Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Merckx was one pretender among many, although no one really believed that he could compete with the best in the mountains of Italy. That taster session at Cervinia led him and those watching to believe that his horizons may yet be broader than just the Classics, but three Italians he had beaten at Milan–San Remo, just for instance, had far greater pedigree on climbs much harder than what he had faced that day.

  Had he needed it, a fourth Italian, Italo Zilioli, could also have told Merckx all about the fickle plight of the great white hope. Barely ten days in, it had already been a miserable Giro in an annus horribilis for Zilioli. Having burst on to the scene with a series of prestigious wins in 1963 Zilioli’s career had been stuttering ever since. Now attacking through the sleet two kilometres from the top of the Blockhaus climb, he thought he had saved his Giro and was homing in on a prestigious stage win. Then had come a noise, that noise, a glimpse of Merckx bearing down, a frantic and fudged attempt to change gear, a look up, and the final realisation that his predator had come and gone. Merckx’s ability to hold off a chasing peloton on the flat had caught Zilioli’s eye three months earlier at Paris–Nice. Never, though, did the Italian think him capable of the same thing 2,000 metres above sea level. Once, Zilioli’s team manager had asked him why he always brought the same book, Letters of Condemned Italian Resistance Fighters, with him to races. Zilioli had replied, ‘Because in moments when I feel desperate, when I feel the unluckiest person alive, I read a few pages and it helps me to understand what desperation really feels like.’

  Zilioli can’t remember what he read that night, but will never forget the headline in the following day’s Gazzetta dello Sport: ‘Italian disappointment: Belgian sprinter wins in the mountains’. As insults went, for a climber like Zilioli, it was a cracker.

  ‘No wonder I looked miserable as sin when a photographer asked me to pose with Eddy just after I’d seen that,’ Zilioli says now. He goes on, ‘Of course Eddy won again two days later. With hindsight, that should have been another penny dropping…’

  Only with hindsight?

  As the man, Zilioli, said, Merckx won again two days after his maiden grand tour stage win on the Blockhaus, this time in a bunch sprint in Lido degli Estensi. The boy, it seemed, could do everything – within reason; after a farcical stage to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, won by Gimondi but declared null and void because too many of the riders had been pushed up the final climb, the cream rose to the top on the final mountain stage to Tirano. Either that or, if the rumours were to be believed, a ‘santa alleanza degli italiani’ or holy Italian alliance allowed Gimondi to attack the race leader Jacques Anquetil after the Passo del Tonale and easily set up overall victory. Any Italian ‘in’ on the deal was said to have pocketed a tidy sum in return for declining to help Anquetil’s chase.

  While Gimondi was heading for his second major tour title and a first Giro d’Italia to add to the Tour de France he had won on his début in 1965, Merckx, alas, had capitulated on the Passo del Tonale. At least he was in good company; Franco Bitossi had started the Giro with big ambitions, won the first mountain stage on Mount Etna, but was now in freefall down the general classification.

  ‘Crazy Heart’, they called Bitossi. His family had been the very incarnation of the Tuscan idyll, before mass tourism and before ‘Chiantishire’, with their farmhouse in Camaioni on the banks of the River Arno, 15 kilometres upstream from Florence and a short boat crossing from the nearest road. One day, though, Franco couldn’t recall exactly what age he was, he had run out of the house to find his mother shrieking at the water’s edge. His younger brother Al was missing and, when he heard his mum scream, little Franco was certain that he had drowned in the Arno. As his mind raced, his heart pounded at double, treble its normal speed. Al was fine, and found within minutes, but the drumming under Franco’s ribcage continued. It would abate soon enough, but also return with distressing regularity once Franco had decided to pursue a career in cycling. Crazy Heart’s first two seasons in the professional peloton had been hellish, yielding zero victories and innumerable variations on the same, tragicomic scene: a flash of heels, a blur of jet black hair, Bitossi clear of the field and then, moments later, stationary at the side of the road, hunched over his handlebars. Gradually, though, after numerous threats to give up, and races like the 1966 Coppa Agostoni where he had ridden rings around Merckx and Gimondi, been forced by palpitations to stop ten times, yet still nearly beaten them, he had reconciled himself to the problem and by doing so eased its symptoms. A barnstorming start to the 1967 season even had some wondering whether he might be the next ‘campionissimo’, but the Giro and in particular the Dolomites and Alps had cut Bitossi down to size, just as they had Merckx.

