Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Over subsequent years, those who knew the couple would describe their marriage as the final piece in the Merckx jigsaw, the solid ground from which he could plot the final ascent of cycling’s Everest. Merckx once said that his days consisted of three things – ‘cycling, recovering and sleeping’. It was not a complaint, more the honest admission of a person to whom life had given one immense blessing: not a talent but a calling. Anquetil had utilised one to cultivate the other; with Merckx, it was the vocation that came first. His talent was the flower that grew from that stem.

  In his compelling study of how excellence develops, The Talent Code, Daniel Coyle cites several examples to illustrate how outstanding motivation underlies all outstanding progress and achievement. One of Coyle’s most striking case studies involved 157 children as they prepared to start learning a musical instrument. Before their first lesson, the children were asked how long they envisaged playing the instrument – a year or under, to the end of primary school, to the end of high school or for the rest of their lives. The musicians’ abilities were then plotted against their hours of weekly practice after nine months. The man who conducted the study, Gary McPherson, said the results were ‘staggering’: ‘With the same amount of practice, the long-term commitment group outperformed the short-term commitment group by four hundred per cent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-terms who practised for an hour and a half.’

  McPherson’s conclusion was this: ‘It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallising experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.’

  Or, in Coyle’s words, ‘What ignited the progress wasn’t any skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energised and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.’

  Early in 1967, it was perhaps premature to speculate about what had ‘ignited’ Eddy Merckx, but the match under his natural ability, that searing desire which terrified Claudine, was there for all to see and envy. No wonder Nino Defilippis, witnessing it for the first time, spoke of an ‘electrocution’.

  Merckx himself still didn’t know how far it would all take him, and neither, at this point, did rivals with their own designs on world domination. Merckx’s 1966 season had been an improvement on 1965, with 20 wins including that first and to date only true pearl, Milan–San Remo, but most, including Merckx, would wait somewhat longer than Defilippis for their eureka moment.

  And, yet, even a fortnight before lightning shook the Matterhorn, it had struck for the second time in two years 300 kilometres to the south on the Ligurian coast.

  2

  something in the water

  ‘We were too immersed in our own careers to see what was going on. To an extent, we only realised what had happened when it was too late…’ WALTER GODEFROOT

  SAN REMO’S VIA Roma is one of those places in sport where real mystery and imagined mystique intertwine almost to the point where they become one and the same thing. Augusta National’s 12th tee has its swirling wind, Lord’s its slope, and the Via Roma its own matrix of wiles. Real or imagined, they confuse and beguile. Failing that, they provide explanations for the otherwise inexplicable, excuses for the otherwise inexcusable.

  It’s the strange camber, say some. No, argue others, it’s the imperceptible rise in those final 400 metres. Another popular yet preposterous theory is that this otherwise unremarkable shopping street threading east–west through San Remo is beholden to its own micro-climate. The breeze doesn’t so much blow off the Mediterranean, just two streets to the south, it doesn’t so much swirl as cast a spell. Tonight there is talk of black magic. How else can the Italians account for their 14th consecutive Milan–San Remo without a home winner, after 42 wins in the first 50 editions? Or, for that matter, the second victory by a young Belgian in a Peugeot jersey in two years?

  When Eddy Merckx came thrashing, bobbing, brutalising across the line, Italian heads dropped as though from a guillotine. On the road, three of them – Gianni Motta, Franco Bitossi and Felice Gimondi. Then, tens of thousands more behind the barriers on either side, and a hundred or so among the journalists waiting behind the line. All except Tuttosport’s Gianpaolo Ormezzano. Ormezzano had gone out on a limb at Paris–Nice the previous year to report that a young Belgian named Merckx was riding strongly in France and was an outsider for victory at San Remo. When Merckx vindicated his judgement a few days later, Ormezzano began to regard the 21-year-old as his own project, his protégé. In March 1967, for the second year in succession, the journalist studied the delighted figure in the black-and-white Peugeot colours as they muscled him towards the podium. If Merckx was handsome, Ormezzano thought to himself, it was in a very un-Italian way. Baldassare Castiglione had spoken for all Italians then and now in his sixteenth-century Il Cortegiano – the Book of the Courtier – when he decreed that a man must not only look good and speak well but also and above all possess a sprezzatura, a certain nonchalance. ‘He conceals art, and presents what is done and said as if it was done without effort and virtually without thought.’ For all his precocity and talents, sprezzatura was not a quality displayed by Merckx. His facial features, like his riding style, brought to mind industry, not artistry.

  If there was a modern-day expression of the Castiglione prototype, a current ‘King of Cool’, it was the film star Steve McQueen, and Gianni Motta happened to be his spitting image. Right now, though, there was nothing cool about Motta’s reaction to defeat. In two years’ time, just up the coast in Savona, Merckx would curl up on a hotel bed, sobbing uncontrollably and vowing never to race again. That was Motta this evening. One by one, like mourners at a funeral, his Molteni teammates filed into his room to offer their support. Up the road in a different hotel, Motta’s sworn enemy Felice Gimondi also stewed.

  The night would bring counsel, plus some perspective. Rather than by Merckx, the great Italian triumvirate of Gimondi, Motta and Bitossi had been undone by the Via Roma. That and a universal sporting truth: there are certain horses that excel on certain courses. And also such a thing as a one-trick pony.

  Merckx’s sprint victory in the Gent Wevelgem semi-classic 11 days later would do little to change their mind; that picture of the finish line at San Remo, with three children of a golden generation fanned across the Via Roma, and Merckx just ahead of them, said unequivocally that the future looked sun-kissed for Italian cycling.

  ‘I mean, how were we supposed to know?’ asks Felice Gimondi today, almost pleading for understanding, compassion, maybe even forgiveness. ‘I had won the Tour de France in my first year as a pro, I was about to win another Giro. Everything was going well…Who knows how many more Giri d’Italia I’d have won if he hadn’t come along. But he did come along. And we didn’t realise for months, years.’

  ‘O sole mio

  sta ‘nfronte a te!

  ‘O sole, ‘o sole mio,

  sta ‘nfronte a te!

  It’s my own sun

  that’s upon your face!

  The sun, my own sun,

  It’s upon your face!

  Dino Zandegù says the urge to sing came spontaneously, the words just flowed. Well, not exactly: a large and vocal group of Italian migrants stationed close to the prize podium had watched him cross the line, his right arm thrust towards the angry skies, his face and hands black as theirs after a day in the mines of Charleroi and Marcinelle, and broken into their own chorus.

  First an ironic, ‘O sole mio!’, then an invocation to join them: ‘Canta, Dino, canta!’: ‘Sing, Dino, sing!’ And so Dino had sung, to the delight of his countrymen and the tickled disbelief of cameramen and journalists from all over Europe.

  A few paces away, making his way through the mêlée, Zandegù’s Salvarani teammate Felice Gimondi also smirked. He had watched ‘Il Dinosauro’ win from 200 met
res back down the finishing straight in Gent. Thirteen seconds later, Gimondi had followed Eddy Merckx across the line. As the blubs flashed and Merckx lunged, Gimondi harked the anguished cry of a beaten man.

  If Zandegù’s performance on the cobbled hills, the bergs of the Tour of Flanders on the second day of April was a revelation, his singing was not, at least not for the Italian public. Ever since his Giro d’Italia début three years earlier, the baker’s son from Padova had enlivened many an uneventful race with his impromptu balladry, often accompanying an impressive baritone with exuberant arm-waving. If a birthday needed celebrating, all eyes would be on Zandegù in the middle of the peloton: his mouth and an eyebrow would rise mischievously at one side, he might disappear for a minute or twenty, then reappear balancing a birthday cake in the palm of his right hand and conducting the chorus with his left. ‘Buon compleanno a te! Happy birthday to you…’

  ‘Typical’, says Zandegù today: those three or four bars of ‘O sole mio!’ became more famous than the victory they were meant to celebrate. More famous even than him beating Eddy Merckx on the Belgian’s own patch.

