Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Merckx had arrived in the Bergamo area two days in advance to prepare. On the eve of the race, he headed out for a final, intensive session behind a motorbike, which was briefly interrupted by strikers blocking the road in Dalmine. When they recognised Merckx, luckily, the picket line parted to let him through. He then flew back to Belgium for an awards ceremony on Saturday evening, before returning to a chilly Bergamo, briefly warming up, and discussing tactics with Boifava the next morning. When Merckx spoke of ‘aiming for an average speed of 53 kilometres an hour’, Boifava feigned nonchalance while shuddering inside.

  A mismatch at least in reputation and experience, the Merckx–Boifava pairing in fact had the makings of a dream ticket. Boifava had won a stage in the Giro in May, was the Italian pursuit champion, and had excelled in the other recent ‘unofficial time trial world championship’, the Grand Prix des Nations in France. As he waited with Merckx for the starter’s pistol, though, the wisecracks from a small gallery of ‘well-wishers’ were doing nothing to calm his nerves. ‘Oh, youngster, you’d better watch or he’ll drop you straight away,’ was Vittorio Adorni’s joshing send-off. Boifava’s Molteni team directeur Giorgio Albani and his mechanic Ernesto Colnago cackled their approval.

  True to his word, Merckx started, says Boifava, ‘like a bullet’. As the route headed west out of Bergamo, skirting the hills of Brianza and towards Milan, Merckx bludgeoned his machine like rarely before. Fuelled by adrenalin, Boifava clung on, and at Robbiate after 28 kilometres, the duo was on schedule to smash Aldo Moser and Ercole Baldini’s 1959 course record. At Monza, where the route swung back towards Bergamo, they still led Van Springel and his stand-in partner Joaquim Agostinho by 45 seconds. It was here, a moment or two after Merckx had peeled to one side, Boifava moved through for his next turn, and the road began gently rising that something very odd and unexpected happened.

  ‘I’d been very nervous before we set off, because being paired with Merckx was such an honour and a responsibility,’ Boifava recalls. ‘My team actually weren’t too happy about it because it was obvious that, if Eddy won, everyone would say “of course”, whereas if we lost it would all be my fault. Anyway, we’d started at this crazy pace, but I was doing OK. Then in Monza we got to this motorway flyover, I was on the front, and I felt a hand on my hip. I looked around at Eddy and could see him gasping for air. I couldn’t believe it. He said, “Slow down a bit.” But it was obvious from his face that he was in a lot of trouble. I thought maybe it was just a passing crisis, but he never recovered. I had to ride on the front the whole way back to Bergamo.’

  Eighteen kilometres from the finish line, the route took them through Zingonia. This was the site of Faema’s new headquarters, an unholy breezeblock dystopia exhibiting the very worst of 1960s urban planning. Bruno Raschi had described it as ‘a forest of prefabricated cement columns, huge expanses of nameless, ownerless factories and 70 kilometres without a single tree’. Here Van Springel and Agostinho finally took the lead, and Merckx’s capitulation was almost complete.

  As he and Boifava rode into the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia, Merckx cried and 25,000 people applauded. He crossed the line and could barely blubber a few words of apology in Boifava’s ear. He then turned to the journalists and admitted, ‘It went badly, really badly. I kidded myself about my strength. I started really fast, trying to beat the record, then I collapsed suddenly. Boifava was amazing…it was me who got it all wrong.’ As his Faema directeur sportif Marino Vigna placed a hand on his shoulder, above the continuing ovation, Merckx mustered enough humour for a sardonic observation. ‘You see, Marino, the only way I can get people to like me is by losing…’

  ‘The Italian fans had turned on him a bit after Savona,’ Vigna explains now. ‘Gimondi’s camp really destroyed a lot of the goodwill the Italians felt towards Eddy. Part of it wasn’t their fault; the Italians were always going to resent a foreigner. But they also came up with a different excuse every time he beat them, instead of recognising his brilliant performances for what they were.’