  As they struggled on together up the Tonale, flanked also by Merckx’s teammate Ferdinand Bracke, Merckx coughed, wheezed and cursed the journalists who had kept him answering questions in the freezing cold after the previous day’s stage to Trento. Whenever the gradient became steeper, Bitossi looked across at him and jotted mental notes.

  Four days later, the Giro had finished with Gimondi the winner and Merckx in ninth position. Bitossi opened La Gazzetta dello Sport and read attentively. One of the godfathers of Italian sports journalism, Bruno Raschi, had reviewed the previous three weeks’ action and judged each of the main protagonists individually. Bitossi looked for Merckx’s name. ‘He has shown his limitations in the mountains. The young Belgian will never win a major stage race,’ it said.

  Bitossi shook his head. Raschi might be a good journalist, but he knew nothing about cycling…

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I read that, what Raschi said about him not winning the Tour. I mean, based on what I’d seen, it was obvious what the kid could do…’

  While others dozed or dithered in denial, Crazy Heart Bitossi, at least, had not missed a beat.

  By the end of July 1967, international cycling’s crowded constellation had abruptly found itself with one star fewer. What a way, though, for its glimmer to go out; the recent winner of Paris–Nice, Tom Simpson, had collapsed and died on Mont Ventoux at the Tour de France.

  Simpson had perished midway through a race in which his Peugeot teammate Roger Pingeon’s talents had shone brighter than ever before. The pair had ridden in different colours at the Tour, race director Félix Lévitan having taken the controversial decision to revert to the old formula of national teams, but that hadn’t lessened their Peugeot manager Gaston Plaud’s delight at Pingeon’s excellent start to the Tour and his horror at Simpson’s death. Plaud made an easy target for ridicule but the man had virtues beyond his ability to pick the right suit and tie or bottle of Beaujoulais nouveau. He had a heart.

  If only he’d been in charge on the Ventoux, or had convinced Tommy to quit the Tour the previous evening. He had tried, lord knows he had tried. Even on the Ventoux, when Simpson’s cheeks had appeared even more wan and sunken than the night before, Plaud had ordered Tommy to call it quits. He didn’t know about the five amphetamine pills that Simpson had supposedly been balancing on his tongue in the morning, and boastfully showing the other riders, or exactly what he’d drunk during an emergency stop in Bédoin at the foot of the Ventoux.

  The fact remained that Plaud’s dynamic dichotomy – the happy-go-lucky yet immensely driven Englishman, and the talented French dilettante – had been cut in two, leaving just Pingeon. Peugeot’s third man had been Merckx, and Plaud suspected that he had already signed with the Italian start-up Faema during the Giro. Merckx learned of his friend and mentor Simpson’s death back home in Belgium, when it flashed on to the evening news. He was distraught. Ever since he had joined Peugeot the previous year, Simpson’s friendliness and willingness to dispense advice had been in marked contrast to the antipathy of his previous team leader, Rik Van Looy. Merckx immediately made up his mind to travel to Simpson’s funeral in Harworth in England a few days later. He would be the only rider from the continent to attend the burial.

  Ninety-one summers young, in his home i
n Tours on the banks of the Loire, Gaston Plaud can still reel off names of the cyclists he helped guide to superstardom – Simpson, Pingeon, Charly Gaul, Ferdinand Bracke, Merckx and more. Plaud and his memory only show their age when he’s asked how, why, for heaven’s sake, he allowed a gem like Eddy Merckx to escape through his fingers at the end of 1967.

  ‘But, but, Pingeon was a good rider. He had won the Tour…’ Plaud starts to stammer.

  But, but it’s not good enough

  *

  There was more one big opportunity to stake a claim, as well as the rainbow jersey of the World Champion to win. The rendezvous was at Herleen, a grimy mining town in the south of Holland, on 3 September 1967. The sandy-haired, smooth-talking, short-sighted Jan Janssen had won the Vuelta a España in the spring. He would be the home fans’ talisman and one of the favourites. So too would Eddy Merckx and Gianni Motta.

  Contrary to what had been written at the time, San Remo in March had not been Motta’s ‘funeral’. It was true that the left leg run over by a car at the 1965 Tour of Romandy had been hampering his form and his morale since the start of the year, but there was no doubt that he was taking his shot at redemption in Holland very seriously indeed. Since around the time of the Giro, he had been working closely with a Milanese doctor, a 38-year-old surgeon and biochemist by the name of Gianni Aldo de Donato. From what little was known of him, de Donato seemed an extraordinary character. In 1959 at the age of 30, he had reportedly discovered the world’s first antiviral medicine. That had earned him a full-page homage in the New York Times. Since then, he had gone back to more mundane matters, and was carrying out one of his routine visits in May 1967 when he noticed ‘a strange agitation’ in one of his patients. Further investigation revealed the cause of the man’s ills: he couldn’t fathom why Gianni Motta wasn’t riding better at the Giro d’Italia. Suddenly curious, de Donato had reached for a pen and paper and written a long letter. Motta had replied courteously, and quickly, because before the end of the Giro de Donato was filling another envelope with a handful of yellow capsules and a note about suggested dosage. The pills were perfectly legal, de Donato maintained. Sold under the commercial name LILLY, they contained ‘a catalyst of the 13 biochemical reactions which take place in the muscle’. De Donato was certain that, had Motta taken them throughout the Giro, and had Gimondi not been able to count on the ‘santa alleanza degli italiani’, Motta would have won the Giro. Not only that, but he reckoned that 24-year-old Motta had the body of a 21-year-old. He would ‘explode’ over the coming seasons.

  ‘He’s a squirrel, Mother Nature’s been good to Gianni,’ was the doctor’s bizarre assessment. It got weirder: ‘Put a squirrel and a mole at the bottom of a tree and the squirrel will climb up, while the mole will stay down below. He’s a squirrel, he’s been lucky. He can succeed in everything, he has to succeed in everything.’

  Their collaboration had continued and intensified over the summer, to the point where de Donato was now commonly depicted as some kind of mystical shaman who had Motta ‘in his thrall’. Everywhere the doctor went, suspicion stalked him. In the Italian team camp in Valkenberg near Herleen, that had then turned to outright hostility when Motta insisted on both training and eating apart from the other Italian team members, with only de Donato for company. The details of those training sessions defied conventional wisdom about how to prepare for a world championships as well as belief; on both the Wednesday and Friday before Sunday’s World Championship race, Motta had covered 290 kilometres at 40 kilometres per hour. Wild speculation about exactly what de Donato was giving or doing to him spread through the foreign riders and press. Some claimed that de Donato was a ‘neuropsychiatrist’. Others reported that, in the runup to Herleen, Motta had followed the regimen of a NASA cosmonaut. Elsewhere, there were clear inferences that de Donato was feeding Motta much more sinister substances than the meat and vegetable milkshakes which had become his main sustenance.

  ‘I’ve realised that drugs rule cycling. Doping is the riders’ daily bread. The riders love it because it reduces their suffering. But in my opinion it has put the brakes on the technical development of this sport,’ de Donato tried to argue, clearly to little avail.

  The misgivings turned to astonishment on the day of the race when the start-gun sounded and Motta shot out of the bunch. Only de Donato nodded his approval; Gianni was sticking to their plan. In the confusion, five riders had jumped across with him: the Englishman Ronald Addy, the Spaniard Ramon Saez, Janssen’s compatriot Jos van der Vleuten and Eddy Merckx. Nineteen laps and over 250 kilometres remained.

  The laps ticked by, the gap grew. At the end of each one, Motta scanned the huge crowds for his guru. De Donato responded with a ‘Forza, Gianni!’ or a clenched fist. Merckx, meanwhile, looked for the brown, shoulder-length hair of his mother, Jenny. Once or twice he took a can of Coca-Cola from her outstretched hand.

  Back in the peloton, the local boy Janssen’s worry and frustration grew. To use one of Janssen’s favourite French expressions, he ‘pédalait dans le beurre’ – literally, he was pedalling through butter. In other words, it was effortless. After eight laps, he could wait no longer. Towards the top of the only real hill on the course, Janssen accelerated and gained 50 metres. Two laps later, at the midway point of the race, he joined Merckx, Motta, Saez and van der Vleuten.

  With two laps to go, Janssen drew close to Merckx. The pair of them had shared a ride the previous year when Merckx’s car had broken down on the way to a race. Merckx now turned to him. ‘So, between you and me, who wins? We need to be careful of the Spaniard Saez, because he’s fast in a sprint, that guy. And Motta will be quick as well…’

  ‘If we get to the finish all together, I’m going to ask van der Vleuten to lead out the sprint from a long way, a kilometre out. That OK?’ Janssen replied.

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Merckx agreed.

  Janssen knew that, in his eagerness, Merckx would want to squeeze between the two Dutchmen and come under the kilometre-to-go flag on van der Vleuten’s wheel. The latter would fade 400 metres from the line, whereupon Merckx would launch his sprint and himself begin to slow in the last 100 metres. Janssen’s superior speed, as a three-time former winner of the Tour de France’s green jersey, would then guarantee him victory.

  That was the theory, but not quite how it turned out: when the quintet reached the final bend, 500 metres out, van der Vleuten had still not kicked. By the time that he did, then jagged to the right at the 200-metre banner, Merckx was closing in on victory and Janssen had lost vital speed as he swung left to avoid his teammate. Janssen was clearly quicker but Merckx held on…by 30 centimetres. Exhausted by his last-ditch attack on the final lap, Gianni Motta came home in fourth place and collapsed into Doctor de Donato’s arms.

  The aftermath was dominated by recriminations – Janssen’s aimed at van der Vleuten for not respecting orders in the final kilometre, Motta’s at the entire Italian team for not marking Janssen, and theirs at him for attacking so early. Amid the brouhaha, the most important outcome was the one that too many still seemed determined to overlook: at age 22, Eddy Merckx would end the 1967 season as the champion, nay the king of the cycling world.

  ‘We hadn’t seen anything special,’ protests Jan Janssen. ‘He was like anyone else. We never thought for a second he’d be a really great rider. He was like Willy Planckaert, Godefroot and lots of others.’

  He says this then pauses – a long, dramatic, meaningful pause. ‘The first time I saw him do something really remarkable,’ Janssen goes on, ‘was at Heerlen. There I realised that, to beat that guy, you had to put your foot to the floor and them some.’

  ‘I was the strongest that day, Eddy knew I was the strongest, but, yeah, I’ll admit it, you could see at the end of ’67 that Eddy was something else,’ says Gianni Motta. ‘Pingeon had won the Tour but, with Pingeon, you knew an hour earlier when he was going to attack. Merckx, by comparison to Pingeon and the rest of us, was Superman.’

  Maybe, final
ly, someone was opening their eyes.

  3

  fire and ice

  ‘I can still see Eddy on the climbs before the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, in the snow…He can’t contain himself. He has magic in his legs.’ MARINO VIGNA

  IN THE HOURS leading up to what would be Eddy Merckx’s second Giro and only his second major tour, he had fizzed with nervous energy in Faema’s pre-race HQ in Gavirate. Eighteen months earlier, the same callow exuberance had led to a falling out with the Italian Vittorio Adorni in the sprint to the line at the 1966 Tour of Lombardy, won by Adorni’s then Salvarani teammate Gimondi. Now, by some coincidence or serendipity, Adorni was lying on a twin bed in Merckx’s hotel room, their hotel room, observing his young teammate through half-amused, half-admonishing eyes.

  Adorni had arrived in Gavirate, dragged his suitcase through reception, up the staircase and through the door a couple of days earlier and found Merckx already fussing and fretting. ‘What are they?’ were Adorni’s first words, index finger outstretched accusingly towards the three large bags encumbering the space. ‘No, you don’t,’ he’d said without waiting for an answer. ‘Where do you think you’re going? On holiday? No, you’re not doing that. If we’re sharing the same space, it’s one suitcase each…’

  Soon, it wouldn’t be luggage but an item of clothing that was bothering Adorni: the hallowed maglia rosa, the pink jersey awarded to the Giro leader. Two kilometres from the finish line of what should have been a non-eventful first, true stage of the 1968 Giro to Novara across the plains of Piedmont, Merckx had catapulted out from behind teammate Martin Van Den Bossche’s rear wheel and into the slipstream of a television motorbike. He had dwelled for a second, suspended mesmerically in front of the main peloton, before kicking again to finally cross the line six seconds ahead of the rest. He had then matter-of-factly made his way to the podium to exchange his world champion’s rainbow-striped jersey for the pale pink of the maglia rosa, the same pink jersey that was now draped over a chair in his and Adorni’s hotel room.