Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  ‘I meant it as a joke, but I think it actually explained quite a bit about how he ended up riding in that Tour,’ Vigna says.

  Thirteen teams of ten men had reported to Roubaix for the Grand Départ of the 56th Tour. As per tradition in prologue time trials, one man from each of the 13 teams would start their race in a predetermined order, before the roll-call was repeated for their second rider, their third and so on. Custom and conventional wisdom also dictated that teams would leave their leader until last, for reasons of theatre but also, above all, so that his teammates’ and the majority of the field’s finishing times could serve as reference points. The prior knowledge that most, if not all, teams would adopt the same policy also afforded a degree of security: if it happened to rain, a team leader could at least be sure that he was starting within a few minutes of his direct rivals for overall victory, in similar weather, and hence in much the same boat.

  The Tour was cycling’s grandest stage, Merckx’s big moment and Belgium’s – but also an important three weeks for Lomme Driessens. Driessens had realised in the spring that Merckx’s brilliance was about the only thing in cycling that could eclipse or even efface his inflated impression of his own genius, and it was therefore paramount that he reaffirmed his value early at La Grande Boucle. As it turned out, this was one of Driessens’s better ideas: having picked the number one out of a hat to secure the first of the 13 starting positions for Faema, he selected Merckx as his team’s and the Tour’s first rider. That way, Driessens told Merckx, he could dodge the commotion of fans and journalists which would build throughout the day, return to his hotel in good time, eat early, then get a good night’s rest. So went the infallible logic: in the event, with Merckx poised on the start ramp at 16h48, the race commissaires noticed that there were publicity vehicles still on the course, panicked, and imposed a five-minute delay. A frown, a shake of the head, an emergency second warm-up and Merckx was finally en route. Thirteen minutes and seven seconds later he crossed the finish line. Only Rudi Altig would cover the ground faster, by seven seconds. Altig was the Tour’s first leader.

  The second day was to be the first key rendezvous, not because anyone expected decisive racing on either of the two ‘split stages’, but because they were taking the race to Woluwe-Saint-Pierre on the outskirts of Brussels, where Merckx had grown up. This partly explained his nerves before both the flat 147-kilometre stage in the morning won by the Italian sprinter Marino Basso, and the 15.6-kilometre team time trial in the afternoon dominated by Faema, which had given Merckx the race lead. Even in the yellow jersey, and in his dream scenario of a triumphant homecoming, Merckx seemed edgy. ‘Only Gimondi is riding sportingly,’ he griped. ‘Most of the others seem to be in league against me. They’re marking me, watching me, sucking my wheel; when I chase down attacks that I think are dangerous, my main rivals refuse to do their share of the work. I feel like a train dragging along a bunch of heavy and useless carriages.’

  The next morning, for once he seemed able to lose himself. Perhaps relieved by Claudine’s presence at his side, he posed smilingly for photographers in front of the Woluwe town hall, then rode ahead of the peloton to lap up the adulation of folk who were normally just neighbours in Tervuren. The route then pointed south-west into the forests and former battlefields of the Ardennes – and a savage combat.

  Neither the average speed of just under 40 kilometres an hour – nor the fact that Merckx’s Faema teammate Julien Stevens had won the stage in a breakaway and inherited his leader’s yellow jersey – offered any clue as to how torrid the day had been. Almost as fancied as Merckx before the race, Roger Pingeon already seemed to have lost his head as well as precious energy as he strained to regain touch after a puncture. Pingeon’s fellow French hope Raymond Poulidor and Poulidor’s domestique Raymond Riotte were also reeling.

  ‘I had ridden the Tour that Pingeon won in 1967, and Jan Janssen’s in 1968, and I swear that everything felt 10, 15 kilometres per hour quicker right from those first stages in 1969,’ Riotte says. ‘The difference was, it was…c’était terrible. His team was strong too, of course, but they’d become strong riding for Merckx. Maybe it was the effect he had on them, or the salary wasn’t the same. We didn’t know what had happened. All I know is Swerts, Van Schil and Spruyt were with me at Mercier, and they weren’t that strong when they were riding with me for Poulidor.’

  Poulidor himself was also shocked. An aspiring winner before the race, the three-time podium finisher had been disarmed to the point of publicly admitting that he could barely hold the wheels – this on terrain where finishing in the main peloton ought to have been a formality. Stage 3 back into France and Charleville Mezières offered no let-up. The Bic team’s directeur sportif Raphaël Géminiani, the so-nicknamed ‘Grand Fusil’ or ‘Big Gun’ who had nearly signed Merckx when he left Solo-Superia at the end of 1965, was among those who thought that Merckx was showing his naivety about the Tour de France. ‘Merckx is bluffing,’ Géminiani said. ‘The way he’s riding is pure cinema. This Tour has started at a breathtaking pace. I don’t know how Merckx will last…’ The same evening Gimondi admitted that it had been an ‘ultra-rapid’ start and would consequently be a ‘terribly hard’ Tour. ‘A race unto death’, France Soir called it.

  Perhaps contrary to appearances, the only man beginning to enjoy himself, in his own, idiosyncratic, self-flagellating way, was Merckx. Géminiani had miscalculated if he thought that the novelty of the Tour would rekindle his old impetuosity. That much was clear when Rik Van Looy escaped on Stage 4 to Nancy, and Merckx resisted the temptation to personally hunt down his old tormentor. The greatest insult of all was indifference. Van Looy’s build-up to the Tour was also more liable to inspire amusement than fear or a reaction from Merckx; the ‘Emperor’s’ participation had been uncertain up to the last minute, and hinged on him finding a stable-lad to look after his horses in Herentals. Van Looy had identified a suitable candidate hours before the Tour was due to start, and so hopped across the border to Roubaux. He was now rewarded with what would be his final stage win in his final Tour.

  Where Géminiani had been right was in thinking that Merckx’s rip-roaring start had been that classic old crock, rule one of Sun Tzu’s Art of War: appear strong when you are weak, prepared when you are not. If they wanted to exploit it, though, it was already too late. Merckx broke the bad news in Nancy: ‘I needed five stages to really get the engine burning. I was afraid that I’d lost my legs after the Savona affair and the time I had to spend off the bike…If I attacked on the first two days of this Tour, it was partly to make people think that I was stronger than was actually the case. Show my strength so I didn’t have to use it. Tomorrow we get to the mountains and now I know that I’ll be fine.’

  The breath of a nation, one that hadn’t won the Tour for thirty years, was bated. Merckx sounded confident, relaxed, but within hours the old agitation was back. Stevens lost the yellow jersey on the first stage through the Vosges. The Faema troops gathered themselves that night in the Hotel Bristol in Colmar. When the lights went out, Merckx’s eyes remained open. No sooner had he finally fallen asleep than the nightmares began. A repeat of Savona. Sabotage. It could happen again. Every precaution had been taken, but it could happen again…

  He was still twitchy when a journalist from one of the Antwerp papers approached him near where the Faema cars were parked in the place de la Réunion the next morning. The reporter was angry that Driessens had installed a blockade in front of Merckx’s hotel room the previous night. Merckx apologised. Sometimes he thought journalists imagined that he went out of his way to inconvenience them, but really saying ‘no’ made him cringe. He could remember being mortified when he double-booked interviews on the rest day of the 1967 Giro, and the journalist who had been squeezed to a later time confronted him. ‘I don’t want to speak to you any more,’ he’d snapped. Merckx had got straight on the phone to Claudine, who then called the newspaper’s sports desk to say sorry again on Eddy’s behalf.

&
nbsp; At the summit of the Ballon D’Alsace, Merckx would upset another journalist, but this time there was no need to ask forgiveness. Pierre Chany of L’Equipe watched Merckx maraud across the line over four minutes ahead of Gimondi, Poulidor and the rest, turned to his colleague, the Tour co-director Jacques Goddet, and sighed. ‘Oh well, that’s us screwed.’ As if to say, the Tour was over after six stages and one relatively straightforward day in the Vosges. What were they going to write for the next two weeks?

  Merckx said simply that it had been ‘time to get serious and land a big blow’. The ever-contrary Pingeon was the only man who refused to admit that, barring accident, Merckx was already unassailable. ‘His superiority is more apparent than real,’ Pingeon opined live on French TV the next morning. ‘He took minutes off us on the Ballon D’Alsace, but that wasn’t down to his pure strength. The difference between him and us is that we didn’t believe the Ballon would be that important, and we kept a bit in the tank, dare I say. We’ll be like cats on hot tin roofs now, and it’s no foregone conclusion that Merckx will be able to prolong his domination in the Alps.’

