garde didn’t welcome Merckx. ‘It’s very simple,’ he says. ‘If I’d been a footballer, I’d have been a midfielder: I’d have been in the middle of the park, controlling the game. But Merckx is the guy putting it in the net. Van Looy too. As a super-champion, you’re not a good teammate. You’re a bit selfish, a bit individualistic. It’s not your fault; it’s the reality…’

  He continues, ‘Van Looy is the king, the “Emperor” as we say, and Merckx is the king in waiting. So of course there’s a battle. And two clans form: the Van Looy clan and the Merckx clan. Some people in Van Looy’s team are even in the Merckx clan. And you see it in races, even in the fight for bonus sprints. It lasts three or four years. And the public loves it, because it’s war between Merckx and Van Looy and war between their fans.’

  For all that, to some, it could seem there was much to dislike about Rik Van Looy in his twilight years, no one doubted either the bike racer he had been or the cunning old lizard he remained. While others cocooned themselves in denial, were blinkered by their own youthful ambition, or simply weren’t paying attention, Van Looy had one beady eye permanently trained on the surrounding seas. It can’t have been long before he noticed a stirring in the waves.

  ‘Bikers are bikers, pros are pros,’ says Walter Pauli. ‘Van Looy could see what was coming, he could smell it. I’m sure of it…’

  If that was true, the ‘Emperor’ appeared determined to revel in his own equivalent of the last days of Rome, winning his third Paris–Roubaix in 1965 even before Merckx had officially joined the Solo-Superia ranks. The amateur world champion would make his professional debut on 29 April 1965, in the Flèche Wallonne or ‘Walloon Arrow’. The first half of the Ardennes double-header climaxing with Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Flèche is now known primarily for a mazy route through the wooded hills of southern Belgium and especially its grandstand finale atop the brutally steep Mur de Huy. ‘Back then it was a very different race,’ notes one of Britain’s best riders in the 1960s and ’70s, Barry Hoban. ‘It was renowned more for the cobbles and tramlines in the town centres than for its hills. It was all about the rough roads.’

  Given Merckx’s reputation as a fast-finishing, bulldozer of a rider, there could have been no more hospitable venue for his professional premiere. But as Hoban points out, ‘In Britain, we put amateurs on a pedestal. In Belgium an amateur is just that. It doesn’t matter if you were a world champion. Their attitude is, “You’ve not done anything yet”.’

  Nonetheless, everyone in the peloton had heard of Merckx, most had seen him win his amateur World Champion in Sallanches the previous year, and many a neck was craned to catch a first glimpse of the new wunderkind. Many, though, would also be underwhelmed. In one quiet moment early in the race, the Belgian Emile Daems rode alongside his Peugeot teammate, the Italian Marino Vigna.

  ‘You see that kid over there,’ Daems said, nodding towards an eager-looking, raven-haired figure in a scarlet Solo jersey. ‘That’s Eddy Merckx. He’s going to be a champion.’

  Vigna was, naturally, intrigued.

  ‘I kept an eye on him after that, and I saw him struggling, going backwards in the peloton whenever the road climbed,’ remembers the Italian, who three years later would become Merckx’s directeur sportif. ‘He looked too big, too muscular to be good going uphill.’

  Merckx would argue that there were other reasons for his huffing and puffing, and for his abandonment well before Roberto Poggiali beat his compatriot Felice Gimondi in a sprint to the line. Merckx had punctured early and, he claimed, lost too much energy in his futile chase to rejoin the leaders, or indeed to compete in Liège–Bastogne–Liège two days later. The Classic known as La Doyenne was promptly scratched from his race programme.

  Merckx was present in the Rocourt velodrome for the Liège finale – but as a spectator. He saw the sallow, sunken cheeks of the 34 riders who managed to finish and told himself he’d been better off on the sidelines. Nine days later that decision was vindicated: in Vilvoorde in the northern suburbs of Brussels, Merckx prevailed over his old training partner Emile Daems, the man who had pointed him out to Marino Vigna in Flèche Wallonne two weeks earlier.

  It was Merckx’s first professional race win. The first of 525.

  If Rik Van Looy’s internal sonar system had been humming before, it’s fair to assume that it was now bleeping with some urgency. Vilvoorde would also be the venue for the 1965 Belgian national championship road race, to be contested on 1 August. Van Looy had worn the black, red and yellow jersey awarded to the winner of two previous occasions. This year the Emperor had a further incentive: it would be his first major race with, or rather, against Merckx.

  Technically speaking, of course, the pair were riding for the same Solo-Superia team. When Godefroot attacked in a dangerous group almost from the gun, however, Van Looy seemed either impervious to or quietly amused by Merckx’s growing state of
alarm. ‘I identified more with Godefroot than Merckx, who got too easily wound up,’ Van Looy would admit years later. Sure enough, on this day, he ensured that Merckx got very agitated indeed by abandoning mid-race, without warning or explanation. It was left to Merckx to almost single-handedly bridge the gap and in doing so ride headlong into the trap laid by Godefroot and his Groene Leeuw teammate and future brother-in-law Arthur Decabooter. Decabooter jumped, Merckx pursued him, and Godefroot tootled in his wheel. Godefroot, a faster sprinter on almost any day or finishing straight, duly had too much zip for Merckx when Decabooter was caught. It was a sting that Godefroot would try to reprise on many occasions over the course of his career, always to Merckx’s immense frustration when it came off.

  And so Merckx’s difficult initiation continued. Since the spring, Merckx claimed later, Van Looy had been showing his indecorous true colours as he led the Red Guard not only on the road but in their taunts. They had christened Merckx ‘Jack Palance’, after the Hollywood star who had played Attila the Hun in the movie Sign of the Pagan. It sounded innocuous, but Merckx later admitted that the constant mockery was ‘really hurting’, despite his best efforts to ‘make it look as though it was all washing over me’. Van Looy’s speciality, on a par with his sprinting, was his sarcasm. Whether it was Merckx’s fondness for rice pudding or his meek ripostes to the put-downs, everything he did was ripe for ridicule. ‘Van Looy knows exactly how to tease someone…for Merckx it must have been really humiliating,’ Jos Huysmans, one of the mainstays of what later became Merckx’s own inner circle, told the journalist Rik Vanwalleghem.

  On the bike, too, Van Looy sometimes appeared to relish the role of the cruel cartoon villain. ‘The Tour of Flanders used to start in front of Gent’s Sint-Pieters station, and it would be mayhem,’ says Barry Hoban. ‘You’d be going at thirty miles an hour through the neutralised zone, then Van Looy would get the Red Guard on the front and go vroooooom on the Gent ring road and for ten kilometres until the first cycle path. Then Rik would swing over and have a good laugh. The French didn’t even know the race had started.’