Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Before the lights went out that evening, thoughts and the conversation turned to the tactic they should now adopt over the next week, until what was predicted to be the first decisive stage of the race to Brescia.

  ‘Non ti preoccupare’ – don’t worry, Adorni told his young companion. ‘We’ll give the jersey to someone else and let their team control the race for a few days. That way you can be tranquillo…’

  Adorni waited for an answer. Silence. He looked across to see Merckx’s lips pursed in defiance, his head shaking.

  ‘No no no no no.’

  ‘What do you mean, “No no no”?’

  ‘Why would we lose the jersey? The race finishes in Napoli, right? Right, well, I want to keep it until Napoli.’

  A long-standing member of the International Cycling Union’s management committee, even now in his 70s, Vittorio Adorni is a frequent visitor to cycling’s major races. More often than not a sweater is draped over his high, broad shoulders and the creases ironed in his slacks are the only things sharper than his observations.

  ‘Eddy was adamant: he was going to lead the Giro from start to finish,’ he remembers with a smile. ‘I kept telling him, tranquillo. Calmo! But at first he wouldn’t have any of it. Then, eventually, he saw sense. He learned more in that Giro than most people learn in a career.’

  For all that he would raise his voice to Merckx more than once during the ’68 Giro, Adorni was not generally known for his authoritarian style of leadership. ‘Diplomatic’, ‘gentlemanly’ or even ‘ambassadorial’ were more common descriptions. This, primarily, was why Vincenzo Giacotto had signed him a few months earlier. Giacotto wanted to ‘Italianicise’ Merckx and his racing, and Adorni had both the experience and the tact to impart a rigour that seemed to elude the Italians in everyday life, but for some reason imbued their approach to cycling. A former and possible future Giro winner in his own right, Adorni boasted another key selling point: he had spent three years in the same team as Gimondi and knew his every secret. He would therefore act not only as Merckx’s mentor, his chaperon and his domestique de luxe, but also as his informant.

  Adorni was certainly under no illusions about Merckx’s potential. The previous year’s world championship road race at Herleen was, he agrees, ‘the moment when the penny dropped and we started to think “Oh dear”’. Fortunately by that time he already knew that he would be riding with and not against Merckx in 1968. After Nino Defilippis’s ‘electrocution’, Vincenzo Giacotto’s final meetings with Faema about budgets, and Merckx’s committal to a three-year deal worth 400,000 Belgian francs a year, Adorni had been identified and recruited as Faema’s in-race éminence grise. He was now 30 years old; it was time to think less about personal glory than putting ‘fieno in cascina’ – literally putting hay in the barn. Saving. Thinking about his future. Adorni’s father had been a bricklayer; Vittorio could scarcely have aspired to anything more glamorous before the day, aged 18, he and some mates rode from their homes in Parma out into the Apennines. A few hours and one ascent of the 1,041-metre Passo della Cisa later, he had been hooked.

  He had been a pro for over seven years, but never had he seen anything quite like Merckx. At Faema’s first get together of the winter in Reggio Calabria, Merckx had astonished his new teammates first with his efforts to learn Italian, then with his attitude to training sessions. A spot of good-natured jousting wasn’t and indeed still isn’t unusual between teammates in this setting, and normally Adorni would relish the impromptu races which often crackled into life on the climbs. But not here. Not with Merckx. ‘He just wanted to race all the time,’ the Italian says, still sounding exasperated. Whenever the road angled skywards, Adorni would hear that deadly whirr at his back, then within seconds, Merckx would appear and vanish in the same flourish of flesh and metal. ‘There would be riders all over the road, absolute carnage,’ Adorni remembers. And the worst – or best – of it: ‘In spite of all the energy he seemed to be wasting on silly races in training, the kid was never, ever tired.’

  There were still rough edges to smooth – but then that was why Giacotto had recruited Adorni. He and Marino Vigna, the former Peugeot rider who had been plucked straight out the peloton to become Faema’s Italian directeur sportif, had set immediately to work. The first weakness that needed addressing was Merckx’s tendency to stiffen up going downhill. Adorni had come up with a novel solution: he would ride directly in front of or behind Merckx calling out instructions, like a primitive GPS robot. ‘Brake now!’ ‘Stay wide!’ ‘Accelerate!’ Whereas, a year earlier, Merckx’s screeching tyres provided the sound effects, within weeks, Adorni’s voice was the only audible accompaniment to poetry in motion.

