Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  ‘Maybe it’s too late to call the Flemish fans into action, but the fact is that this year we’re only hearing cries in French, we’re only seeing flags with French slogans. Brussels and Wallonia have adopted Merckx… Maybe it’s just a reflex that makes the Flemish shout in French in France, but if that’s the case they’re wrong. Could we ask Flemish tourists to encourage Merckx in Dutch or, at least, in their dialect?’

  Later in the same book, the authors lamented that De Vlaeminck had lost too much time on the first mountain stage to be considered a genuine contender. ‘It would have been great,’ they argued, ‘if the first Belgian to win the Tour for forty years could have been “een Vlaeminck”.’ Or, their play on words seemed to suggest, anyone as long as he was ‘een Vlaming’ – a rider from Flanders.

  Now, in April 1970, De Vlaeminck and his older brother Erik, the reigning cyclo-cross world champion, prepared to do battle with Merckx on the rutted roads and murderous, cobbled hills of Flanders that they considered more theirs than his. Roger was not only a thoroughbred Flandrian in name, extraction and upbringing, but also on a bike. Like Van Looy, he was speedy enough to beat all but the fastest finishers in a sprint and also among the best on the flat and short climbs or bergs. This made him the ideal candidate for victory at Gent–Wevelgem on 1 April, but it was Merckx who drew first blood in a repeat of his 1967 victory. Five days later, Merckx was beaten at the Tour of Flanders…but by the sprinter Eric Leman, not De Vlaeminck, who could only finish 13th.

  Merckx’s next competition was the Tour of Belgium, one of a shrinking number of races not yet in his palmarès. After three stages, the pain in his left leg was back along with the anxieties and, also, the old winning itch. The next morning, in Jambes, the weather was fit only for sled-dog racing, and De Vlaeminck was among a group of riders pleading with the race director to cancel the stage as they set off across Wallonia towards Heist-aan-Zee. Popular myth has it that Merckx took this as his cue to shoot immediately from the pack. Walter Godefroot says that, in actual fact, it was he who launched the first attack. What matters, though, is not who was the instigator, but the way that Merckx was about to force two-thirds of the field to abandon the race and set up overall victory.

  ‘It started snowing and suddenly everyone starts shouting, “Stop! Suspend the race!” but I attack,’ Godefroot remembers. ‘I go up the Kruisberg in Ronse, and I remember that the derailleur is like a snowball. I had to pour some tea on the chain so it didn’t jump. I get to the top of the Kruisberg, look round and see Merckx arriving with Erik De Vlaeminck on his wheel. Van Schil or Spruyt is also on the wheel. Not long after that, we come to a section of cobbles and we’re down to three – me, Merckx and De Vlaeminck. Merckx didn’t attack – he just accelerated slightly. A bit later, the weather is starting to change, De Vlaeminck is taking his leg warmers off, and Merckx looks at me and growls, “How’s it going?” I say, “OK.” But Merckx is now doing one, two kilometre turns on the front, while I can only do five hundred metres then pull off. Merckx is a motorbike. We keep going like this for a few kilometres, then he asks me again, “All OK?” I say “Yes.” He then says, “OK, stay in the wheel and make sure you beat this prat.”’

  Godefroot’s subsequent sprint win made it a double defeat and double-trouble for the De Vlaemincks: like everyone else in the main pack behind, Roger had been humiliated to the tune of 12 minutes.

  Roger’s fifth place in Paris–Roubaix the previous year, just weeks after turning professional, at least indicated that he could start the 1970 edition of the race known as the ‘Hell of the North’ with realistic ambitions of castling Merckx later the same week. With the rain teeming down and the notorious pavé cobbles at their most slippery, with 30 kilometres remaining, the lead group comprised Merckx, Leman and Roger De Vlaeminck, who looked perfectly placed. Then, disaster: a puncture. No sooner had he slowed for a wheel change, than Merckx was accelerating away on his own to a five-minute victory. Later, Merckx would admit that this was perhaps the only time in 1970 when his legs felt the same as before Blois. On the day he had the audacity or honesty to call it his easiest win over cobbles.

  A few metres away, a furious De Vlaeminck was accosted by the same Flemish radio journalists whom Merckx had been careful not to spurn a few moments earlier. ‘Let me tell you this,’ he said. ‘Next Sunday, at Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Merckx won’t drop me. That, I promise.’

  Erik De Vlaeminck listened to his brother and shook his head in exasperation. ‘That what you said about Merckx not dropping you on Sunday… If you ask me, you’re an absolute nutcase. You’re setting yourself up for a massive fall,’ he said as they headed for the showers.

  Roger glared back in much the same way as he had at Merckx at the amateur Tour of Belgium in 1968.

