Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Observing from the outside, one of Merckx’s main rivals in the Classics, Walter Godefroot, could see why Van Bug had brought Driessens in, but also why it wouldn’t be plain sailing with ‘Lomme the Liar’.

  ‘Driessens was one of the best motivators, no, I think the best motivator in cycling at that time. But it doesn’t work for some people,’ Godefroot says. ‘It works with Van Looy for a while but not with Merckx. Van Looy likes him because sponsors like him so he brings in a lot of money, but cycling at this time is changing. It’s becoming more modern, more structured, and Driessens isn’t an organiser. What he is, is an incredible motivator. That’s why Van Buggenhout told Merckx to take Driessens: it was better having him on your side than against you. Driessens is very smart, plus he can talk himself out of any situation: if you kick him out of the front door, five minutes later he’ll be climbing through the back window. When he wants something, he does everything to get it. I mean, when you were on top of your game, Driessens was great. If I’d have had him in my peak years I would have won more races… So he’s great if you follow him blindly, but if you can think independently about bike-racing, which Eddy already could, it’s not going to work.’

  Godefroot pauses to search for the right analogy.

  ‘Driessens is like…he’s like the husband who comes home and asks his wife what’s for dinner, and what time it will be on the table. At first she keeps doing what he says, but after a while, a wife with character tells the husband to sod off.’

  Any expectation that Lomme Driessens had of being the ‘star’ at Faema evaporated about as soon as Godefroot et al.’s hopes of somehow getting the measure of Merckx in 1969.

  At the beginning of the ’69 season, Adorni had left for Scic, Driessens was in the Faema team car, but otherwise it was as you were – only with Merckx’s supremacy growing exponentially. By the end of 1968, he had raced 129 times since the start of the year and won on 32 occasions, including the prestigious Italian semi-Classic the Tre Valli Varesine in August. It was getting to the point where all that seemed to matter in international bike racing now was whether or not Merckx was competing and, if he was, how or by what margin he would win. At the Spanish Vuelta a Levante in the first week of March 1969, he won three out of seven stages and the general classification. At Paris–Nice, the haul was identical: three stage wins and the overall title. In the final stage, the traditional last-day time trial up the Col de la Turbie above Nice, an estimated 50,000 fans witnessed a poignant changing of the guard. Once unassailable against the clock, the 35-year-old Jacques Anquetil heard the lethal drum of Merckx at his back as the crowd thickened 250 metres from the line. Anquetil had started a minute and a half before Merckx, but was now overtaken. Depending on your vantage point, it was either a fitting abdication to the new king or the grisly execution of someone who could and probably should have bowed out sooner. Merckx, incidentally, suspected the latter and told himself that he would never make the same mistake.

  Sparing in his plaudits until then, Anquetil finally had the decency to recognise Merckx’s true merit. Master Jacques now called Merckx the greatest, most complete rider that he had ever seen.

  In many pundits’ eyes, if that assessment demanded further accreditation, it came at Milan–San Remo a few days later. Again, more impressive than the victory per se, was the manner in which Merckx achieved it, breaking with the sequence of his sprint wins in 1966 and ’67 to attack alone on the descent of the Poggio. Not only had he turned a weakness, his descending, into a strength, it now appeared that Merckx was merely enacting the races that he had already ridden and no doubt dominated in his own head. Before San Remo, he had asked his Milanese mechanic and framebuilder Mario Milesi for a bike four centimetres shorter than his normal steed expressly for the two-kilometre plunge off the Poggio hill. The plan had worked so beautifully that Merckx had ample time to raise both arms in celebration on the Via Roma – a gesture that led one wag in the Belgian press pack to inform Merckx that he had just broken article 196 of the Belgian Cycling Federation rulebook stating that both hands must be kept on the handlebars when a rider crossed the finish line. Merckx’s response – ‘It’s worth paying the 200-franc fine to say that I can win’ – was substantially less newsworthy than his claim that it had been a race ‘without any difficulties’ except for a brief scare when he struck a kerbstone with his leg at the foot of the Poggio and momentarily considered pulling out.