  Perhaps it was no coincidence then, that in Gimondi’s home town, the tifosi warmed to the uncommon spectacle of Merckx suffering on a bike. Boifava conceded that he had ‘probably lost my only opportunity to win the Baracchi’, while also understanding that the race had come too soon for Merckx. Months later his own career would be badly affected by a crash in training which left him in a coma for ten days. He went on to win a handful of races before retiring at age 31 in 1978, but would forever be remembered as ‘the man who made Eddy Merckx cry’.

  As far as Boifava and plenty of others were concerned, Merckx would be back to his tyrannical former self, if not in the last criteriums before the end of the ’69 season, then at least in the New Year. How could they be so sure? Merckx wished he knew, because that comment about Blois one day being ‘just a bad memory’ betrayed not only his, but every athlete’s, gravest anxiety. In Bergamo, his head throbbed. Were these the occasional, permanent symptoms that doctor in Blois had warned him about, or just the born winner’s psychosomatic rejection of heavy defeat? What if ignoring the doctor’s advice to leave it a few more days, perhaps even weeks, before getting back on his bike had been a dire mistake? Hadn’t people been telling him for years not to be so headstrong, so hasty?

  The winter for a cyclist was the time to rest, but for the restless mind and body the long, cold months could be a purgatory of self-doubt. In Merckx’s thoughts, the memory of the Baracchi, its thunderous first half and calamitous second, could quickly turn into a microcosm of two alternative versions of his future: the former, a continuation of the crushing supremacy he had reached at the Tour, the latter a sharp decline.

  What Merckx didn’t yet fully realise, but would soon find out, was that his life and cycling would never quite be the same after 1969. He would conclude years later that Savona had changed him psychologically and Blois physically. Whether and how those differences would manifest themselves in 1970, the world waited to discover with a mix of hope and trepidation.

  10

  a new merckx

  ‘The crash had left physical and psychological scars… To compound it, Savona was still on his mind. He had some black days after what happened there.’ ITALO ZILIOLI

  BY 1970, CYCLING had itself a sportsman who, later that year, would be voted the world’s greatest in a poll of judges from 50 countries. In Mexico at around the time of the Giro, Pelé would orchestrate probably the finest team display in football history at the World Cup, and glitter as an individual, yet even he came up short of Merckx. Joe Frazier won the heavyweight boxing title of the world, Jack Nicklaus the British Open in golf, John Newcombe Wimbledon in tennis, but a 24-, soon to be 25-year-old Belgian cyclist seemed to tower over all of them.

  And yet, as far as the man himself was concerned, the Eddy Merckx of 1970 and indeed every year thereafter was far inferior to another rider: the Eddy Merckx of 1969.

  It is remarkable how many epoch-defining athletes have had their careers compromised by some, often widely unrecognised adversity or injury. The Spanish golfer Severiano Ballesteros is a pertinent example when discussing Merckx. According to one of his brothers, Ballesteros was already a shadow of his former self when he burst on to the international scene and almost won the 1976 British Open at 19 years of age. For three years in his teens, and until the onset of back problems that later bedevilled him, according to his sibling, Ballesteros played the best golf in the world and ‘never missed a single shot’. If this raised the question of how good Ballesteros could and would have been, the same consideration could be made of Diego Maradona, who discovered cocaine at Barcelona in the early 1980s, peaked at the 1986 World Cup aged 25, and was practically finished as a footballer by his 30th birthday. Or about Ali, who lost three of his best years to the Vietnam War. Or about Fausto Coppi, who lost five shots at the Giro d’Italia and seven at the Tour de France to the Second World War. Or about Greg LeMond, who surely would have won more than three Tours but for his hunting acciden
t in 1987. And so forth and so forth.

