Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  What would Jenny say to him now? And Jules? It wouldn’t be difficult to imagine what his father thought of drugs. Cigarettes were bad enough – if not for him then at least for his children, and he barely touched alcohol. Merckx remembered the time he’d been caught puffing on a Zemir. His dad had hauled him in front of the mirror and said that he looked ‘as white as a piece of stale cheese’. Then came the obligatory clout.

  Eddy was always up to mischief, most of the time outside the Merckx family’s store in the Place des Bouvreuils or in the park in Woluwe, where the ponds were fantastic for finding frogs and tadpoles. At school, the teachers would see his attention wandering or his chair shuffling towards the window and the noise coming from the street. Even when he played cards, he would want to play in the open air. About the only time he could bear to be indoors was for rare games of billiards in the Cheval Blanc Inn next to the grocery store. When, as they often did, Jules and Jenny asked him to lend a hand in the shop, it went without saying that he’d always be happier doing the bread deliveries than stacking shelves.

  ‘It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well,’ Jenny always used to say; if he had learned anything from his parents, it was that hard work would always be rewarded. That, whatever his detractors said, explained his success until Giacotto and Raschi had appeared in the room Merckx was already pulling the braces of his bib shorts over his shoulders. In the time it took Giacotto to utter that sentence, everything had been tarnished for ever. The sound of Merckx ripping off his gloves as the first tear rolled down his cheek had made Giacotto flinch.

  All he’d ever wanted to do was this – ride his bike. From before he knew it, when Stan Ockers was finishing second in the Tour de France in 1950 and 1952, and certainly when Ockers did the Ardennes ‘double’ in 1955, before Eddy’s tenth birthday. The next autumn, Ockers had died in a crash on the track in Antwerp, aged 36. Eddy was inconsolable when one of his friends broke the news as they walked to school.

  At the time he was still playing football, tennis and basketball, and showing promise in all three. After one football match in which he’d scored a double hat-trick, when he was eight or nine, the coach of his team, White Star, had asked him to stay behind after the other kids. ‘Well played. Here you go,’ he said, handing over a large pile of official club kit as a reward for Eddy’s Man of the Match performance. So why hadn’t he stuck at it? Why the obsession with cycling and not another sport? No one knew, because it didn’t run in the family, and the residents of Woluwe were a little too bourgeois for such a low-brow sport to have any traction there. The best cyclists were sons of factory workers, miners, not social climbers like the Merckxes had become. Sure, everyone listened to the Tour de France on the radio in summer, and everyone had heard of Rik Van Looy, but that was as far as it went. This wasn’t Flanders. For years Eddy didn’t even know what the Classics were because he spent Sundays with his grandmother on the farm where he’d been born in Meensel-Kiezegem. His obsession had been and, even now, still remained the Tour de France.

  The Tour…Would he even ride it now? Only this morning, perhaps a little complacently, his thoughts had skipped ahead to June and how he would prepare for his first crack at the big one. ‘I already feel like I’m in training. I’ve already established my programme for between the two tours. I’m going to race nine times, then I’ll be ready for the Tour,’ he had told a journalist. Those comments now seemed as pitiful as the flowers wilting downstairs. The sanction for a positive test was a one-month ban. The test had taken place on 1 June, today was 2 June, and the Grande Boucle would begin in Roubaix on 28 June.

  Maybe, back home in Woluwe, the same people who had called him ‘Tour de France’ as a kid would be remembering the times when they told him that cycling wasn’t a career. He hadn’t stood out in his very first races, that much was true. Before the first, unofficial one when he was 12, his only ‘training’ had been mucking about with his mates and riding to school up the steep incline of the Avenue du Kouter. Then, one weekend in Meenzel-Kiezegem, he had tagged along in a race for unlicensed riders and been lapped several times. Two years later, Jules rigged up a TV for the road race at the Rome Olympics and Eddy watched, transfixed. A Soviet, Viktor Kapitonov, won and Eddy swooned at the white jersey adorned with the five Olympic rings that they gave him on the podium. ‘The next Olympics are in Tokyo in four years. I’d better hurry up,’ he said aloud. Then, in July 1961, Jenny had gone off on holiday to Middelkerke on the north coast with the twins, and Eddy had mysteriously asked to stay behind to help his father in the grocery store; Jenny discovered later, and wasn’t particularly amused, that he had an ulterior motive – his first official race. It had taken place in Laeken, and Eddy finished sixth of 33 riders, on the same afternoon that Jacques Anquetil rode into Paris as a Tour de France winner for a second time. Eddy had raced 11 more times between then and 1 October, the date of his first victory. That had come in Lettelingen, appropriately, a few hundred metres from the Flanders–Wallonia border. He wore a black leather skullcap and shorts that barely skimmed his thighs.