  Having failed to impress Giancarlo Ferretti with his bike-handling at the 1967 Giro di Sardegna, now Merckx and his new troupe offered a masterclass at the same race in February 1968. Merckx didn’t even wait to cross over the Med and into Sardinia, winning the first stage on the Italian mainland by over six minutes to make overall victory a formality.

  That had been his first stage-race win of his pro career, to be followed by an equally emphatic one in the Tour of Romandy in Switzerland in April. Adorni says that Faema were becoming a ‘super-team, everyone could see it’. In Adorni and the Belgians Roger Swerts, Vic Van Schil, Martin Van Den Bossche and Joseph Spruyt, Merckx suddenly had a Red Guard of his own, arguably even stronger and more versatile than Rik Van Looy’s equivalent in the Faema team’s previous incarnation.

  At the Giro, though, Merckx and Adorni both knew that they were about to face their biggest test. It hadn’t even been a year since Bruno Raschi’s affirmation on the pages of Italy’s most authoritative sports newspaper, La Gazzetta dello Sport, that Merckx would never win a major stage race. Franco Bitossi had laughed, but there were others who still harboured the same, serious doubts. For all that Merckx was the reigning world champion and had finished the 1967 season with 26 wins, so far these had all been in one-day or track races. Some even speculated that the victory in Novara on Stage 1 was proof that Merckx had come to Italy only to target stage wins. Adorni was his team’s real captain, they maintained. They were half right, in the sense that the plan discussed and agreed upon in Gavirate had been for the road to anoint the Faema leader. If that was true, however, Stage 1 had cast an overwhelming vote in favour of Merckx.

  A day later, Gianni Motta added his voice to the mounting consensus and building evidence that Merckx was the stronger of the Faema pair. ‘Merckx looks the strongest rider in the race. Faema should count on him,’ the Italian declared, having survived the first major climb of the race, the Col de Joux, before beating Merckx in a two-man sprint in Saint Vincent. In the final four kilometres, Motta had looked like a man outriding not only the peloton but also a now omnipresent, taunting spectre – the pain in his left leg. His winning attack with Merckx had disguised desperation as liberation; poor Gianni’s chances in the Giro and indeed his best days as a rider would soon be over. A positive drugs test announced at the end of the Giro – not to menton the unseemly end to his collaboration with Gianni Aldo de Donato when the doctor illegally fled to Argentina with his estranged daughter the previous autumn – were symptomatic of the way that Merckx’s star had waxed while Motta’s waned.

  Midway through the first week of the Giro, Motta hadn’t been the only rider in the Giro gruppo whose health was causing concern. While the usual jollity at Molteni now came and went in inverse synchrony with the aches in ‘capitan Motta’s’ groin, all had seemed well at Faema as Guido Reybrouck sprinted to victory in Alba at the end of Stage 3, and Merckx ‘loaned out’ the pink jersey to the Italian Michele Dancelli in accordance with Adorni’s grand plan. ‘Tranquillo, tranquillo,’ Adorni had reminded Merckx again before the start in Novara. The message, by the look of things, was finally getting through.

  Reybrouck’s victory, just a few weeks after his positive dope test in the Tour of Flanders, crowned a memorable few days for Faema manager Vincenzo Giacotto in his native Piedmont. A more s
tylish, less bumbling version of the Peugeot directeur-cum-bon viveur Gaston Plaud, Giacotto was, says Marino Vigna, ‘the man who brought a bit of civilisation to cycling, and taught riders how to behave in hotels at races, in the bars and lounges’.

  True to form, Giacotto had wanted to celebrate Reybrouck’s win and Faema’s rip-roaring start to the Giro with a dinner amongst friends. The guests were to include the Faema team doctor Enrico Peracino and Professor Giancarlo Lavezzaro, the chief cardiologist at the Italian Institute of Sports Medicine in nearby Turin. Before the meal, though, Giacotto had invited Lavezzaro to meet his two star riders, Merckx and Adorni, and also to submit them to a cardiogram. The two riders had duly acquiesced, undergone the tests, and Lavezzaro was now examining the results. He didn’t have to look very hard to notice that something in one of the graphs wasn’t only amiss, it was downright alarming. He immediately found Giacotto; the young Belgian chap’s cardiograph, he informed his friend, was that of a man in the middle of a heart attack.