  The prospect of Blois and its consequences hampering the remainder of Eddy Merckx’s career was of course a remote one when the first signs appeared in the winter of 1969 to ’70, but the fears would grow like a gangrene over the weeks, months and years that followed. If the Trofeo Baracchi had really only highlighted Merckx’s lack of fitness and racing, a bout of tendinitis at the Six Days of Cologne a few weeks later was the first, true warning sign. Not that Merckx’s partner in Germany, Patrick Sercu, could see or hear anything different from what he had become accustomed to with Merckx. ‘Yes, he was complaining, but he was always like that,’ Sercu says. ‘Even when he was fifteen, he was always sick before the start, and it carried on when we did Six Days together. It’d be, “Ah Patrick, my stomach, my knee, my back. Take it easy tonight.” Then we’d get on to the track, start the Madison, and on the first changeover he’d be asking me whether he should attack yet. On the bike he was another man. Cycling was the best medicine for him.’

  To the outsider, there was nothing particularly new even in the way, that winter, Merckx was constantly tinkering with his bikes and his riding position. Only those in the very tight inner circle comprising family, Van Buggenhout and Guillaume Michiels perhaps began to notice a mounting unease – and even that largely relied on their powers of intuition or observation. The fact that he showed up one day at Jules and Jenny’s to rescue two oblong mirrors from their shed, ‘so I can look at my position when I’m on the rollers’, might have confirmed nothing more than that Merckx was as focused as ever, despite the distractions of the previous few months and the impending birth of his first child. Added, though, just for instance, to Claudine one day finding the allen key with which Merckx adjusted his saddle height under a pillow in the marital bed, it would perhaps have been clear that, in Merckx’s mind at least, his desire for Blois to one day be ‘just a bad memory’ seemed increasingly wishful.

  What exactly was the problem? At first Merckx didn’t know the name, only the feeling. In this first winter after the crash, it was mainly localised in his left leg, and was more a discomfort than a pain. When he climbed, the old fluidity, the way the pedals seemed almost to liquefy beneath his feet, was replaced by a clunking motion of equal power but nowhere near as satisfying a sensation. Sometimes his left leg would outright lock up. In time, his masseur Gust Naessens would come to refer to it as Merckx’s ‘little leg’.

  One thing had changed over the winter: the Faema team had switched its name to Faemino, like the instant coffee the company had just launched. Their first, pre-1970 season training camp was to take place in Loano on the Ligurian coast, 25 kilometres from where old ghosts lurked in Savona. Merckx’s old friend Zilioli was there for the duration, having moved to the team in the winter from Filotex. Merckx meanwhile would make only the briefest of cameos, having remained in Belgium for the due-date of what he and Claudine now knew would be a daughter. Little Sabrina, who would have been called Laurence had her parents not worried that it sounded too ‘French’ and therefore unpalatable to Flemish tastes, was finally born, well overdue like her father, on Valentine’s Day. Sod’s law: her birth immediately contributed to the end of the love affair that had begun two years earlier between Merckx, Faema and their owners the Valente brothers. Merckx’s late arrival and token appearance in Loano after the Milan Six-Days, which began within hours of Sabrina’s arrival, didn’t go down well with the local tourist board with whom the Valentes had arranged Faemino’s stay. Over the next few weeks and months, the relationship would continue to deteriorate.

  When they watched Merckx on the road, Zilioli and the other Faemino riders saw nothing unusual except that, in Zilioli’s case, climbing wasn’t quite the joy that it had been in training at some of his previous teams.

  ‘Usually, after riding Six-Days over the winter, someone would give themselves a week or ten days to get used to their road bike again, but Eddy was out with us at eight o’clock the morning after arriving,’ Zilioli says. ‘As one of the better climbers, I always used to test myself on the hills. I said to myself that if ever I was going to drop Eddy on a climb it was now. So I accelerate and what happens? Eddy bullets past me and drops everyone.’

  Zilioli, though, was one of Merckx’s closest and most perceptive friends, and soon got a sense of the anxiety nibbling if not gnawing at Merckx. ‘He was worried in that winter,’ the Italian confirms. ‘The crash had left physical and psychological scars. You should never underestimate what it’s like to see a guy die in front of you, your derny rider…To compound it, Savona was still on his mind. He had some black days after what happened there.’