  It was funny that Pingeon should mention cats. Well, not funny, but at least coincidental; in a very roundabout sort of way, Merckx would be grateful for one as he staved off the Frenchman in the Alps.

  Martin Van Den Bossche has just turned 70. He sits in a big leather chair in the sparkling office at the back of his sparkling tile showroom in Bornem, not far from Antwerp. ‘Big’ Martin is still an imposing figure, well over six feet tall, and with a booming voice that delivers sentences like volleys from a bazooka. He has lost most of what in 1969 was already just a spur of brown hair, but the eyes that slant down at the edges, the narrow chin, and the protruding ears still fit together at familiar angles. Not much is all that different from the giant mosaic of the owner in action at the 1970 Tour de France that looms over the shop-room floor.

  Anyway, Merckx, that cat…

  ‘It was the June 1960,’ Van Den Bossche announces. ‘The Tour de France was passing through Belgium, and we’d got a half day at the metal factory to go and watch the race. My brother was a year older than me, he’d been a cyclist, but he’d fallen and broken his collarbone, and I’d inherited his bike. I’d started racing and realised quickly that I was pretty fast. You start riding in age-group races and you hear and see people breathing hard and dropping back when the pace is high and you’re following easily. Those guys disappear, and you stay. That way you go from a thousand to a hundred, then from a hundred to the ten best in your area. From there, from reading about Jacques Anquetil and Charly Gaul at the Tour de France, to having a career in cycling, though…well it doesn’t even occur to you.

  ‘Anyway,’ Van Den Bossche continues, ‘we’re on this half day, and we ride and watch the Tour at Willebroek. After the race, we have one of our own. A cat runs out into the road and I crash into it. Smash! Broken arm. Three weeks off work. By now my cycling’s going well, and I’d already won a junior national title in 1959. It hits me that I have to make a decision: it’s either riding to and from the factory twice a day, from Hingene to Boom, 40 kilometres on ash and sand roads, because I do two shifts, or it’s riding in professional races. At the end of the three weeks I go back to the factory with my mind made up: I’m going to become a cyclist.’

  A powerful climber with a penchant for churning huge gears in the mountains, Van Den Bossche continues to improve and earns a pro contract in 1963. Riding for Wiel’s-Groene Leeuw, he turns heads by finishing third in the 1965 Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The same year he rides Paris–Luxembourg and witnesses the first on-the-road skirmishes in Rik Van Looy and Eddy Merckx’s war of succession. While he sympathises with Van Looy, ‘who had to fight for years against Van Steenbergen, then is finally on his own and sees Merckx arrive’, Van Den Bossche is mainly impressed by the youngster. ‘You could see he was a huge talent. When he was pacing the peloton, you just felt it,’ he says.

  If Van Den Bossche rates Merckx, the feeling isn’t necessarily mutual, despite him being in the first wave of riders signed by Vincenzo Giacotto for Faema in 1968. Nonetheless, in the Giro, on the famous stage to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, it is the leggy Belgian who shreds the lead group on the approach to the final climb before Adorni and Merckx take over. At the end of the year, Jean Van Buggenhout negotiates on Faema’s behalf and offers Van Den Bossche the same terms as in 1968. Van Den Bossche rips up the contract theatrically in front of Van Bug’s face. Van Bug promptly apologises and draws up a new, much more lucrative one. Van Den Bossche is again in the Giro line-up in ’69 and also Merckx’s roommate, including in Savona. Nothing in those primitive dope tests surprises Van Den Bossche any more. He recalls one occasion when a teammate locked a tester in a hotel room after Milan–San Remo, dangled the key out of the window and threatened to throw the tester with it if he didn’t leave immediately having recorded that the test had been performed and the rider was ‘negative’.

  ‘We were used to having to pee for dope tests, but your urine wasn’t sealed or anything. Nor did you have to sign any kind of paper! There was no fridge!’ he sniffs. ‘They could do with the urine sample whatever they wanted. In a courtroom nowadays those tests would have had no value at all.’

  What about the rider who allegedly ‘visited’, and was turned away from, his and Merckx’s room a couple of days before Savona, with briefcase in hand? Does Van Den Bossche remember that?

  He laughs but doesn’t seem inclined to answer.

  Martin? Do you remember?