  ‘He is not dropping me on Sunday,’ he repeated.

  11

  the gypsy and a nomad

  ‘Ohohohohoho. “Who was the better player?!” Dear me…I was much better.’ ROGER DE VLAEMINCK

  ROGER DE VLAEMINCK sits behind the kitchen table in his farm in Kaprijke, watching intently as a small yellow sponge chases a puddle of coffee around the wooden surface.

  ‘Dab! Dab don’t wipe. Dab,’ he says quietly, but with some urgency. When, a few seconds later, all trace of the liquid has gone, De Vlaeminck’s gaze remains fixed on the spot. ‘Dab, don’t wipe. Always dab,’ he says again.

  De Vlaeminck looks much the same as he did a few months ago at the Giro d’Italia in Nevegal, albeit dressed for a lazy day around the house rather than preening on Italian television. He wears a white T-shirt, tracksuit bottoms and slippers. While the clothes aren’t exactly fit for the catwalk, De Vlaeminck himself still has the lean, athletic physique of an active middle-aged man. All up the walls, there are framed photos of his 11-year-old son Eddy and 38-year-old wife Katty. Perhaps it’s having a belle 27 years his junior that keeps De Vlaeminck looking youthful. Maybe that was also the main attraction of the model and actress Phaedra Hoste, whom De Vlaeminck began dating in 1987 when he was 40 and she was 16. Then again, perhaps there were other things.

  De Vlaeminck brings his mug to his mouth and looks wistfully out of his patio window. Beyond the garden, where the llama guarding his livestock roams, the horizon ends after a few hundred metres of muddy, nondescript, quintessentially Flandrian field.

  He shakes his head.

  ‘London? How can you live in London? Look at this. Isn’t it beautiful?’

  The biggest challenge with De Vlaeminck proves to be keeping his mind and the conversation on the reason for our visit. Questions about, for instance, the now famous meeting with Merckx at the 1968 amateur Tour of Belgium, are inevitably cues to turn off at his favourite tangents, namely football or the mediocrity of current riders and races. The habit is manna for Belgian journalists on a quiet news day but also food for their scorn. Just this weekend, De Vlaeminck says, he was invited to the first cyclo-cross race of the season but didn’t even stay for the race. ‘I ate and then went home. I didn’t miss anything. The top guys were paid really well to be there, but they were all thinking about the bigger race the next day. We never thought like that. I won Het Volk one day then beat my brother Erik in a cyclo-cross the next. As for the Tour de France, now, well, I come in here, turn on the TV, see there’s a 110 kilometres to go and then go and do some work in the garden for two-and-a-half hours. I watch the last 10 or 15 kilometres, no more. It’s a different sport now from what it was when I was racing Merckx.’

  And finally, we’re back on message, the rivalry that, in 1970, threatened to stir and sever Belgium in a way that the unequal contest between Van Looy and Merckx had done only sporadically. At the heart of the matter, as already discussed, was a division of the Belgian landscape dating back perhaps even before to Julius Caesar’s conquest of Gaul and Wallonia’s gradual assimilation of Latin vulgaris, a precursor of French, as its mother tongue in the centuries that followed. Added to the old linguistic chestnut, though, was another factor: De Vl
aeminck was not only a Vlaaming – from Flanders – but he was also a ‘Flandrien’. The concept was a nebulous, often subjective one, but central to every definition was the idea that there was a sub-breed of riders from Flanders who were even tougher, stronger and more ferocious than the rest, and whose appetite for the most awful conditions was even greater. Merckx couldn’t be ruled out on the second criterion – two of his biggest wins, the 1969 Tour of Flanders and the 1970 Paris–Roubaix, had been, after all, achieved on the hardest of courses in diabolical conditions – but the breadth of his repertoire, and of course the fact that he had grown up close to Brussels meant that this was one denomination, and one aura that he could never attain in the eyes of the Flemish purists.

  De Vlaeminck, meanwhile, had flopped in his first Tour de France and, by default, reinforced his credentials as a man of the Classics and a pure Flandrien. Stories were also beginning to spawn about the 400-kilometre training rides which, he says now, he did ‘every Wednesday when I was at home’. ‘Merckx trained a lot but I don’t think he trained more than me,’ De Vlaeminck elaborates. ‘Gent–Wevelgem used to be 260 kilometres. I’d get my friend to meet me with his motorbike at the finish and we’d do another 120. At other times, twice a week, I’d do 180 kilometres before nine o’ clock in the morning. I had a 90-kilometre circuit that I’d do twice, then I’d get back home, eat, then go off for another 150 kilometres…’

  He scoffs, ‘These days they do the GP E3 Harelbeke on the Saturday and won’t do Gent–Wevelgem on Sunday because they say it’s too much!’