  Lavezzaro says today that, in their concern, he and Giacotto had agreed to repeat the tests the following morning. All they gave Merckx was the false pretext that Lavezzaro wanted to analyse the effects on the heart of several hours’ sleep. After a nervous night, Lavezzaro had knocked on Merckx and Adorni’s door the following morning and performed the test. He waited and watched. To his dismay, Merckx’s graph was still that of someone whose next journey ought to be to hospital, not the 162 kilometres of the Giro’s fourth stage.

  This wasn’t the first time that someone had said there was something not just unusual, but genuinely faulty about Merckx’s heart. Prior to the amateur World Championships in Sallanches in 1964, the then 19-year-old, and anyone else in contention for a place in the Belgian team, had been summoned to Gent for routine medical checks. Merckx would later refer to their outcome as the first ‘hammer blow’ of his career: the tests had supposedly revealed that Merckx had a problem with his heart and therefore wouldn’t be available for selection. When his mother called the Belgian Cycling Federation to query the results, she was told: ‘You’re putting him on a pedestal…He can’t climb a mole-hill.’ Selector Oscar Daemers then said that her son could perhaps be accommodated in the four-man 100-kilometre time trial team. Jenny Merckx demanded to know why Eddy’s heart was considered fit for this, most aerobically exacting discipline, and not for the road race. ‘You stubborn old woman!’ Daemers snapped back. Now she was convinced that something fishy was going on. A few more phone calls, between Jenny Merckx and the family doctor, then between him and the man who had examined Eddy in Gent, and it quickly transpired that Daemers didn’t want Merckx to race in Sallanches, most probably because he hailed from Brussels and not Flanders, and had apparently ‘engineered’ his exclusion. Merckx’s heart was, as the Merckx’s GP Dr Fesler had always said, ‘strong like his father Jules’s’. Shamelessly, Daemers ‘atoned’ by sending the first telegram of congratulations that Jenny Merckx received after Eddy’s victory in the Sallanches road race.

  Four years on at the Giro, Giacotto and Lavezzaro faced a genuine dilemma: did they tell Merckx about his condition, or even pull him from the race? Lavezzaro remembers Merckx ‘making vague noises about his cardiograms always being funny’ but also seeming completely blasé. Lavezzaro was terrorised – but didn’t insist. Instead he returned home to Turin and every day for the remainder of the Giro feared that he would return home from work in the evening, start asking his wife what had happened in the Giro, only to see a pallor in her face. Every day he braced himself and every day, it seemed from his wife’s summary, Merckx was becoming stronger.

  ‘Now,’ Lavezzaro says emphatically, ‘Merckx wouldn’t be allowed to race. At the time we could see that he had a problem but couldn’t make a precise diagnosis without doing a cardiac catheterisation, which obviously wasn’t practical at the Giro. We just knew that he was at risk. Later I wrote to Merckx’s doctors in Belgium but they said it couldn’t be anything because he was still winning on the bike. The next year, the brother of the president of Torino football club had exactly the same thing and we went to Houston in the USA to get it diagnosed properly, because we didn’t have the right apparatus in Turin. It was a non-obstructive hypertropic cardiomyopathy, Nowadays, you pick it up straight away in the electrocardiograms that, for instance, professional cyclists have to pass to get their licence. And someone with that diagnosis wouldn’t be allowed to race. There are no symptoms…but there is a risk of sudden death. In 1977, an Italian footballer called Renato Curi with this problem dropped dead in the middle of a match… But no, there were no aerobic advantages and nothing Merckx could feel. There was just this sword of Damocles above his head every time he raced.’

  By the time Merckx had failed for a second time in four months to win on San Remo’s Via Roma at the end of Stage 5, narrowly losing out to his mate Italo Zilioli after their attack on the Passo Ghimbegna, one problem in the Faema camp was at least nearing its resolution. With Dancelli still comfortably leading the race but expected to struggle in the mountains, and Merckx over two minutes clear of every other contender for the Giro title, Zilioli’s win had ‘saved the Giro from becoming a one-man show’, according to Tuttosport. There appeared to be nothing, however, which could stop precisely that happening at Faema.