  Amid talk in Italy that he already bore comparison with campionissimo Coppi, Merckx flew home to Brussels, where a large group of fans was waiting to greet him at the airport. An even larger one would of course be in Gent two weeks later for the start of the Tour of Flanders, Belgium’s cup final, and one of a shrinking number of Classic races that Merckx had not yet won.

  The days when Rik Van Looy’s Red Guard could tease and toy with the peloton were long gone, but the old Emperor had suggested there might be life in him yet with a victory over Merckx at the E3 Harelbeke semi-Classic.

  A week later, it was Merckx’s turn to read a Flemish newspaper, specifically Het Nieuwsblad, and shake his head. Merckx, the newspaper’s preview of the Tour of Flanders suggested, may not have the requisite qualities to ever win the Ronde. Merckx had triumphed before on flatter courses, hillier ones, in harder Classics, and easier ones, so the logic was hard to fathom. ‘We’ll see about that,’ Merckx mumbled as he read aloud to his soigneur Guillaume Michiels. A few hours later, Hoban recalls, Merckx sparkled on the cobbles and hills, in the cold and rain of Flanders.

  ‘By that point there were no tactics: everyone knew that it was just a case of following Merckx for as long as possible. In that Tour of Flanders he killed us off in stages. After his first attack, there were thirty of us left, and I thought I’d pick up some pocket money by sprinting for the primes [cash prizes] at the top of the climbs. On the Kwaremont, he hammered all the way on the front, and I just about managed to hang on for grim death and nip round him at the top. On the Kruisberg, the same. But then we got to the Kapelmuur and you could see that he was ready for the coup de grâce. He went up like a man possessed. I got to the top a few seconds behind, with Bitossi and Gimondi. “On y va” – “Let’s go”, I said to Bitossi…but, a few kilometres later, Eddy was already gone, and we knew by then that Merckx wasn’t going to wait. Even with seventy kilometres to go.’

  Not that Hoban or anyone else realised it, but there was one man capable of troubling Merckx on his procession towards Gent: Lomme Driessens. Merckx had charged clear like a bull, head low over the handlebars, nostrils flaring, steam rising from his throbbing ribcage, but now he slowed as Driessens drew alongside him in the Faema team car.

  ‘Verdomme, Eddy! What do you think you’re doing?! Committing suicide?! Are you crazy? There are 70 kilometres to go!’

  Dino Zandegù was right when he said that a hurting rider is a nasty rider, and there could be no more unwelcome intruder than Driessens into the privacy of Merckx’s pain. ‘Go stuff yourself!’ he told Driessens – and went on to ride the last 70 kilometres as though an imaginary red rag hung from the peak of his Faema cap. His final victory margin was five minutes and 36 seconds over Gimondi, who had finished second to win the race of the mere mortals.

  Driessens’s histrionics were not over. Under the podium, ‘Cycling’s Napoleon’ proceeded to hold forth about how Merckx’s attack had been a tactical masterstroke, Driessens’s very own Waterloo. When he read the quotes in the following day’s papers, Merckx was furious. The reality, which everyone in the peloton now acknowledged, was that cycling was turning into an Eddy Merckx biopic, and all besides the lead character were extras.

  There were still defeats, near misses like at Paris–Roubaix the week after Flanders, but even they now came with caveats. These could then somehow be tweaked into further evidence for Merckx’s genius. He had been suffering with a knee injury at Roubaix, yet still been beaten only by Walter Godefroot? The other Belgians were so afraid of him at Flèche Wallonne that they formed an anti-
Merckx coalition? After that race, he had spent the evening with his mechanic, and the next morning with his doctor, because something must have been amiss for him to lose? Some efforts to shoehorn any race outcome into the now accepted canon of his invulnerability were risible. After Paris–Roubaix, one Italian newspaper suggested that Merckx would be ‘relieved to have abandoned the excessive weight of his invincibility’. In Belgium, meanwhile, his same po-faced omnipotence was more sensibly held up as the reason for Van Looy still being the more popular rider.