  Interestingly, though, or maybe predictably given his temperament, De Vlaeminck takes a fundamentalist view of what constitutes a Flandrien, and in doing so excludes even himself.

  ‘There was only one Flandrien and that was Briek Schotte,’ he says. ‘The others were false Flandriens. Schotte won the Worlds at Valkenberg in 1948 having attacked from the gun and ridden with a broken wheel for 200 of the 260 kilometres. You know the average speed? It was 37 kilometres an hour! Merckx could try to do that but I’m not sure if he’d manage. No, for me Briek was the only one. The first and only one. The others, me included, are all half-Flandriens.’

  A half-Flandrien but, nonetheless, proudly Flemish. Like Van Looy before him, De Vlaeminck seldom if ever spoke French, but when he did, his Flemish fans felt somehow betrayed. ‘You couldn’t win with the fans,’ he says. ‘It was the same for me and Merckx. As soon as you said a word of French, you annoyed the Flemish fans. The difference was that I was Flemish so didn’t need or even interest the Walloons as much as Eddy did. I didn’t have to worry about speaking French. He had to try to please everyone.’

  Whether the differences were real or imagined, it was easy to see why the clash seemed so appealing to both the public and the media. For all his tyranny on the bike, Merckx could seem docile, childlike and apologetic off it, while De Vlaeminck put sass and an edge into everything he did or said, like in those radio interviews after Paris–Roubaix. De Vlaeminck was mystified when the French rider Jean-Pierre Danguillaume appeared alongside him in the peloton one day in 1969 and said just, ‘The Gypsy. You’re the Gypsy’ – but somehow the nickname seemed perfectly apt. He was dark, mean and streetwise. He had also been a brilliant young footballer, good enough to play four games for Eeklo in the Belgian third division at age 16. This was one apparent similarity with Merckx, about whom Dino Zandegù says, ‘He would have gone straight into Serie C [the Italian third division].’ Informal matches between journalists were common, and Zandegù recalls one in particular where Merckx ‘scored four or five goals and absolutely murdered us – he had this rocket shot with his right foot’. These games were also among the best examples of the foaming competitiveness which was another characteristic of both Merckx and De Vlaeminck. Walter Godefroot remembers one occasion when all three were on the same team, fellow rider Ronald De Witte was in goal, and De Witte allowed a Godefroot back-pass to slip through his fingers and graze the post. ‘They went crazy at him. I had to calm them down, remind them that we weren’t playing in the World Cup final,’ says Godefroot, still aghast. ‘That was just their mentality. There was no such thing as playing for a laugh. You played to win or not at all,’ he adds.

  Having already been perplexed by Merckx’s win-at-all-cost mentality on the Tourmalet in 1969, Martin Van Den Bossche decided to have some fun at his expense in one game between Belgian and Italian riders by deliberately giving away a penalty in the dying moments when Belgium led 2–1. Merckx was incandescent, and Van Den Bossche had to stifle a giggle.

  Merckx and De Vlaeminck could both be as cut throat as each other, but who was the better footballer? When the question is put to De Vlaeminck, a series of low-pitched hoots echo through his kitchen, to be followed – if he’s not careful – by the thud of him falling off his chair.

  ‘Ohohohohoho “Who was the better player?!” Dear me…I was much better. Merckx was robust. You would bounce off him. But he wasn’t technical. He was a big brute. “Who was the better player?!” Dear me…’

  ‘Rivalries are good. I loved the battle,’ he picks up, returning to the more pertinent matter of the 1970 Liège–Bastogne–Liège. ‘I didn’t mind. It only changed when, after a while, the others start to take advantage of our rivalry. Merckx would attack and the others would say, “Ah, De Vlaeminck will go after him and we’ll get on his wheel. No problem.” That changed things a bit. I then got sick of it and stopped bridging the gaps all the time. Before that, though, it was beautiful…painful but beautiful.’

  On 17 April 1970, ‘Le Gitan’, ‘The Gypsy’, kept his promise. Not only did Eddy Merckx not drop him despite endless, furious attacks, but De Vlaeminck was the first over the line and the winner of Liège–Bastogne–Liège. Merckx was disgusted, not so much by the fact he had dragged his rival through the Ardennes hills with barely any collaboration, but by the way in which, as he saw it, Roger’s brother Erik had deliberately blocked him on the approach to the Rocourt velodrome. In September 2011, Roger De Vlaeminck still insists this wasn’t the case, and, to prove it, uses three coffee mugs to reconstruct his decisive spurt on a right-hand bend, his brother’s slight deviation to the left, and Merckx’s position on Erik’s wheel. ‘In Formula One, that’s perfectly fair, isn’t it?’ he protests. At the time, De Vlaeminck further irked Merckx, and made him change his mind about skipping Flèche Wallonne two days later, by telling the press, ‘You see? Merckx can’t drop me in a straight fight.’ Meaning, ‘He can’t drop me without attacking when I’ve got a puncture’, which is what De Vlaeminck believed had happened in Paris–Roubaix.