  Luckily, in Adorni, Merckx had a clever and pragmatic tutor and former co-leader. Eclipsed by his pupil on the road, Adorni now did exactly the opposite of Van Looy at Solo-Superia, resolving to pass on as much of his savoir faire as possible before the end of the Giro. The ‘Corsa Rosa’, as the race was known, was the perfect context in which to ‘Italianicise’ Merckx, just as Giacotto had wanted.

  ‘You could tell straight away that Eddy wanted to learn. It took him no time. But the Belgians were totally different from us,’ Adorni remembers. ‘At the Giro, on the first night, the Belgians were all congregating in a room, sometimes ours, and eating biscuits and drinking beer after dinner. For a few days I just watched them, quietly shaking my head. It happened once, twice, then on the third or fourth night, they all came in and I said, “Right, no more! Everyone out! This is no way to spend evenings at a stage race. Eddy, you have a camomile tea, you go to bed early, and you look at tomorrow’s stage map. That’s how you recover in stage races. You can’t go around Italy drinking beer and eating biscuits for three weeks.” Maybe at first he was sceptical, but then he saw that I was talking sense.’

  Sure enough, within days, Merckx had a new routine. A phone call to Claudine back home in Belgium, some ribbing from Adorni about the frequency of their conversations, perhaps a mug of tea, then it would be down to business and the map of the following day’s stage. ‘He wasn’t cold or clinical, and neither did he really know what he was capable of, so he needed someone helping him,’ Adorni explains. ‘If his legs felt good on a climb a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometres from the finish, he’d want to attack. But the system we came up with was that I’d basically tell him when to go and when to sit in. Later, he performed these amazing exploits in the Tour and Giro, so we knew he could hold everyone off for a hundred kilometres or so, but in 1968 we didn’t know how he’d last over three weeks.’

  Meanwhile, at Salvarani, Gimondi was getting very little right except his predictions: he had said Stage 8 to Brescia would give vital pointers and Merckx had duly dropped everyone on the Colle Maddalena, this in a stage which passed through both Gimondi and Motta’s home villages, Sedrina and Groppello d’Adda. That pair both crossed the line 48 seconds behind Merckx. Motta was then penalised a further second for holding on to his car on his way to greet family members in Groppello, with the permission of the peloton.

  Years later, it would be remembered, scarcely, as a Merckx victory like hundreds of others. Merckx, though, had noticed an unusual but soon-to-be familiar sound as he rode into the Brescia velodrome eight seconds ahead of Adorni: the crowd was booing.

  Alpine folklore has it that there are six ‘great north faces’ in the range, each so high an
d so challenging that they remain the preserve of only the most daring – or foolhardy – mountaineers. Of the six, the most vaunted and infamous are the Eiger and the Matterhorn, both in Switzerland, and the third member of the so-called ‘Trilogy’, the Grandes Jorasses in the Mont Blanc massif. The Petit Dru in France and the Piz Badile on the Italian Swiss border are barely less terrifying.

  This leaves one, great north face, and the only one whose name is also inscribed in cycling folklore. The Tre Cime or Three Summits of Lavaredo are a trio of adjacent pinnacles tucked high in the north-west corner of Italy in one of the most visually beguiling mountain ranges anywhere on the planet, the Dolomites. To give them their individual names, those summits are the Cima Piccola, Cima Grande and Cima Ovest, and it is the north face of the 2,999-metre Cima Grande, specifically, that represents one of the stiffest challenges in European climbing. Such was the adulation reserved for Emilio Comici when he took three days to conquer the vast, overhanging wall in 1933 that he claimed soon afterwards that his life had become ‘unbearable’.

  The Giro d’Italia’s own mountain trailblazer, race organiser Vincenzo Torriani, had hoped that the first ascent by professional cyclists would cause equal hysteria in 1967. He was right – but not in the way that Torriani had wanted: Stage 19 of the ’67 Giro, finishing outside the Rifugio Auronzo in the shadow of the Cima Grande, had been utterly ruined by fans pushing riders up the brutal, four-kilometre climb. Torriani was left with little option but to declare the stage null and void. The first man to the Rifugio Auronzo, Felice Gimondi, wept. The following day’s Gazzetta dello Sport dubbed the Tre Cime ‘The mountains of dishonour’.