  If losing was what it took to relieve and ingratiate himself, Merckx was about to fail again at Liège–Bastogne–Liège, the hilliest, the oldest and the toughest of the Belgian Classics. Once more, Barry Hoban was among the stranded admirers as this time Merckx opened the throttle on the Côte de Stockeu, 100 kilometres from the finish. Only one rider could stay with him – his Faema teammate Vic Van Schil, he of the ham-fisted attempts to escape a dope test at the 1968 Giro. Merckx now seemed omnipresent, subliminal; even when he wasn’t nearby, his influence was. In the wooded hills of the Ardennes, as much as a drubbing, it felt to Hoban like a haunting. ‘I was chasing with Herman Van Springel, Gimondi and Jos Huysmans, and I kept wondering why they weren’t riding. Of course, I couldn’t know at the time that Huysmans and Van Springel were future teammates of Merckx. Eventually I pulled over and the gap got huge. It was scary.’

  The scary margin by the time Hoban crossed the line in third was just over eight minutes. The world’s most famous boxer and possibly sportsman wasn’t fighting in 1969, self-exiled from the Vietnam War and so ostracised from competition, but Hoban says that he had found a worthy substitute in Merckx. ‘It was like now Muhammad Ali. Even if Merckx wasn’t saying it like Ali did, you could tell he was thinking, “I’ll take the man in the fifth round!” In other words, “I’ll drop them all on the Côte de Stockeu and win by eight minutes.” ‘Basically,’ Hoban concludes, ‘he was doing exactly what he wanted.’

  Before the end of a spring in which Merckx and Faema had flirted with perfection, there was still time for Lomme Driessens to underline yet again why he was often more of a liability than an asset. After his antics in Flanders, he had already angered Merckx by insisting that he rode the Tour of Majorca with a sore knee and the leftover symptoms of an intestinal virus. Everyone had seen the effect of that decision on Merckx’s performance at Paris–Roubaix. In the Omloop der Vlaamse Gewesten in the last week of April, with Merckx’s appetite momentarily sated by his Liège masterclass five days earlier, the Faema riders agreed that Merckx’s old Madison partner Patrick Sercu would get his chance to shine on the road. Sercu appeared to be doing just that when the other Faema man who had made it into the key move of the day, Julien Stevens, attacked two kilometres from home. Incensed, Sercu joined the chase which ended with Stevens being absorbed with 400 metres to go, and was so tired that he could only finish third in the sprint to the line. And provoke another Driessens diatribe…

  ‘We spend all day working for you and you can’t even win the sprint! You’re only a track rider!’

  ‘OK, that’s fine, that’s sorted: I won’t race in your team next year,’ Sercu snapped back.

  Sercu says now that the exchange ‘summed up Driessens’. ‘If you didn’t win, it was all the rider’s fault and you were useless. If Eddy won, though, Driessens could have spent the afternoon napping in the car, but you’d still find him next to the podium at the finish, kissing Eddy and taking all the congratulations.’

  Driessens apart, Faema was now turning into almost as formidable a force as its leader. Liège had been their most intimidating display yet. Hoban was not surprised, having ridden in the same team as Joseph Spruyt and Roger Swerts at Mercier in 1967, before they left for Faema. ‘Merckx was never on his own,’ Hoban says. ‘His team was phenomenal, because he’d cherry-picked the best from other teams. He’d already rewritten the rulebook about bike-riding, long before people were going to South Africa and Australia for training camps. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, they’d all meet at his place and they did 200 kilometres, rain or shine. Then in the race, the red and white jerseys would surge to the front and it’d be a battle just to hold the wheels. If you’re going at 40 kilometres an hour, anyone can attack, but if you’re going at 43 kilometres per hour it’s not so easy. Now, Eddy’s team could go at forty-five, forty-six. He controlled the race all day long. You never saw his teammates at the back of the bunch.’

  Others, though, watched the Merckx platoon – Spruyt, Swerts and the Van Dens and Van Bens, which for Zandegù blurred into one hellish red mist – and marvelled. They were all now over-performing. Meanwhile, the opposite appeared to be true of Merckx’s rivals. For all that it had been mooted during the ’68 Giro, few really believed that Faema and their doctor had access to some secret rocket fuel, legal or not. Anquetil had, it’s true, briefly set tongues wagging during the 1967 Giro by revealing that a French doctor was submitting him to daily ‘super-ozone’ injections in a mobile laboratory that followed him around Italy. The treatment supposedly eliminated toxins from the bloodstream and muscles, thereby aiding recovery. It wasn’t banned – but neither was it healthy or very effective. With interest in Merckx so hysterical that one Flemish newspaper, Het Laaste Nieuws, was about to send 13 journalists to the 1969 Giro, it was also inconceivable that daily visits by Merckx to some itinerant ozone Tardis could have passed unnoticed. The same would have applied to a needle-wielding Svengali entering his hotel, particularly if there was no shame in what he was doing.

  Steroid use was already rife in weight-lifting, and was undetectable in urine tests, but the dosage was fraught with risk and the side-effects ugly. The 1960 Tour de France winner Gastone Nencini had a terrible reputation for ‘experimentation’, notably with morphine and hormone injections. He had also had the same team doctor as Merckx – Enrico Peracino. But no one was making the connection or thought that Peracino had encouraged Nencini. In fact, an old story went that Nino Defilippis asked Peracino to inject him with a doping product before a time trial at the 1957 Tour de France, and Peracino threw the syringe back in his face. This left the old bric-a-brac of amphetamines and stimulants which could be used with impunity in training but were a dangerous option for someone winning and therefore being tested as often as Merckx, if not for his teammates. Other theories were of the crackpot variety, like speculation at the 1968 Giro about a mystery Mongolian plant extract. Either that or they relied solely on dubious, anecdotal evidence. One story went that Merckx had already been ‘warned’ about the results of his dope tests on multiple occasions. More plausible, because Peracino had admitted it in Nencini’s day, was that the doctor used needles to inject legal vitamins and rehydration solutions which aided recovery.

  In interviews, Merckx’s statements were neither especially reassuring nor incriminating. ‘It’s a shame, a real shame,’ was all he had said about Gimondi and Motta’s positive tests at the ’68 Giro. His regular lieutenants Swerts, Van Schil and Reybrouck had all failed tests before 1969, as had Vittorio Adorni at the 1968 Giro di Sardegna – but then so had dozens of riders.

  So, no, there must have been something else going on, some other phenomenon. One of the journalists closest to Merckx, the Walloon television reporter Théo Mathy, reckoned that it was a logical aggregation of several factors. They were the disciplined example set by Merckx, the intensity of training sessions with him, plus the dual incentives of success and money, whether through better wages or cash prizes.

  Merckx himself probably put it better years later in his Coureur Cycliste, Un Homme et Son Métier. Here, he went into detail about the ideal team composition, its blend of riders able to make the pace on the flat and ‘police the bunch’, and climbers like Martin Van Den Bossche who could ‘toughen up the race’. None of this was new or ground-breaking, but there were many interesting and intelligent observations in the four pages he devoted to the topic. What emerged was a profound awareness not only of Merckx’s teammates’ worth to him, but also
of his to them. The reason for Spruyt’s, Swerts’s and Van Schil’s marked improvement since joining Faema was, Merckx wrote, ‘the effect of emulation’. In a team that works, ‘everyone takes pride in not falling below the standards of their neighbour’, he went on.

  Of course, they also had to be talented. Even today, the leggy climber Martin Van Den Bossche is half confused, half insulted that his 10th place overall in his first Tour de France in 1966 barely registered with the Belgian public. ‘Nobody talked about it! Nobody talked about it! People had been spoiled by riders like Rik Van Looy and Rik van Steenbergen. The rest of us just didn’t exist,’ he laments. Asked, however, whether he didn’t consider himself too good to sacrifice himself for another rider, in this case Merckx, Van Den Bossche immediately frowns and shakes his head. ‘No! People would have laughed at the suggestion! The lead man was the lead man – and the lead man was Merckx.’ The fact was that forsaking one’s own ambitions also meant forsaking an awful lot of responsibility and pressure. Life on Merckx’s team was straightforward. ‘It wasn’t a team of many words,’ says Van Den Bossche. Literally and figuratively, on the bike and off it, ‘keeping Merckx’s head out of the wind, that was pretty much it,’ he adds. With time, Van Den Bossche would come to feel that he and his teammates weren’t only burying their egos and ambitions, but also their personalities in the name of the Merckx cause. For the time being, though, he suited the job, and it suited him fine.