Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  ‘The Tre Cime di Lavaredo was just one the first of endless exploits,’ he says. ‘After that, Merckx just got faster and faster. He would be riding on the bunch, taking it easy, or so he thought, and the group would start breaking apart behind him. Or he’d attack 120 kilometres from the finish and we’d think he’d gone insane, then the next time we’d see him would be at the finish. There were things which the general public didn’t see and no one remembers but which gave us all nightmares. He went tack tack tack and swept through professional cycling like a forest fire, burning everyone and everything in his path. He made us suffer, he beat us, he humiliated us, yet we still had an inestimable admiration for him. More than for his strength; for his courage, his fantasia, that imagination to dream up things that no one else believed possible…’

  Ferretti draws breath.

  ‘I was Gimondi’s domestique until 1970 then three years later I became his directeur sportif. Felice fought, he battled, he pretended, but finally even he got despondent. At the Volta a Catalunya in September 1968, a week after Adorni won the World Championships, it hit him. Merckx and Felice were going at each other every day, the leader’s jersey was going from one to the other, then we got to the time trial. I had already finished and was watching on TV back in the hotel. Felice is a born time triallist, but Merckx made him look like a pantomime horse. Half an hour after the race, I hear the door creak open and see Felice standing there, shaking his head. He peels off his gloves and throws them on the bed, cursing. “Porco cane!” he says. “How the hell am I going to beat this guy? I have to beat him. If it’s the last thing I do before I give up, I have to beat him in a time trial!”

  ‘Well,’ Ferretti says with a chuckle. ‘It took him five years…’

  Up the road in Macugnaga, a moment of serendipity.

  In a VIP enclosure overlooking the finish line, Felice Gimondi reminisces about the same afternoon in the same Volta a Catalunya in 1968. A small crowd has formed at a respectful distance from our table. From its midst, a smartly dressed, strapping man in his 60s steps towards us. He takes the chair next to Gimondi.

  It is Eddy Merckx.

  ‘Merckx was so strong,’ Gimondi has just been saying, ‘that you had to take it in turns to follow his wheel!’

  Gimondi now turns away from the recorder and towards Merckx, who gives the impression of wanting whatever is about to be said to remain a private conversation, without necessarily wishing to change the subject. When he looks at his old mate, his old rival, Gimondi, he smiles. When he looks in our direction, with head and body at 45 degrees, Merckx is nigh on expressionless.

  ‘Eddy, when was it that we first met? Bruxelles–Anselberg in 1963, when we were still amateurs?’

  ‘You beat me. You made me suffer like a beast.’

  ‘It was the only race he let me win! All the others, you won after that…’

  They both laugh. Gimondi shakes his head.

  ‘That time trial in the Volta a Catalunya still burns. I still think about it now. At midnight, I was still down on the beach, the Playa de Rosas – walking up and down, up and down – trying to figure out how I’d lost. Because it was the first time that you’d beaten me in a time trial…’

  ‘I’d broken my wheel. I broke two spokes. I had to change a wheel.’

  ‘You? In that one, too? Merda, I didn’t know that…Anyway, it took me two years to swallow what happened that day and finally understand why he’d beaten me.’ Gimondi stops and points to Merckx. ‘He just was stronger.’

  ‘But do you remember the war we had in that Volta a Catalunya?’ Gimondi continues. ‘This huge battle, knives out in every stage. One day, I had a problem after five or six kilometres, and on they all went, into battle. The next day, you had a problem, and off we all went. The jersey went back and forth two or three times that week. And then, in the end, as always, you won.’

  And with that, Merckx gets up from his chair, without warning or a word, walks away and the interview continues with its main subject matter no longer present.

  ‘Dino! Dino!’

  Another former Salvarani rider, Dino Zandegù, is shuffling down the mountain and towards us wearing a dark blue raincoat and a smirk. It’s now gone four in the afternoon; by his own estimates, that means 90 per cent of what he’s about to tell us is going to be true.

  *

  Dino, Dino, tell us about Merckx. When you finally realised what you were up against, I mean after 1967, what was it like, racing against him?

  ‘He came at us from every angle, slaughtered every one of us, like some rabid wild man, some barbarian. He could have been the greatest footballer, the greatest skier, the greatest boxer of all time, only he chose cycling. But Merckx also had this great drama in his life: he couldn’t stand, couldn’t tolerate losing. And it was a real drama for him.’

  And a drama for you and the rest of ’em, eh, Dino?

  ‘Oh, he used to drive me nuts. When he was racing, you knew that he could put you out of the time limit any time. It was a constant, breathless chase. You’d see Merckx’s team on the front ready to make the race 150 kilometres from the finish, Van Den Bossche, Van Den this, Van Ben that – they all surged to the front – and he’d be pawing the ground like this big tiger. He couldn’t wait for the moment, kilometre X, when he would attack and smash us all to pieces. I used to tell him to go stuff himself. When you’re hurting, you turn nasty. I’d be shouting from the back of the bunch, “Vaffanculo, Merckx! Bastardo!” Half of the peloton detested him despite thinking that he was an OK bloke.’

  But you got on well with him too, eh, Dino? He had a sense of humour. You used to sing for him…

  ‘“O Dolce Paese”, that was his favourite. We used to talk, you know, at the criterium races. We’d get there and eat three hours before, then the crit would start at eight and at ten we’d all be together in a restaurant again. After one of these crits, we’d maybe had a drink or two and Eddy started telling me to sing him this song he’d heard in Friuli one time, which he’d loved, this “O Dolce Paese”. I sang it that night, and every time I saw him after that, it was “Dino, Dino, sing me that song, that ‘O Dolce Paese’!”. I said, “Merckx, who do you think I am? Father Christmas?” But because he was even more important than that, because he was Merckx, I always sang.’

  5

  new world order

  ‘He wasn’t a bully…but he was a Mafioso in one sense.’ PATRICK SERCU

  TWO DAYS BEFORE the 2011 Giro stage to Macugnaga, another mountain-top finish, this one at the Nevegal ski resort near Belluno, throws up another brief encounter with shrill echoes of 1968.

  After all these years, Il Processo alla Tappa, the post-stage review show enlivened by Dino Zandegù’s singing in the sixties, is still going strong, and this year acquires extra gravitas thanks to Merckx. Every day for a week he sits on the stage, drowning in blandishments from the female presenter and dispensing his nuggets of insight and anecdotes. At Nevegal, though, he isn’t the only guest and former rider introduced as a ‘Belgian legend’. The other man is leaner, darker and noticeably younger. His facial features are smaller and neater. He also speaks good Italian. He is also smartly dressed. His young, blonde, gazelle-like wife, perhaps in her late 30s, and their son Eddy, watch from offstage.

  He is Roger de Vlaeminck.

  One day in May 1968, Merckx headed out for a pre-Giro training ride with a few of his teammates, and decided to drop in on the amateur Tour of Belgium. His influence was already such that he and manager Jean Van Buggenhout had largely taken charge of the Faema team’s recruitment for the following season, and there was a young lad from West Flanders about whom Merckx was hearing great things. Spotting De Vlaeminck among the 18- and 19-year-olds making their last-minute adjustments and preparations before the start, Merckx climbed off his bike and ambled towards him. They shook hands. The conversation, as usual with Merckx, was brief and to the point: what would De Vlaeminck say to riding with Merckx at Faema the following season?

 
The response was instantaneous, unequivocal and unexpected.

  ‘No. I don’t want to ride with you. I want to ride against you.’

  De Vlaeminck went on to win the race, and the significance of his words became apparent within a few months. The same would be true of the Merckx camp’s efforts to reinforce Faema with another headstrong personality ahead of the 1969 season. At the Giro, with Merckx irrepressible, Van Bug had begun discussions with Guillaume ‘Lomme’ Driessens about joining Faema as a directeur sportif the following year. On first impressions, they had much in common: both were in their 50s, they were imposing in words, actions and physique, and both were considered big beasts, two of the kings of the Belgian cycling jungle. ‘The difference between them,’ says Marino Vigna, the Italian Faema directeur who would soon be Driessens’s colleague, ‘was that one was underrated, the other overrated.’

  Van Bug’s confidence in Driessens is interesting for what it says about how he regarded Merckx who, having turned 23 the week after the ’68 Giro, was now his prize asset. If, early in 1967, there was a raft of other riders with their sights on domination, it had been definitively capsized and any doubts forgotten. As the 1968 season ended, this left Merckx exactly where he wanted to be in his life and career, yet also exactly where he was at his most uncomfortable: with the spotlight of his homeland and, increasingly, the rest of Europe, stinging his eyes. In a sense, he straddled the worst of all worlds: he was a Belgian, but a Belgian from bilingual Brussels, and therefore the public property of both French-speaking Wallonia in the south and cycling-crazy, Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north; he was excelling in a sport whose popularity owed in part, and still owes today, to a physical proximity to its people, whether they were fans at the roadside or journalists at races. Team press officers didn’t yet exist, and this meant unbridled access, or intrusion, for reporters who would think nothing of knocking on his hotel-room door and demanding an interview. There was no top-secret compound in which to train, and the biggest star in Belgium could be witnessed at work on any morning when he wasn’t racing. All an assiduous fan had to do was camp outside the spacious but hardly palatial four-bedroom house that Merckx bought with Claudine after their wedding. On the stroke of nine, come rain or, more seldom in Belgium, shine, the garage door would tilt open and Merckx would emerge.

  As soon as pedals and wheels were turning, of course, Merckx was into his bubble. The faster he rode, the freer he felt. As the Italian Ferretti team’s directeur sportif at the time, Alfredo Martini, puts it, ‘This is the guy who said that, when he rode slowly, his legs hurt. The faster he rode, the better they felt.’

  In front of cameras, microphones and notebooks, it was another story. These he didn’t have the talents or the training to outrun or outride. ‘He had no idea at all how he was supposed to conduct himself in the new situation,’ one of the journalists closest to Merckx at the time, the late Robert Janssens, told Rik Vanwalleghem in Eddy Merckx – De Mens achter de Kannibaal. ‘He was overwhelmed by it. He couldn’t understand quite why he needed to give answers to the more diverse questions. He would have liked to have a good chat, but simply couldn’t. His middle-class upbringing had taught him to do what was asked by his environment. But his nature was in direct conflict with his intent. He was not very well disposed verbally, he didn’t read much, and he used few words to express himself. Moreover, he didn’t really read the press.’

  These were gripes, or observations, that would temper the media’s admiration for Merckx throughout his career. The impression he gave was of seeing interviews not as an annoyance but certainly a distraction from the main business of racing, training or at least thinking about one or both. The issue was exacerbated by the fact that he hated to offend; hence, while he would rarely refuse an interview, out of simple politeness, he was incapable of offering reporters the incendiary or even insightful quotes that could have made him their darling.

  To all of this was added another problem: while hailing from Brussels guaranteed interest and claims of ownership from both the French and Flemish-speaking halves of Belgium, it also placed Merckx in a state of linguistic limbo. The Merckx family had moved to Wolowe-Saint-Pierre in the south-east of Brussels when Eddy was one, attracted, like many, by the increased opportunities for employment. As well as being a born introvert, Eddy’s father, Jules, didn’t speak a word of French, while his mother Jenny’s was competent if not quite fluent. The Merckxes were by no means the only predominantly Dutch-speaking family in the neighbourhood, but French was becoming more and more prevalent. The reason was that, since the Second World War during which many of the Flemish provinces had sided with the Nazis, speaking Dutch had been regarded if not as a badge of dishonour, then certainly as the least preferable option when language was a choice. French, on the other hand, could be an instant step up the social ladder.

  Now, having grown up in a Dutch-speaking household, in a mostly French-speaking neighbourhood, and living with a Francophile wife, Merckx often just sounded confused. Even today, over forty years later, he admits that there are gaping holes in both of his vocabularies, French and Dutch.

  Van Bug, then, was perhaps right to think that Merckx needed help. Where he had made a grave error was in enlisting Guillaume ‘Lomme’ Driessens to be a directeur sportif who was also a spin doctor – a brilliant motivator who all too often behaved like a hired thug.

  Merckx disliked him instantly. At the 1967 Giro, Driessens had taken the trouble or liberty to point out his tactical errors on an almost daily basis, despite the fact that Merckx was riding for an opposing team. He had then told a journalist in private that the youngster would never measure up to Rik Van Looy. Driessens, of course, had quickly forgotten this when he finally joined Faema a year and a half later.

