Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Another, at first more open secret, was that Merckx was suffering in the mountains, and Van Den Bossche had precipitated a recurrence of his leg problems on the Passo di Crocedomini on the stage from Zingonia to Malcesine. When his lanky former domestique accelerated, Merckx tried to follow, but felt his left leg immobilise. He was over a minute behind at the summit, then regained touch on the descent, before falling back again on the next climb to the Bezzecca plateau. He had returned to the main peloton by the time they reached Malcesine, but knew some would already be hailing a landmark moment: Eddy Merckx had been distanced in a major tour mountain stage for the first time since the 1967 Giro. His irritation showed when he initially refused all interviews at the finish line, only later admitting that ‘I haven’t suffered like that for a long time.’ Perhaps wisely, he chose not to mention Blois or the leg, and chose instead to attribute the crises to a bad cold and sore throat. The following day, sure enough, normality resumed and the pink jersey was secured with a trademark solo win at Bretonico.

  From that point on, if Merckx wasn’t ‘allowed’ or wouldn’t permit himself to crush the opposition as he had at the Tour, there were still plenty of other outlets for his competitiveness. Dino Zandegù remembers one in particular on Stage 15 between Casciana Terme and Mirandola.

  Dino, Dino, they say Merckx used to go crazy even for the bonus sprints! Did you ever see that?

  ‘Oh yes, that day in 1970, we were going over the Abetone in Tuscany, but on the way we were passing Luciano Tajoli’s estate in Pontebuggianese, and Tajoli had put up forty flasks of Chianti for the winner of a bonus sprint there. You know Luciano Tajoli, the singer – “Terra straniera, ho pianto per te, la, la, la….” Him. Anyway, when there was wine involved, I was always particularly motivated for that kind of sprint, so there I am, we go round a big curve, over a little bridge, and I sense this big shadow looming over me. I see out of the corner of my eye that it’s Merckx in the pink jersey, but I’m so motivated that I do the sprint of my life and I beat him! As always, Merckx is black with rage. I try to hide in amongst my teammates, but he’s seen me, and he’s throwing every kind of insult you can imagine at me. “You rotten scumbag! You scoundrel! Just you wait and see! I’ll make sure that you never race a criterium again! That Chianti’s mine!” Then, that night, all the teams are staying in hotels next to each other and he comes to find me with Rudi Altig. He likes a drop of wine, too, Rudi. Merckx says he’s not leaving until I give him half of the bottles. A few hours earlier I thought he was going to kill me, so I daren’t say no, and off he goes with half of the Chianti…’

  Midway through 1970, Eddy Merckx had won his second Giro d’Italia, asserted his authority over Roger De Vlaeminck in the Classics, and was already beginning, perhaps even subconsciously, to accept and adapt to the legacy of Blois. ‘After Blois, cycling became suffering, especially in the mountains, when previously it had just been fun,’ Merckx would comment in his retirement. At the time he swore to Guillaume Michiels that he had lost ‘fifty per cent of my power’. Even in 1970, though, public and private hints by Merckx to this effect were greeted with rolling eyes. ‘If you were to look at his career, just the results out of their context, you couldn’t say there was a “Blois effect”,’ argues the journalist Walter Pauli. That may be true, but it’s equally reasonable to point out that the accident occurred when Merckx was 24 and, most physiologists would argue, still two or three years short of his peak. There may have been no discernible dip in 1970, but most would have conceded that there had been no improvement on the stratospheric performances of 1969, either. Whether that also was because he had matured, mellowed, and was beginning to heed the advice of everyone who had warned that he was heading for burnout – their sole remaining hope or commiseration – maybe only Merckx knew. An interview with Marc Jeuniau early in 1971 would certainly indicate that Merckx had at least considered the long-term impact of the hell-for-leather approach he had employed in the previous three or four seasons. ‘I won’t race beyond the age of thirty,’ he said. ‘My way of racing makes it impossible to last a long time. But the public likes the way I ride. The quality of the spectacle and panache count more than everything else. Anquetil used to say that he didn’t care about public adulation. That’s not true. No champion is indifferent to it.’