  More laughter. The soupçon of a smirk. ‘Who knows? There are so many stories.’

  *

  By the time that Van Den Bossche had begun grinding on the lower slopes of the Col de la Forclaz on Stage 9, the peloton had already been extensively pruned. Merckx, of course, was comfortable in Van Den Bossche’s giant silhouette, but there weren’t too many others like him. Near the top of the climb, big Martin’s work was done and he made way for the boss. Merckx accelerated but could immediately feel that he lacked his usual zip; the extra-long pedal cranks that he’d asked his mechanic to fit that morning had been a mistake. Pingeon led him over the climb, then beat him to the stage win in Chamonix under the immense awning of Mont Blanc. In their respective post-race interviews, Pingeon said, ‘I told you so’ – or words to that effect, while Merckx paid tribute to Van Den Bossche.

  The next day, over the 2,645-metre Col du Galibier, which Merckx had never climbed, they all rode cautiously. Herman Van Springel, another Belgian who had already strewn his ambitions of overall glory all through the Vosges, Jura and Alps, was allowed to escape on the descent off the Galibier and win the stage, but there was no change to Merckx’s five-minute, 21-second advantage over Pingeon on general classification when they reached Briançon. An old Tour adage went that he who wore the yellow jersey in Briançon wore yellow in Paris. Merckx wasn’t sure about that but the ‘race unto death’ that his attacks had instigated on the first two days had already claimed some illustrious victims: Roger de Vlaeminck, the 21-year-old Belgian champion who some had believed might turn the ’69 race into a battle of the Tour rookies, him and Merckx, had climbed off his bike.

  Merckx’s tactics on the Galibier were interpreted by some as proof that, nine days in, he had reconciled himself to the difficulty of the Tour. Jacques Goddet spoke in L’Equipe of his ‘passivity’ and him riding ‘like the most common of champions’. Goddet spoke too soon: on the final Alpine stage to Digne, Merckx attacked incessantly, uphill and down, and finally left Pingeon trailing on the descent into Digne before beating Gimondi in a sprint. The next day, an innocuous attack by a rider 53 places behind on general classification, Jacques De Boever, was temptation enough for Merckx to cast off his shackles 60 kilometres from the finish in Aubagne. Only Gimondi could follow and earned a stage win for his troubles, nipping around Merckx at the end to show that he was learning his lesson. Pingeon, meanwhile, had floundered on a superlight bike ill-suited to the terrain. He was still second o
verall but more than seven minutes behind Merckx.

  Now Goddet nuanced his analysis, and in doing so hinted that intelligent observers at least were zeroing in on the essence of Merckx’s riding. His almost unprecedented aggression for a Tour favourite in the first dozen stages perhaps wasn’t about revenge for Savona, or even his ‘fear of disappointing people’ as Raymond Poulidor describes it. Neither perhaps, as Goddet wrote in L’Equipe, did it necessarily come from a ‘determined desire to massacre his adversaries’. Felice Gimondi is observing not explaining when he says of those hellish afternoons with Merckx tugging on his leash in the Southern Alps and Provence: ‘He was angry at the start of the Tour – he did probably want revenge – but then Eddy was always like that, like he wanted to attack someone, physically. He was always aggressive, always up for it. You were always chasing him, because he never really rode on tactics – it was all power and instinct.’

  The reason, Goddet concluded, seemed almost to be a sense of duty – to his fans, to the contest, and to his own natural talent. The Tour is many races within a race. Broadly speaking, it consists of four types of stage – the mountains and time trials where ground is made or lost by the overall contenders, sprint stages where they keep out of the way, and ‘transition’ stages in which stray dogs who excel in none of the above can have their day. Most if not all other aspiring Tour winners would have seen a lowly rider like Jacques De Boever’s attack, 60 kilometres from the end of one of these ‘transition stages’ like the one to Aubagne, as an irrelevance. Not Merckx. To him it was a race like any other, an opportunity, and a win by an inferior rider would be, to his way of thinking, an incongruity or even an affront. The much-discussed, much-mythologised ‘politics of the peloton’ to him sounded more like the convenient excuses of those uncomfortable with the idea of sport as meritocracy. ‘May the best man win’; more often than not, the best man was Merckx, on flat or hilly terrain, and finishing first was just his way of respecting, in both senses, the verdict of the road.