Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  What many had forgotten on the night before what Torriani hoped would be his and the Giro’s redemptive voyage to the Tre Cime in 1968 was that, 12 months earlier, Eddy Merckx had crossed the line in second place. Many, but not Gimondi; in the Salvarani hotel, he, his sponsors and directeur sportif Luciano Pezzi looked nervously ahead to the following day’s 213-kilometre stage. ‘It’s now or never,’ Pezzi told him. The general classification, with Michele Dancelli still in pink but certain to surrender, and Merckx in second and over three minutes ahead of Gimondi, indicated that Pezzi was right. The same perhaps couldn’t be said about journalist Gigi Boccacini, who in La Stampa described Merckx as ‘a strong athlete in the mountains, yes, but not really strong’.

  High in the Italian north-west, Merckx woke to sullen skies and more calls, in the local papers, for the fans or tifosi to avoid a repeat of the previous year’s debacle. He had slept well, or at least much better than the night before Brescia, where he had been kept awake by the high temperature. Peracino, the Faema doctor, was feeling less refreshed. The cardiogram that Merckx had taken in Alba was still on his mind, and Peracino had tossed and turned all night. After breakfast, he went to find Adorni and Merckx. Adorni informed Peracino that his roommate had already left to prepare for the day’s stage. Peracino told Adorni that it didn’t matter and that he would catch up with Merckx later.

  The scene now shifts several hours and a couple of hundred kilometres, from past to present, a memory to the Faema directeur sportif Marino Vigna’s mind’s eye. ‘I can still see Eddy on the climbs before the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, in the snow. Every time the road goes up, he always goes off the front of the bunch by accident – he can’t contain himself. He has magic in his legs.’

  On the Passo Tre Croci, just before Misurina and its lake (said to have formed from the tears of a spurned maiden), nine riders, survivors from an earlier 13-man break, are still clear. The peloton, heaved along by Faema’s Martin Van Den Bossche, is still seven minutes behind. The temperature is around three degrees. Adorni moves to Van Den Bossche’s shoulder, glances at Gimondi, then turns to Merckx. Since the start of the stage in Gorizia, if not since the start of the Giro in Campione d’Italia, written in those doe-eyes has been the same plaintive expression, the same question: ‘Can I go now? Is it time?’ And all day, all race, the old stag has been telling his young fawn the same things: ‘Not yet!’, ‘Calmo!’, ‘Tranquillo!’; ‘You won’t win the Giro at the Tre Cime di Lavaredo…’

  But maybe, seeing that magic, now even Adorni isn’t sure. Merckx is still watching him; Adorni decides to nod. Merckx goes; Gimondi pounces.

  They all regroup. The sleet turns to snow, and Merckx turns again to Adorni. He is almost begging. Adorni nods again. The time to process what’s just happened, and the gap is a hundred metres.

  Merckx is now en route to what he will one day call his greatest-ever athletic performance. This moment has been coming for three years, some would say 22 years, 11 months and 15 days. It is nothing more, nothing less, than the precise second when Eddy Merckx rides off on his own into the distance.

  For the foreseeable future, there will be fleeting instants when a rider appears at his side, as Adorni does now, having realised that Gimondi is beaten, then they like the Italian will come to the same conclusion: ‘I’m a just a cyclist – he’s a motorbike.’ And they will leave Merckx to his own rabid, sanguinary pursuit of whatever it is that he finds so compulsive about victory, just as Adorni does at the foot of the final, awful ramps to the Rifugio Auronzo.

  Merckx will have left fellow pretenders trailing, and one by one he will slash through the relics of former glory with names like Anquetil or Van Looy – or today Galera and Polidori, who are the last to be caught a kilometre from the finish. Faster than himself, he will exhaust superlatives similar to the ones that will appear in tomorrow’s newspapers: ‘marvellous’, ‘irrepressible’, ‘unreal’, ‘fantastic’. He will give endless interviews like the one he conducts in the Rifugio Auronzo, peeling off clothes but revealing little or nothing of what makes him different. ‘I attacked at the bottom of the climb after a long pull by Van Den Bossche, and I continued with a regular cadence, pushing a 42x26, the same that I used on the Colle Maddalena. This is the hardest climb I’ve ever done, so I tried to never change my rhythm. I kept catching riders but I had no info on what was happening in the race, either behind or in front of me. When I crossed the line and not before, I realised that I’d won.’ He will continue to sound exactly like other riders, and equally banal, and look as different from them on a bike as he did on a cardiogram.

  He will also go on making his victims despair, like they do when they realise he leads the Giro by nearly four minutes from Adorni and over five from anyone else, and sometimes driving them to tears. Having crossed the line today six minutes and 19 seconds after Merckx, for the second time in 12 months under the Cima Grande, Gimondi is sobbing. Among the fans on the four-kilometre, 12 per cent corkscrew to the finish line, there were a group of his boyhood friends from Sedrina, and seeing them has caused his already frayed nerves to snap. For 15 minutes, while Merckx takes all the plaudits, the Rifugio for Gimondi has been exactly that – ‘a refuge’. ‘I saw people crying for me and now that’s all I can do,’ he blubbers, surrounded by the men with whom he plotted Merckx’s downfall just last night. ‘My fans and my teammates believed in me. How could I have betrayed them?’

  Just when you think that things can’t get any worse for Gimondi, a door opens and Gianni Motta, the rider he most loathes, steps into the improvised changing room inside the Rifugio. For one day, though, the sworn enemies are united in their dismay. Two years ago, they had the world at their feet. Now, they see an abyss.

  Motta picks his way through the small crowd of journalists and Salvarani staff and places a hand on Gimondi’s shoulder. ‘Come on, chin up,’ he says. ‘You’ve had a bad day, but that’s all it is – one bad day. Look at me: I’ve been going from one disappointment to the next for the past ten months!’

  It wasn’t that bad, Motta wanted to tell Gimondi. What neither of them knew is that it could, and would, get a whole lot worse.

  The boos rang out all across the Bay of Naples, over the Mediterranean and around Vesuvius like the toxic fumes of a first eruption since March 1944. In Brescia a fortnight earlier, the jeers had all been for Merckx, but now they echoed towards the tall, frowning figure to Merckx, the Giro winner’s right. Poor Vittorio Adorni. Three years ago, that time in Florence, he’d tossed back his head, closed his eyes and allowed his ears to soak in the applause of the countrymen and women who had seen him turn the 1965 Giro into a procession around Italy. He had won by 11 minutes – more than double his deficit from the champion Merckx in this year’s final standings. This was what the Neapolitans couldn’t understand: how could an Italian capable of winning the Giro sacrifice his chances in favour of a foreigner?

  No one, though, was better placed than Adorni to know just how dominant Merckx had been, and how much more pain he might have inflicted. On the night of Merckx’s masterpiece at the Tre Cime, for the first time in the race, Adorni was happy to see the pink jersey draped over a chair in their hotel room. He had even joked, ‘Hey, Eddy, you’d better watch out. I’m going to attack you and come after that tomorrow,’ and Merckx had laughed.

  Similar room, similar scenario a few days later, only this time the one mucking about was Merckx. At least that’s what Adorni assumed when he heard, ‘Hey Vittorio, come and have a look this’ and looked up to see Merckx’s head buried in a map of the next day’s stage, and his arm beckoning Adorni. ‘Look at this nice climb after 60 kilometres. We could light it up there.’

  Adorni’s expression was now one of complete stupefaction. ‘Are you serious? What on earth are you talking about, light it up? The Giro’s over. What’s the point of attacking? Forget it. Just stay calm and you’ll win the race…’

  ‘Well, you know, I thought…I just thought that we could have some fun…’ Merckx muttere
d as he walked away.

  The final days of the Giro had, in all truth, passed off in a strange, sombre atmosphere. As it wended south through the Appenines, abandoning the Italian cycling heartlands of the north, the race had also left a trail of shattered ambitions and disappointment. That photo from Milan–San Remo and the Via Roma in 1967, with Bitossi and Motta and Gimondi fanned across the road and Merckx millimetres ahead of them, now looked less the harbinger of an impending gold rush than a sepia souvenir of former fantasies.

  The catcalls for Adorni, Gimondi’s tears – above all, from an Italian point of view, it had felt like an undignified ending. After some disastrous days in the mountains, ‘Crazy Heart’ Bitossi had salvaged some pride with a stage win in Umbria, but also found himself unwittingly embroiled in a controversy over dope testing. After Stage 19 to Rome, Bitossi claimed, he had seen Merckx’s teammate Vic Van Schil emptying the contents of his drinking bottle or bidon into the container he had been asked to fill with his urine. Bitossi and a teammate who had witnessed the same thing later filed a formal complaint. So much for the rumours that had been doing the rounds for several days, and which were never substantiated, that the Faema team was using some miracle, mystery drug made all the more remarkable by the fact that it was perfectly legal.

  If the Giro’s denouement had been bad, its epilogue was to be more unseemly still. A week after Merckx’s coronation in Napoli, the Union of Italian Professional Cyclists (UCIP) announced the names of the nine riders who had tested positive for ‘doping’ during the Giro. Given what Bitossi had seen and reported in Rome, the least surprising name was Vic Van Schil. The most shocking were Gianni Motta and Felice Gimondi.

  Exactly a fortnight after their brief reconciliation in the Rifugio Auronzo, Gimondi and Motta again found themselves side by side. They were supposed to be in Castelgrande, a small town in central Italy, for a money-spinning circuit race, yet here they were, in the front room of an ordinary punter who had offered up his house as the venue for an impromptu press conference. Once again, Gimondi was devastated, Motta more sanguine. ‘Fifteen years of work and it’s all collapsed,’ lamented Gimondi. ‘What bugs me is having ridden the Giro for nothing,’ said Motta.

  While both men confirmed that they would appeal against their one-month bans, one dilemma had at least been taken out of their hands: neither, it was now sure, would ride the Tour de France in July. This gave them one thing in common with Merckx. The previous winter, Merckx and his pal and fellow world champion, track ace Patrick Sercu, had been granted an audience with the Belgian Prime Minister Paul Van den Boeynants. Clearly aware of the already growing lobby for Merckx to make his Tour de France debut in 1968, Van den Boeynants had advised him not to succumb to the public clamour. Faema boss Vincenzo Giacotto was of the same opinion. Merckx had then stood firm the following spring when a delegation from the Tour organisers visited him at Paris–Roubaix and again, reportedly, when Coca-Cola offered him one million Belgian francs to line up in France. In the second instance, Merckx’s manager, Jean Van Buggenhout, had understandably wavered before reaffirming that his client’s no was a no. He was too young, it was too early.

  For the second year in succession then, riders divided into national, not trade teams, set out on their journey around France. The Italians were without Gimondi and Motta but at least had Bitossi. ‘Franco, if you want to win the Tour de France, you’d better make it now, because next year there’ll be Merckx,’ the agent Daniel Dousset whispered in Crazy Heart’s ear before the start in Vittel. Bitossi went on to enjoy by far his best ever Tour, and possibly his best ever major tour. He would win two stages and the green jersey of the points competition and finish eighth on the final general classification.

  The winner was the wily Dutchman, Jan Janssen, who had stolen the Tour from under Herman Van Springel’s nose in the race-ending time trial. Van Springel, too, admits today, ‘I knew that it would be my last chance. I knew Merckx was coming…’

  An old ghost came back to haunt Merckx towards the end of 1968. In truth, Rik Van Looy had never really been away. As he got older and weaker, the now defrocked Emperor had become more and more preoccupied with Merckx and stalling his ascent, particularly in the one-day races that Van Looy had dominated. The most prestigious of all for a Belgian was the Tour of Flanders, and in 1968, once again, Walter Godefroot’s victory in a Classic had been overshadowed by a perceived injustice to Merckx. Simply put, Van Looy seemed to have ridden the whole race glued to Merckx’s wheel, apparently only interested in making him lose.

  The brilliant 2010 documentary De Flandriens and its narrator, Michel Wuyts, tackled the issue head on in a rare interview with Van Looy.

  WUYTS: You said that you never rode on Merckx’s wheel just to make him lose.

  VAN LOOY: How can you ride on someone’s wheel to make him lose? If they can explain that…

  WUYTS: By making him nervous.

  VAN LOOY: Yes, well you shouldn’t get nervous. There is always someone on your wheel.

  WUYTS: But if it is a Van Looy…

  VAN LOOY: But Van Looy was already 35 years old. You shouldn’t be scared of a 35- or 36-year-old.

  WUYT: But you still had your very good days.

  [VAN LOOY nods]

  WUYTS: In the ’68 Tour of Flanders, did you ride on Merckx’s wheel?

  VAN LOOY: [pauses for five long seconds] In ’68…yes that was the case, yes.

  Racing in the same Belgian team and national colours as Merckx, not even Van Looy would have the audacity to attempt the same trick at the world championships in Imola in central Italy, on 1 September 1968. What he could do instead was attack with Adorni, of all people, with 58 kilometres gone and 219 remaining. Did Van Looy really think he could win, or was this just his latest ploy to cripple Merckx? The second explanation looked plausible when, having collaborated with the Italian and seven others to take the group out of the peloton and Merckx’s reach, Van Looy wilted with 85 kilometres remaining. From there, Adorni rode unchallenged to win by over 10 minutes, with his Faema teammate and the defending champion, Merckx, resigned or at least happy to repay Adorni for his help at the Giro d’Italia by not chasing. Even having sacrificed his own chances, Merckx still finished eighth.

  ‘I’d told Eddy in the run-up to the race – the Worlds were in my home region and I couldn’t and wouldn’t help him there,’ Adorni recalls. ‘Van Looy and I >went away with a few others but the race had barely started. I said, “Rik, what do we do now? We’ve two hundred kilometres to go. We’re going to die out here in this heat.” Rik just looked at me. “Are you scared of dying? You and me are old anyway.” So on we went. To be honest, I wasn’t afraid that I wouldn’t be able to drop Van Looy, which is what I did. I wasn’t worried about Merckx or what it meant to him that I was away with his big rival, either. I heard later that he hadn’t really made any effort to catch me. I never asked him why. I didn’t want to know.’

  Adorni may have preferred blithe ignorance, but the Italian press the next day had more than an inkling that the two riders’ association with a certain Italian coffee-machine maker, Faema, night explain Merckx’s passive approach.

  The Gazzetta dello Sport’s headline: ‘A coffee aroma in Adorni’s world title’.

  4

  eddy, ciao

  ‘He came at us from every angle, slaughtered every one of us, like some rabid wild man, some barbarian.’ DINO ZANDEGÙ

  IT’S AMAZING WHAT you can learn about the lie of the land in international cycling towards the end of 1968 on an afternoon at the Giro d’Italia…in 2011.

  From one mythical mountain to another. From the Matterhorn, lightning rod for Nino Defilippis’s ‘electrocution’, to the Cima Grande of Lavaredo and now the Monte Rosa. The Rosa’s eastern face, the highest in the Alps, appears so enormous from its base in Macugnaga that the summit may as well be an extension of the sky. Even when the clouds roll down the mountain and into the valley, as they do today, it’s not hard to see why the first president of the
Alpine Club, John Ball, declared this valley the most beautiful mountain canvas on the planet.

  The rain has finally stopped. In its place is a man-made percussion not unique to the Giro but maybe more disorderly and cacophonous here than at other races. A surprise winner, the Sicilian Paolo Tiralongo, will cross the line in under two hours, yet banners and barriers still have to be erected, cars still need to be parked, the corporate crowd still has to be fed and fans entertained. In every direction, there are carabinieri, volunteers or men and women in fleeces emblazoned with the race organisers’ logos, pointing, shouting, gesticulating flamboyantly.

  Three or four hours ago, at the stage start in Bergamo, Giancarlo Ferretti had taken shelter from the approaching storm under a gazebo in the hospitality village. The once fearsome ‘Iron Sergeant’ of team managers, ‘Ferron’ has lost some of his aura, as well as his job, since an internet scammer tricked him into thinking that emails from a Hotmail address were promises of a multi-million-euro sponsorship deal from Sony-Ericsson in 2005. His five foot nine frame is still as lean, his posture just as proud as when he rode with Gimondi at Salvarani in the 1960s, but some of the old gunslinger’s steel has faded from his eyes.

  At times, like now, it is replaced by a misty nostalgia.