  If that sounded like a gauntlet clunking to the tarmac, Merckx stooped to collect it at Flèche Wallonne. As he powered over the line in Marcinelle, neither of the De Vlaemincks, nor the rest of the field, were anywhere in sight.

  The Classics season thus came to a conclusion: the unambiguous one that Merckx was still Merckx, in everyone else’s judgement if not in his own. He had won two ‘semi-Classics’, Flèche Wallonne and Gent–Wevelgem, and one of the so-called ‘monuments’, Paris–Roubaix. What had changed was that he now had a talented, belligerent rival with greater longevity that Van Looy and more gumption than Godefroot. The former’s spring had been a pitiful death rattle on his former hunting grounds, including abandonments at Paris–Nice, Milan–San Remo, Gent–Wevelgem, the Tour of Flanders and Paris–Roubaix. Godefroot had signed for Gimondi’s Salvarani and immediately felt like the embarrassed guest in the home of a married couple now communicating only via hateful stares and thrown plates. ‘We had our first training camp that winter in Alassio, on the Ligurian Riviera in Italy. There were only eight or nine of us – the rest were arriving later – and on the first morning we all set out from the hotel, down the little hill to the coast road. We came to the seafront and T-junction, and I saw Gimondi turning right and Motta turning left. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I’d just joined the team, didn’t speak a word of Italian, yet there I was, forced to make this decision in a spl
it second, knowing that if you went right you were with Gimondi, in his clan, and if you went left you were one of Motta’s boys. I had nothing against Motta, but I went right.’

  Perhaps more to the point, like his feuding teammates, Godefroot had the world-weary air of a man whose best years had been the first of his career. The years, specifically, when Merckx still seemed mortal. ‘I can remember [the Salvarani directeur sportif] Luciano Pezzi coming up to me one morning that year and saying, “Ah, I’ve heard Merckx isn’t going well, so we’ll put the hammer down and attack him.” I said, “Luciano, with respect, I’ve heard before that Merckx isn’t going well, and it’s usually a sure sign that it’ll be him who’s attacking.” We tried anyway and the attack from Merckx duly came. And that was Merckx. You perhaps thought that he wasn’t the same any more, or on a bad day, then he rammed it down your throat.’

  Here, unwittingly exemplified in Godefroot’s anecdote, was perhaps also a key reason why whatever Merckx had lost after Blois was imperceptible to his main antagonists. Merckx’s then Faemino directeur sportif Marino Vigna explains it best: ‘Maybe he wasn’t quite as strong [in 1970], but then maybe it also didn’t matter as much because by that stage he’d put the fear of God into everyone. They were scared of moving, because they knew what chaos Eddy would then unleash. They never wanted to give him any bait. The memory of what he’d done to them in those ’68 and ’69 seasons terrorised a lot of people for years.’

  By ‘people’ Vigna means not only riders but also the press and race organisers who had begun to fear for the sport itself in 1969. The second group, in particular, were damned if they did invite Merckx and damned if they didn’t, and so some resorted to striking a strange kind of bargain. The rumour was that the Giro d’Italia chief Vincenzo Torriani had overcome Merckx’s reluctance to return to the race which, he felt, had betrayed him in 1969, by offering him 80,000 Belgian francs a day to compete. In return, Torriani asked Merckx to ride economically, holding back some of his own energy in readiness for the Tour de France and also some suspense in the battle for the pink jersey. As it transpired, he appeared to amuse himself by taking three stages out of the first nine to all but wrap up the general classification, then by ensuring that Felice Gimondi beat the Faema defector Martin Van Den Bossche to second place overall. That, at least, was how it looked from the outside. In truth, even Van Den Bossche understood then, and still understands now, that it was in the interests of the Giro and Italy that Gimondi should finish second. ‘Merckx never spoke about that, but it was obvious. When there was an attack and Gimondi wasn’t part of it, Merckx just wouldn’t ride. It was all part of the game, however much the Flemish press tried to build it into a Flanders versus Brussels thing. I mean, even I tried to sell my third place to my [Molteni] teammate Michele Dancelli, but he wouldn’t pay up, and tried to finish third in a sneaky, cunning way,’ Van Den Bossche concedes.