  If Merckx was really to retire at age 30, that left six more Tours de France to ride and, based on the evidence at hand, probably win. While he rode with new frugality at the Giro, however, down in the Alps, a rider with similar pizzazz and ambition was staking his claim as the most credible ‘anti-Merckx’ to date.

  Luis Ocaña had been born a week before Merckx and into a very different milieu. His native Priego was a woebegone hodgepodge of ruins dozens of kilometres from anywhere and 150 to the west of Madrid. As his biographer François Terbeen put it, it was ‘a desolate land where only misery found shelter’. A small flock of sheep, their wool and a tiny olive grove were the family’s only income, and scraps of bread sometimes their only nourishment. Even at age five or six, the young Luis would decline to eat, like his father, if he could see that there was too little on the dinner table to go around.

  In 1951, when Luis was six and money still short, his father accepted a job in a mine in Vila in the French Pyrenees. It was a success, or at least an improvement, and soon Señor Ocaña was heading back to Priego to round up Luis, his mother Julia and brother Amparo, and take them to France. Six years later, one of Julia’s brothers raved about the new life he had also created in Magnan, just up the road in Armagnac country, and the Ocañas moved again. While Luis felt more and more at home in France, he remained a foreigner to the bullies among his classmates. One day, apparently for this reason alone, one of them spat in his face.

  Another move, this time a few kilometres to the east and Houga, coincided with the start of Luis’s apprenticeship as a joiner, his first journeys to work on his new ‘Automoto’ bike, and the Spanish climber Federico Bahamontes’s victory in the 1959 Tour de France. Soon, Luis was entering races in the colours of the local Stade Montois cycling club and winning with increasing regularity. In 1967, he rattled off victories in the amateur Grand Prix des Nations, the Tour des Alpes de Provence and the Tour of Majorca. One of the leading Spanish teams, Fagor, moved swiftly to sign him in 1968, and Ocaña repaid their faith by winning the Spanish national road race championship in Mungia. For Ocaña, the symbolism of the victory dwarfed even the privilege of wearing the yellow and blood-red jersey of the Spanish champion for the forthcoming 12 months; his father was dying, at just 49 years of age, ravaged by a prostate cancer for which he had refused any treatment. Luis had ridden the entire race in Mungia possessed by the idea of returning to his dad’s bedside with the champion’s jersey and laying it at his father’s side ‘as a testimony to my affection for him’. ‘Bitterly, I kept telling myself that everything would have been wonderful if destiny had spared my father this illness,’ Ocaña later wrote in his autobiography. ‘In fact, my sister Amparo had just given birth to her second child. Life was being renewed all around us, bringing into our family new faces to love, to feed, to bring up, but, alas, there was also this dreadful ordeal that my father was enduring on his bed of suffering.’

  While the writing was a little overwrought, it chimed with the tragic aura the cycling world would come to associate with Ocaña, as over the next two years, he alternated swashbuckling success with crashing failures like his early exits from both the 1968 Vuelta and the 1969 Tour de France. Like De Vlaeminck, he was mercurial, swarthy, enigmatic – and also, crucially, immune to the spirit of resignation which had infected much of the peloton since 1968. As of the start of 1970, he was also now backed by one of the strongest teams in international cycling, sponsored by biro makers Bic. At first, on signing with team and their manager Maurice de Muer, Ocaña had worried that the Dutchman Jan Janssen might be a cumbersome presence alongside him, but the pair had proved to each other and De Muer at Paris–Nice in March that their talents – Janssen’s sp
eed and cunning, and Ocaña’s rapier accelerations in the hills – were perfectly matched. Ocaña finished second behind Merckx despite frittering energy with reckless and fruitless attacks. Janssen responded to his new teammate’s claims that he would one day topple Merckx with a sceptical ‘Ah bon?’, while De Muer told him to stop racing like ‘some kind of cycling Don Quixote’ – the only novel that Luis had ever read. A month later, Ocaña appeared to be learning fast as he triumphed in his national tour, the Vuelta a España, with a performance almost Merckx-like in its assurance.

  ‘The sniper who played into his rivals’ hands has now been replaced by a lucid, organised, top-class rider,’ De Muer told him after the Vuelta, and Ocaña bore out his manager’s commendation with a masterly win at the Dauphiné Libéré, the last major test before the Tour. While, in June, Merckx began an exhausting but lucrative, made-for-TV schlep around France to recce some of the key Tour stages, Ocaña returned to his now beloved Armagnac, the French wife he had married on Christmas Eve in 1966, and a new level of expectancy.

  The Luxembourger Johny Schleck, his team- and roommate at the time, says that Bic’s cosmopolitan, orange-clad army felt that they had no more, no less than a potential Tour winner in their number.

  ‘Merckx was the king at the time, but we felt that Luis, with the ability he had in the mountains and the ability he had on the flat above all, was a possible Tour winner,’ Schleck says. ‘He wasn’t explosive but he was enormously strong. When he accelerated, it took him a while to open up a gap, but he went so fast that he blew everyone off his wheel, one-by-one, until no one was left. He could climb in the saddle, with his hands on the drops, and just batter people. He had these big, rippling thighs and I think he must have produced about as much power as anyone in the peloton back then.’

  Unfortunately, Schleck and everyone else knew that Ocaña’s thighs were as thick as his skin was thin. ‘You could practically see through it, Luis was so sensitive,’ another ex-teammate, Philippe Crépel, confirms. Schleck agrees that this was the one, major doubt that Ocaña needed to banish in 1970, particularly after a 1969 race that had started promisingly then thudded to a halt with a crash on the Ballon D’Alsace and withdrawal two days later. ‘He was a very fragile, very sensitive character. Sensitive to everything, even success,’ Schleck says above the drum of raindrops on a hospitality gazebo at the 2011 Tour de France, where his sons Andy and Frank are among the star attractions. ‘Luis used to get carried away. I personally think that he was very bad at dealing with pressure, right from the start. Sometimes he was on a cloud and sometimes he got out of bed and nothing was right with the world. Back then, going to the Tour de France with Luis as our leader was a big step into the unknown.’

  If the press and other riders were all unanimous in considering Luis Ocaña the main and perhaps only threat to Eddy Merckx’s designs on a second straight Tour de France win, after four days the defending champion himself wasn’t convinced. Merckx was satisfied on two counts – one, a specialist from Brittany had been successfully treating the sciatica (that was now the diagnosis) in his left leg and, two, even on the plains of north-west France, Ocaña looked to Merckx like a man on the edge. This, says Marino Vigna, was yet another weapon in the Merckx panoply. ‘Eddy was very good at judging his competitors. He would come to me at the start of races and say, “Watch so and so today. He’ll be good. And they invariably were.” In the stampede to the line and a bunch sprint won by Godefroot in Lisieux, Merckx had positioned himself within spying range of Ocaña and made this unflattering assessment: ‘I got a good look at Luis. He looked washed out and had his mouth open like he was about to die. People are saying that he’ll be my most dangerous rival in the mountains. I hope they’re right, but he has to show a bit of resistance.’

  Ocaña wasn’t listening, but an attack in the first kilometre on that fifth stage towards Rouen in Normandy was a brave riposte. Needless to say, Merckx was alert to the danger, reacted quickly, and a second consecutive bunch sprint ended with another win for Godefroot.

  Almost a week in, the Merckx mind was unusually unencumbered – except for one thing. His friend Italo Zilioli had taken the yellow jersey on Stage 2, after Merckx’s victory in the prologue, and the circumstances of the ‘handover’ had sparked yet another row with Lomme Driessens. Zilioli and another Faemino rider, Georges Vandenberghe, had marked Godefroot when he attacked to join four other unfancied riders early on the stage to Angers, and initially refused to contribute to the pace-making until Driessens appeared at their side. ‘OK, you can go!’ Driessens told Zilioli. When the gap back to the main peloton grew to five minutes, Merckx loomed to offer viewers the unusual spectacle of the race leader chasing down a teammate and purportedly his ‘best friend in cycling’. The time gap as Zilioli took the stage and 20 bonus seconds was 24 seconds – enough to dispossess Merckx of his yellow jersey by four seconds.

  Merckx said that he was angry not because his friend had broken rank and followed through on his pre-Tour promise-cum-threat to ‘see what I can do myself’. Nor was he upset, Merckx said, because he’d dreamed of keeping the yellow jersey all the way to Paris. His concern, he claimed, was that Zilioli would now burn himself out before the mountains, where Merckx needed his help. Although Marino Vigna admitted that it was he who had urged Zilioli to forge ahead, Merckx blamed Driessens.

  Six days later, perhaps in an effort to atone or reingratiate himself, Driessens instructed Merckx and the Faemino Red Guard not to wait when Zilioli punctured close to the finish in Valenciennes. ‘I’d told them to stay at the front to help Eddy, and Zilioli wasn’t there when he punctured,’ Driessens explained that night.

  Looking back now – and partly because it wasn’t the first or last time that Merckx’s brand of sporting leadership lapsed into megalomania – it seems fair to doubt whether he was really more concerned with ‘needing Zilioli in the mountains’ or monopolising the Tour. Zilioli, for his part, is still sticking to his version and sticking by his friend: ‘I was the kind of guy who, if he had good legs, would just go to the front and take off, without really thinking too much about the consequences. Eddy wasn’t angry with me. He was just concerned about how much energy it would take to defend the jersey. That night, he said, “Italo, today you’ve done a lot of work, and it’s a long Tour.” You see, a lot of people thought Merckx only had an accelerator, but he had an accelerator and a calculator. Eddy used to say “Legs don’t have a brain.”’

  In his first day back in yellow, as the race headed towards the Brussels suburb of Forest, just a few blocks from Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Merckx again welded power to intelligence in a devastating attack with Lucien Van Impe. Any other rider might have gifted the stage-win to his fellow escapee in return for a 1’20” reinforcement of his race leadership, but Merckx only knew one kind of charity, the one that consisted of donating his prize money to good causes, as he would at the end of this Tour. Besides, he didn’t like wheel-suckers – or ‘profiteurs’ as he called them – and Van Impe had already shown that tendency in his first 18 months as a pro.

  The surprise move and victory, plus a further strengthening of Merckx’s position in the afternoon time trial, delighted the fans in Brussels but appalled the Tour director and L’Equipe journalist Jacques Goddet. ‘Gentlemen, this is a catastrophe!’ Goddet blurted in the newspaper’s evening editorial meeting, brandishing a printout of the general classification, which Merckx already led by over two minutes.

  Luis Ocaña’s ninth place and 3’38” deficit were alarming but not a death sentence with four mountain ranges – the Vosges, Jura, Alps and Pyrenees – still jutting invitingly out of the road map. Unbeknown to Merckx, however, Johny Schleck’s misgivings about his team leader’s mental fortitude were proving sadly accurate, as Ocaña’s stomach tied itself in knots more intricate and painful than the hairpins he was about to face on Stage 10. Merckx knew all about how and where stress could collect, germinate and tyrannise in the body, having suffered the same problems as an amateur,
and now he hastened Ocaña’s collapse by escaping with 13 other riders 170 kilometres from the finish line in Divonne les Bains. Earlier, just five kilometres into the stage, Merckx had chased the Portuguese Joaquim Agostinho only to be told that Agostinho had a score to settle after his contentious disqualification the previous day. More to the point Agostinho ‘[needed] a cow, and you, Merckx, have enough money to buy a hundred!’ Later, though, Merckx was in no mood to compromise; standing behind the finish line outside Divonne’s palatial casino, the journalist Gianpaolo Ormezzano waited with the Molteni team manager Giorgio Albani for what was now a three-man lead-group of Merckx, the Molteni rider Guerrino Tosello and the Belgian Georges Pintens to swing around the final bend. Ormezzano recalls: ‘I said to Albani, “If he lets Tosello win here, he’s got a friend for life,” but of course then Merckx smokes him.’ Ormezzano then walked over to where Merckx had stopped, already looking refreshed, and put the same point to Merckx as he had to Albani: ‘If you’d let him win, you’d have had a friend for life.’ Whereupon Merckx gestured towards the fans craning over the barriers and mumbled in his usual, bass montone, ‘I owed it to them. They have the right to see the best man win.’