  In 1961 he had ridden 14 races, the next season it would be 55. At school he was so distracted that his grades had dipped from an already low baseline. He had failed in every subject (including the Latin in which, according to one paper, he was suddenly fluent at Milan–San Remo in ’66) and had to repeat the year. Jenny despaired. Sometimes she cried. Eddy saw her and worried – but he knew what he was doing. He knew that a future in professional cycling was now not only a dream but a compulsion. In the winter of 1961, now aged 16, he had gone training one Sunday with Michiels, the professionals Emile Daems and Willy Vannisten and a couple of other strong, local riders, and Daems had struggled to hold Eddy’s wheel when they all sprinted to the top of a cobbled climb. In the classroom, things continued to deteriorate, until on the day before the 1962 Easter holidays, Merckx was sent to see the headmaster about an unfinished essay. ‘Have it done on the first day back or there won’t be a second,’ he was told. That had made up his mind; now he just had to persuade his parents. As strict as he always was, Jules loved seeing Eddy succeed, and had given his blessing to him racing in Halle on 1 May. Now Eddy went to see his mum. ‘If it really upsets you that much, I’ll stop riding my bike and concentrate on school. But I’d like to become a cyclist,’ he said.

  ‘There are thousands of cyclists, but only Rik Van Steenbergen and Rik Van Looy make decent money…’ she replied, feigning some knowledge of the subject. ‘But if that’s your decision, you’ll get our support. Just think of what I’ve said to you today when you’re racing,’ she said finally.

  On the evening of 1 June, Jules called from Halle to tell her that Eddy had won the race…by over four minutes. His prize was 400 Belgian francs for coming first and 450 in the bonus sprints. Two months later, on a wet day in Libramont, he became the Belgian national junior champion and all doubts in everyone’s mind had been, if not totally erased, then at least suspended for the time being. The headmaster’s offer to postpone his exams until September if he returned to school was politely declined.

  On another day at around this time he had turned up to a race, seen a fellow competitor looking him scornfully up and down, and heard: ‘Hey, little kid, you’ve got no chance here. Didn’t you know? Le grand Eddy Merckx is riding today.’ Being admired felt good, but not as good as winning. The morning after that first ever win in Lettelingen, he had opened his eyes, seen his mother in the room, and beamed. ‘Oh, Mum, winning is such a great feeling,’ he said.

  Le grand Eddy Merckx. That’s what everyone had been calling him for a couple of years now, but he’d soon see whether they changed their tune in the next few hours. The Giro would be leaving Savona, the journalists would go with it, and then what? Giacotto was already talking about second opinions, getting some tests done at some Medical Institute in Milan. They might bring some clarity, but by then it’d be too late, at least for this Giro. Faema had even organised the inauguration of their new factor
y in Zingonia around the Giro’s arrival there in two days’ time. Some party that would now be. Giacotto was talking about the whole team, minus Merckx, flying home from Milan’s Linate airport tonight. Meanwhile Gimondi had said he wouldn’t wear the pink jersey, out of respect. That was a nice gesture. The maglia rosa that should have been in the peloton today, the one belonging to Merckx and with Faema stitched on the breast, was draped over the bedside table, destined never to be worn.

  Merckx looked up now and saw Claudine and the Faema vice president Paolo Valente shuffle through the door. He embraced her. She had arrived at the race two days earlier, on the rest day in Cesenatico. Together with Van Bug, she was the one who always stepped in when Eddy was in above his head, when he wanted to say ‘yes’ to everyone, but, really, for his own sake, ought to have told them ‘no’. Had he read that bizarre article in the Corriere della Sera a few days ago which said that Claudine ‘managed his career’? Unlikely – he seldom read papers, books or magazines. He knew that it was bad, that he ought to make more effort, that he’d maybe have more to say in interviews, but the urge just wasn’t there.

  There was a cyclone in his head, and now every weakness, every character flaw was blowing up in front of his face. He knew that he could be selfish, even self-absorbed, but then which athlete, or at least which champion, wasn’t? He tried to atone with generosity, sensitivity, politeness – not that it earned him much credit with the press, or one or two of his rivals. Merckx had always let his legs do the talking, or, on one occasion, when he had passed and turned to glare at Van Looy in the La Turbie time trial in Paris–Nice in 1966, his eyes.

  Then Driessens – what would he now say? No doubt something ridiculous and self-important. ‘This wouldn’t have happened if I’d been at the Giro.’ Yes, that’s probably what Driessens would say.

  As time went on, more and more, Eddy was noticing that the directeur sportif’s role was a ‘problem position’ in his teams. His last real ‘coach’ had been Felicien Vervaecke. Vervaecke had himself been one of Belgium’s best ever riders, a Tour de France King of the Mountains in 1937 and a runner-up on general classification in 1938. Guillaume Michiels knew him and had introduced Vervaecke to Merckx. Before long, as well as constantly reminding Eddy to be more economical in races, Vervaecke was telling friends and acquaintances that he had the next Belgian Tour de France winner on his hands. He had realised after a while that it was impossible to curb Merckx’s attacking instinct, his sheer zest for racing his bike, and that the best approach was therefore just to limit the consecutive efforts which might lead to burn-out. Eddy had done just one stage race as an amateur – the Tour of Limbourg in 1963, which he’d won, the day before he met Jean Van Buggenhout for the first time. Vervaecke was still his coach and personal mechanic when he turned pro with Solo-Superia in 1965, but they drifted apart the following year when Eddy rode the Six Days of Gent, and his partner Patrick Sercu’s mechanic worked for both of them. Vervaecke had taken that badly.

  Merckx hated upsetting people almost as much as he hated losing. Increasingly, though, it had become unavoidable, an occupational hazard. On the bike, his competitive spirit and the way that it manifested itself had always ruffled feathers, even if he always tried to be as ‘réglo’, as fair as they came. ‘Come on, we’re not risking our lives out here,’ Walter Godefroot had said to him after one rambunctious sprint when they were amateurs. Godefroot was no shrinking violet himself – hence the occasional nickname, ‘De Vlaamse Bulldog’ or ‘the Flemish Bulldog’ – but there had always been an intensity, a single-mindedness about Merckx on a bike that inspired not just fear but a sort of repugnance. In a way there was insecurity in what Godefroot had said, and in what people kept complaining about Merckx’s ceaseless will to win: they wished they were as linear, as motivated as him, but there was always a worry or a weakness or a reminder of their own mortality which intruded. Take Zilioli. He had seemed unbeatable in the summer of 1963, then ‘frozen’ as soon as that success created the expectation of more. It stopped being fun. Merckx, on the other hand, was only enjoying himself when he was fulfilling that premonition, that vision of his ideal future self as a winner, a champion. He couldn’t explain it and couldn’t comprehend the need to excuse it. Sometimes the others talked as though his victories invalidated everything they did.

  It was now after lunchtime, and all those continuing their journey, their Giro, had left Merckx behind. The cycling world that seemed to spin like a basketball on his fingertip had stopped turning at ten o’clock that morning. Claudine, Van Den Bossche and Valente remained in the room, their attention all on him. ‘Milan’ and ‘this afternoon’ were among a handful of words that penetrated the daze when Valente spoke. Van Den Bossche pulled on a grey turtle-neck sweater, Merckx his zip-up tracksuit top and they began gathering their things.

  Gladioli – the symbols of moral integrity, but also of a gladiator’s sword piercing the heart. They were still in reception when Merckx left.

  7

  benefit of the doubt?

  ‘Eddy, if I hug you, it’s because you’re an honest lad. I don’t make a habit of embracing Judas.’ ADRIANO RODONI

  PROFESSOR GENEVOSE, WHO had watched Doctor Cavalli perform the ‘B’ test, agreed there could be no doubt: the concentration of the offending substance was ‘altissimo’ – extremely high. And yet for hours, days, weeks and years after Vincenzo Giacotto had delivered his mortifying verdict, doubt is what continued to flourish.

  If it hadn’t been for the clear empirical evidence staring him in the face, not even Genevose would have believed it. He was on the race as the riders’ medical representative, and had got the call at four in the morning: one of the five riders tested the previous day – Roberto Ballani and Marino Basso, respectively first and second in Savona, Merckx the maglia rosa, and the randomly selected Enrico Paolini and Luciano Luciani – had tested positive. Genovese threw on some clothes and hurried to the mobile laboratory where Cavalli was waiting to test the second sample. Only four hours later, when the second test was complete and had yielded the same conclusive result as the first, had Genovese discovered that the sample belonged to Merckx.

  ‘I left no stone unturned before accepting the result of the analysis. I didn’t know who the test concerned, but I pleaded with Doctor Cavalli to keep checking ad nauseam. I can tell you that we were even more careful than on Gimondi’s case [in 1968], so horrified was I by what had happened. I can rule out any imperfections in the analytical procedure. Everything was done technically perfectly.’

  The professor’s reaction was no different from anyone else’s: how and why now, in Merckx’s ninth test of the Giro and at the end of a stage almost devoid of difficulty? The Ferretti team’s directeur sportif, Alfredo Martini, called the idea of Merckx cheating in this context nothing less than ‘a joke’. Martini pointed out that the hardest climb on the road to Savona had been the three-kilometre, 2 per cent Piani d’Invrea – barely a ripple on the Ligurian coastal cruise. And as the race leader and holder of the pink jersey, Merckx knew that he would be tested.

  Everyone, indeed, had greeted the news with disbelief and disgust. Not at Merckx but whoever or whatever was responsible for what was surely a grave miscarriage of justice. The most outspoken were those who had already encountered the same ‘problem’; yes, it was amazing how their language could change, and the euphemisms flow, months after the event. Adorni had had his own little ‘mishap’ at the Giro di Sardegna in Faema colours the previous year. ‘It’s impossible. We should all protest and go home,’ he fumed now.

  The chorus of discontent contained many variations on the same refrain.

  Gimondi, himself positive the previous year: ‘It’s impossible. I know Merckx as a rider and as a man. Now we should protest and all go home.’

  Motta, also shamed in the ‘68 Giro: ‘You would have had to be stupid…and Merckx is extremely intelligent.’

  Altig, nicknamed ‘The Cycling Pharmacy’ after his admission in one French cycling
magazine in 1969 that he was smart enough to use products that didn’t show up in urine tests: ‘We’re exposed to the actions of some stranger who offers you a drink, and you don’t know what it is that you’re swallowing.’

  Gastone Nencini, the directeur sportif of the Max Meyer team, whose injections had so appalled doctor Enrico Peracino in his racing days: ‘The riders shouldn’t start today, out of solidarity with Merckx.’

  The handwringing was understandable coming from either current or recently retired riders. Part of it was sympathy – if not for what they all seemed to think were improprieties in the test, then at least with Merckx for getting caught. Their outpourings also reflected the power he and Faema now wielded – not least their capacity to mete out suffering in the bunch. Because there was another thing that no one believed: Merckx’s affirmation, in the rawness of his distress, that he might give up cycling. They all knew that he would be back in the peloton and inflicting pain as soon as his ban had ended.

  As far as his countrymen were concerned, within hours, that had become the key issue: if not clearing Merckx’s name, then how to get him back riding in time for the Tour. The Giro had left Savona with a new leader, Gimondi, who tomorrow would finally pull on the pink jersey relinquished diplomatically today, erasing all trace of its previous incumbent. The Giro was over – at least for Merckx. His father, Jules, had asked an Italian journalist who called the house shortly after the news broke whether Eddy could still be readmitted to the race once his innocence was established. Jenny seized the phone out of her husband’s hand and roared, ‘It’s a scandal!’ She then reached for and puffed on a cigarette for the first time in her life.