  ‘I wasn’t made to get on well for long with Guillaume Driessens,’ Merckx wrote in Coureur Cycliste, Un Homme et Son Métier in 1974. ‘His volubility and his sly way of talking just didn’t fit my character. I often wondered, for example, why he always tried to keep the journalists away from me, telling them I didn’t want to see them, when it was all coming exclusively from him. It was because of him that people started saying I was an unpleasant character. “Merckx is impossible – he couldn’t be any less cooperative,” the journalists who didn’t know me well used to say, and they were right.’

  If they weren’t obvious before, Merckx’s true feelings about Driessens weren’t too difficult to decipher when his old directeur died at the age of 94 in 2006. ‘When I heard of his death, my first reflex was to wish everyone could live as long as he did…Without any ambiguity, I would say that we weren’t friends. He was forced upon me at an important time in my career. I tolerated him but we didn’t have the same vision of cycling.’

  That vision, Merckx discovered quickly in 1969, was to his mind a toxic mix of bluster, bullying and deception, but also the charisma and motivational capacities that seemed, in Van Bug’s eyes, to make Driessens and Merckx a Belgian dream team. ‘Cycling’s Napoleon’, as some had christened Driessens, had traded for years on his supposedly close association with the Italian campionissimo Fausto Coppi, whom he had met when Coppi came to Belgium on a hunting expedition in the late 1940s. To listen to Driessens, one would have been forgiven for thinking that he was the man who discovered Coppi, made him a world-beater, and masterminded every one of his legendary exploits. Boasts like these made it easy to see how he had earned another, even less flattering moniker : ‘Guillaume le menteur’ or ‘William the Liar’.

  One rider Driessens had certainly been close to was Van Looy. Their partnership, though, had ended badly at the end of 1953, whereupon Driessens joined the rival Romeo-Smiths team and quickly exhibited another unsavoury characteristic – his quenchless thirst for revenge. ‘Let’s see what Van Looy’s worth without me,’ had been Driessens’s sniffy parting shot from Van Looy’s GBC team. For the next three or four years, as if the emerging generation spearheaded by Eddy Merckx wasn’t enough to deal with, Van Looy had to cope wi
th constant efforts by Driessens to undermine and frustrate him. ‘Lomme the Liar’s’ favourite tactic was the one later employed, probably not coincidentally, by Van Looy against Merckx: stick to the stronger man, mark him, taunt him and under no circumstances help him, until finally either his legs or his nerve gave way. When it worked, as when Guido Reybrouck sucked like a leech on Van Looy’s back wheel en route to Ax-les-Termes in the 1965 Tour de France, then beat him in a sprint, Driessens was insufferable. And when it didn’t, Driessens was also insufferable. At the 1968 Giro, his Romeo-Smiths riders’ abject performances prompted a withering tirade and, eventually, Driessens’s departure for Faema. ‘The way things are going, you’ll all soon be back working in factories! I’m a directeur sportif and I want to be following races, not funerals!’ Driessens ranted.

  It was somehow apt that Driessens should mention funerals. In the 1948 Tour of Switzerland, then working as a masseur for Mondia, he had been sitting in the back of a team car that ran over and killed the Belgian rider Richard Depoorter. Driessens’s contradictory statement in court and his fainting attack during cross-examination were typical of the antics Merckx could later expect at Faema. The driver of the car, the Mondia directeur Louis Hanssens, was convicted of causing Depoorter’s death in 1957.

  In football in the 1970s, the phoney war between two managers, Brian Clough and Don Revie, would grip the English public, but by that time Driessens had already served up an uncanny cross-breed of their most distinctive traits. Before his time in cycling, Driessens had also been a football manager, for the modest Vilvoorde in the northern suburbs of Brussels. To the same round face and frame as Revie, the same thick jaw and hooded eyes, and a similar reputation for dirty tricks and skulduggery, Driessens somehow added Clough’s gift for the gab and his even bigger gift for self-aggrandisement. ‘Driessens was an egomaniac of the first order,’ confirms the journalist Walter Pauli. Another writer, the erstwhile Tuttosport cycling correspondent Gianpaolo Ormezzano, agrees that the same attributes which made Driessens poorly suited to Merckx also made him incompatible with the other top dog at Faema, Vincenzo Giacotto. ‘Giacotto and Driessens were at the antipodes,’ Ormezzano says. ‘Vincenzo was a paragon of civility, Driessens more like a bandit. Vincenzo was a bourgeois from Piedmont, Driessens was a peasant from Flanders…’