  It was to be the story of Zandegù’s career. No, of his life. He was a talented cyclist but a better showman. And an utterly brilliant raconteur. These attributes now earn him an annual invitation to the Giro d’Italia from state broadcaster RAI. In their daily, pre-stage eyesore, exhibiting all the naffness that makes Italian television a national embarrassment, Zandegù is the performing seal in a circus commanded by the mustachioed ringmaster Marino Bartoletti. In 45 years, not much has changed; what Zandegù used to do within the bosom of the peloton, he now accomplishes in a makeshift studio in the Giro’s hospitality village. At Bartoletti’s unctuous behest, Dino sings, Dino dances, Dino jokes, Dino laughs.

  Above all, Dino tells stories. On air and off it – to him it’s the same. No sooner have the credits rolled than ‘Il Dinosauro’ is shuffling off, his fingers are clasped like five thick salamis around a new listener’s, and he’s away. His tales are breathless, hysterical, crescendoing monologues delivered through a north-east Italian accent as gravelly as the unpaved sterrato roads which are often their setting. What’s more, says Zandegù, ‘ninety-five per cent of them are true’. Unless, that is, it’s the afternoon. Then, by Dino’s own admission, ‘the percentage falls to ninety’.

  Dino, Dino, tell us about growing up…

  ‘Well, we didn’t have a lot but at least we weren’t hungry because we owned a bakery. You just about scraped by. The first batch of bread that Dad used to bake at 6.30, we kept to one side just in case the oven broke and we were left with nothing. There were 18 of us in the family: eight brothers, six sisters, Mum, Dad, Gran and Granddad. We all used to get together at four every afternoon to boil up the dry, stale bread, the pan biscotto, and put it into a kind of panzanella, a bread salad. It was buonissima! Better than what my wife makes now! Anyway, when I won races as an amateur, I’d come home, tell my mum and sisters, and my reward would be a cup of caffè latte and a corner of bread straight out of the oven. If I didn’t win, my mum pretended that she’d forgotten to cook and there was nothing you could do! Even my sisters were annoyed with me! Then when if I got a bit friendly with a girl, they didn’t like that either! They’d tell me that I had to go and explain to her that I had to race my bike and mustn’t have any distractions. Thanks to them, I was practically a virgin at 26!’

  Practically? Eh? Never mind…What about that Tour of Flanders in 1967? Beating Merckx, that must have been something…

  ‘Ah, yes, well my teammate Gimondi and I attacked with Merckx and came across to Barry Hoban, Noel Foré and Willy Monty, who had been in the break earlier on. After the Mur de Grammont climb, I attacked with Foré and Merckx was stuck, because Gimondi wasn’t going to help him. Foré was too tired after his earlier break to pose any threat in the sprint. I won easily. Then Merckx came over like this big, roaring lion, absolutely furious. I didn’t pay him too much attention. The Italian fans were shouting to me to sing, and it just came naturally. “O sole mio…!”.’

  Dino, Dino, seriously now, should you all have known in 1967? Should you, could you not have seen what was coming?

  ‘We were all intimidated. We were. This kid just arrived, this big, handsome Belgian kid with high cheekbones – the face of an immense athlete – and pretty quickly we all realised that on the bike he was a brute. I say quickly but it wasn’t straight away. It took a while, a couple of years. We, we didn’t know, we didn’t…’

  For once even Dino Zandegù is lost for words.

  *

  If March had belonged to Merckx, victories for Zandegù in Flanders and the Dutchman Jan Janssen in Paris–Roubaix forestalled hype around the new star that may have followed what, after all, had been only two inspired performances in the space of eleven days in Milan–San Remo and Gent–Wevelgem. Yes, Merckx had won again at Flèche Wallonne at the end of April, this time with a vicious solo attack, but again there was an explanation: the magic sparkle dust named ‘form’, which could come over a rider for a month or six weeks and transform him from good to great, inconspicuous to irresistible. No one was disputing that now Merckx, at 21, had a glittering future; not many either, though, were getting carried away, partly because the last, the hardest and maybe most prestigious of the Classics had opened clear daylight between the two main young pretenders to ‘Emperor’ Rik Van Looy’s throne. Walter Godefroot first, Eddy Merckx second; the line of succession had been determined by the finish line at Liège–Bastogne–Liège.

  Van Looy, it has to be said, had always preferred Godefroot. First and foremost, he was a true Flandrian, like Van Looy. Godefroot’s parents had worked in the textile factories which provided work and bare subsistence for thousands of families in and around Gent. When Godefroot was 13, they scraped together the last Belgian francs that Social Security Services and the Catholic Church wouldn’t cover for Walter to go on holiday to Switzerland. ‘That way, you’ll at least get to go that far once in your life. We never will…’ Godefroot’s mother told him.

  A few years later, in 1964, cycling would take him to Tokyo for the Olympics, where he won a bronze medal, which at the time he felt could have been gold with a little more help from Merckx, and in the three years since he had travelled and won all over Europe. His Liège win had now confirmed him as the best young Classics rider anywhere in the world. Or so Godefroot thought. He glanced at one Flemish daily’s sports pages the following day and flinched. ‘Merckx undone’ said the headline, and beneath it, in smaller writing: ‘Godefroot wins Liège–Bastogne–Liège’. The author went on to espouse Merckx’s view that he had been outsprinted only because he wasn’t familiar with the cinder track at Rocourt in Liège, which had hosted a soggy finish. Godefroot cursed as he read. He had done all the chasing behind Merckx’s Peugeot teammate Ferdinand Bracke, he had repelled every Merckx attack when Bracke was caught, and he had led Merckx into the velodrome. What else did he have to do? Maybe if he lived in the same city as clueless journalists and their newspapers, Brussels, like Merckx…

  But at least Godefroot had bagged a big one. Merckx’s victory two days earlier at Flèche Wallonne now paled. Even Merckx’s Peugeot team manager, the debonair, dickie-bowed Gaston Plaud, seemed to think so. When Merckx told Plaud that he would consider renewing his contract on the condition that Plaud signed two or three Belgian domestiques to help him in the 1968 Classics, the Peugeot chief’s expression glazed over. As usual, Plaud’s mind seemed to be on other things. Food, wine, who he was meeting for dinner. If it didn’t serve up such rich material for mockery, the sound of Plaud’s voice on arriving at the team hotel every night would have driven his riders to distraction. ‘Bonsoir, Madame. Qu’est-ce que vous avez comme spécialité de la maison?’

  The truth was that Plaud had his reasons for not trying harder to hold on to Merckx, plus two brilliant and highly marketable leaders: Tom Simpson and Roger Pingeon. Why would he kowtow to Merckx, a Belgian, at the risk of alienating t
hat pair, respectively among the best one-day and stage-race riders in the world?

  No, if Vincenzo Giacotto, another of professional cycling’s bon viveurs, wanted Merckx, he could have him for his new Faema team in 1968. Before Plaud packed him off to Italy for good, he would send him to Treviglio, near Milan, for the beginning of his first major tour, the 1967 Giro d’Italia…

  One Wednesday afternoon in October 2012, Walter Godefroot sits forward in his chair and shakes his head, probably much like he did when it dawned in April 1967 that some members of the Belgian press believed the real story from Liège–Bastogne–Liège was another stellar performance from Eddy Merckx.

  ‘We were too immersed in our own careers to see what was going on,’ he murmurs by way of an apology. ‘To an extent, we only realised that had happened when it was too late…’

  As the 1967 season wore on, it was coming to resemble a series of auditions, on a bigger scale and with higher stakes than Merckx’s in front of a judging panel of Nino Defilippis, Vincenzo Giacotto and Teofilo Sanson at Cervinia in April. Most sports thrive on duality, rivalry, and cycling was no different, but there was also something inherent in what racing represented that compelled its followers to look for one superior being, a clear champion, and which somehow made them most comfortable in one’s presence. Thus, the periods most clearly defined in the collective memory were those which were also synonymous with just one rider: in France, the Louison Bobet or Anquetil eras; or in Italy, those associated with Costante Girardengo, Alfredo Binda and Fausto Coppi, for all that Coppi’s battles with Gino Bartali had promoted Coppi’s deification. By contrast, times of transition, as one regime petered out and another readied itself to elect a leader, often gave rise to the most exciting racing but also a sense of general unease. In the early 1960s, there had been two rulers, Jacques Anquetil in major tours and Rik Van Looy in the Classics. By 1967 that pair was going but not yet gone – and wouldn’t until someone truly stood up and stood out from the crowd.