  In some ways – and not that Merckx saw it – Zilioli was living proof of what lay on the other side of the precipice above which Merckx may now have been teetering. Zilioli’s career had been sabotaged not by a physical weakness but a psychological one. People could and would speculate about how many more Tours and Giros Merckx would win, how many records he could break, but only the men looking down their own personal cliff-face, the riders, knew how precarious their footing was, and what a rocky landing awaited below.

  No one felt the vertigo more acutely than Italo Zilioli.

  ‘Eddy was sensitive, like me,’ he says, ‘but I suppose the difference was that he seemed to be able to express his emotions and worries or turn them into something positive. I on the other hand keep them bottled up, which isn’t good. When you do that, eventually your head goes, or your liver, or your sleep… I used to get nightmares all the time when I was under pressure. Fortunately they stopped when I retired. It was because I couldn’t handle the pressure. As soon as something was being asked of me, it started to get to me. I wanted to be instinctive. Eddy also had those worries, nightmares, but again he seemed able to use that sensitivity as fuel.’

  The early indications were that, whatever Merckx feared or could feel, its impact would be bigger in his head than on the road. His final harvest in 1969 had totalled 43 victories from 129 races, and now he commenced 1970 in similarly ominous form. At Paris–Nice, he won three stages, including the traditional La Turbie uphill time trial, but finished in agony due to a delicately positioned wound caused by his constant shifting in the saddle. This prompted more tinkering, a phone call to Vincenzo Giacotto to warn him that his participation at Milan–San Remo could be in jeopardy, and finally the decision to ride with one pedal crank longer than the other in a misguided attempt to alleviate the pain. The night before the race, Merckx called Zilioli into his hotel room and admitted that he was in no state to ride for victory. Instead, he promised, he would be Zilioli’s domestique de luxe. Merckx was as good as his word, and Zilioli got fourth. Merckx congratulated him, stopped for a couple of minutes to answer journalists’ questions, then rode straight up the coast, another 50 kilometres, to catch a plane from Nice airport. In total, that day, he had ridden 340 kilometres.

  The next month, like every April, would be spent almost entirely at home in Belgium as Classics fever gripped the nation. Rarely had anticipation of a spring campaign been piqued like now, and not only because Merckx had shown chinks of vulnerability – or at least a lesser degree of invincibility. No, the reason was something, someone else, specifically the first of two major new challenges that would present themselves in 1970, together with the twinges in Merckx’s left leg.

  Later in the season Merckx would begin to gauge the ambition of the Spanish caballero Luis Ocaña, but his emergence would be slower and more staccato, despite victories in the Vuelta a España and the Dauphiné Libéré in the spring and early summer. The new and more immediate danger came in the Classics, and its or his name was Roger De Vlaeminck. The 22-year-old from Eeklo in East Flanders had justified his refusal to join Merckx’s Faema empire with a string of victories in 1969 which patently established him as Van Looy’s natural successor. De Vlaeminck was young enough and talented enough not to need his hero Van Looy’s conniving, but a bullish refusal to accept Merckx’s superiority was at least one s
imilarity between him and the ‘Emperor’. For all that Merckx’s Tour win had sent his popularity soaring, De Vlaeminck also provided the dyed-in-the-wool Flemish speakers with a new totem for their linguistic, political or nationalistic hang-ups. Even some who weren’t on the Van Looy bandwagon, and had no particular prejudice before, had turned on Merckx when he and Claudine exchanged French and not Flemish marriage vows in December 1967. This despite the fact that the decision had come, entirely innocently, from Merckx’s mother Jenny, who assumed that she was sparing the priest the unnecessary inconvenience of translating two ways. ‘They raked up my wedding hundreds of times. Ever since then, they have always been ready to pick up any mistakes I make with the language,’ Merckx bitterly commented later.

  While Merckx had spent the two or three subsequent years trying to redeem himself, taking immense care to give numbers of interviews in French and Flemish, certain sections of the public and press had continued to regard him as a divisive figure in an already bisected nation. At the 1969 Tour, three journalists from the Flemish Belgian Radio and Television network authored a Tour de France travelogue containing the following passage: