Four days later, following two further Merckx masterclasses in a time trial around Divonne and the big Alpine stage to Grenoble, Ormezzano would be the bearer of bad news which turned Stage 13 into a sorry one for both Merckx and Ocaña. Ormezzano had become as close as journalists could to Merckx over the previous three years, partly because the youngster had made him and his pre-race punditry look good by winning the 1966 Milan–San Remo, and more recently because, says Ormezzano, ‘I’d defended Eddy when the Italian press started turning on him for ruining their vision of Felice Gimondi dominating international cycling.’ In recent times, Merckx had come to know of Ormezzano’s involvement in local politics and taken to addressing him as ‘Il Senatore’.
Now, in Gap, Ormezzano waited for Merckx to come under the banner and into the mêlée, ready to relay some terrible news: their mutual friend, the Faemino team manager Vincenzo Giacotto, had lost his battle with throat cancer and died the previous night. For Ormezzano, Giacotto had been ‘one of those people who was impossible to dislike, except for the fact that he supported Juventus, which for a Torino fan like me was the worst sin a man could commit’. Amid tears, Merckx now described him as a ‘real friend’. Once or twice, after Savona, he had wondered whether Giacotto really believed that he was innocent of doping, and the mutual trust had briefly lapsed. In future, though, Merckx would cherish his memories of a man, he said now, ‘whom I really liked as a human being’. A few metres away, Italo Zilioli sat propped against the trackside and wept into his hands. His association with Giacotto went back further than Merckx’s, almost a decade.
At around the same time, another fragile bird, Luis Ocaña, was bringing to an end a terrible ordeal that reached new timbres of agony on the Col du Noyer. When his Bic teammate Charly Grosskost could take no more and climbed off his bike, Ocaña briefly wanted to follow him, but instead prolonged the martyrdom which would provide rich material for his memoirs two years later. ‘I touched the depths of despair… In front of a fountain which my fever lent the appearance of an oasis, I was even tempted to abandon. I was ashamed, as I told myself that I had no right to finish the stage, with Charly having abandoned. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t worthy of his sacrifice… My face was like Christ’s on the cross, but the solicitations of my directeurs sportifs seeped into my being and had the effect of a cracking whip.’
The following day, once again, Merckx and Ocaña found themselves united in suffering but divided by minutes on the torrid slopes of the Mont Ventoux, the ‘God of Evil demanding sacrifice’ described by Roland Barthes. In the morning, Italo Zilioli was still so shaken by Giacotto’s passing that, when the minute’s silence in his former boss’s honour ended, his head still hung and it was left to Merckx to cajole him with a hand on the shoulder and an ‘Allez, camarade!’ The way the pair then channelled their grief on the road where Tom Simpson had perished three years earlier then bore out what Zilioli said about how they responded very differently in adversity; if, as L’Equipe’s Antoine Blondin had said, the Ventoux was ‘a witch’s cauldron’, the rare brew of sadness and adrenalin spurred Merckx to yet another devastating solo win, while Zilioli floundered with Ocaña further down the mountain. Two kilometres from the summit, now flagging, Merckx had paid his respects to Simpson and the monument that marked the site of his collapse in 1967 by removing his cap, while Jacques Goddet jumped out of his race director’s car to leave flowers. Moments later, having been too exhausted to even raise a hand from the bars as he reached the summit and the finish line, Merckx caused a brief but serious alarm by barging past reporters while complaining that he had ‘fire in his belly’. For a few, nervous minutes, the spectre of Simpson and an unthinkable déjà vu hung in the heat haze, as the second-place rider, Martin Van Den Bossche also felt unwell and was bundled into an ambulance. Van Den Bossche, now found himself sitting next to the rider who the previous year had killed his dream on another legendary peak, the Tourmalet – Eddy Merckx.
‘I can still hear the tour doctor, Pierre Dumas, saying that my heartbeat and circulation were good but that they’d give me a shot if I didn’t regain full consciousness in the next two minutes,’ Van Den Bossche says. ‘I heard him counting, “Sixty, fifty-nine…” then him telling his assistant to “Get it ready”, meaning the shot. Fortunately within a minute I was awake, and then Merckx came in. They closed the door, and we were in there for an age, about half an hour. It turned out quite well because there were these two Citroëns waiting to take us down the mountain with a police escort. We went down at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour with sirens wailing and fans still all over the road. It was absolutely terrifying, but the good thing was that we arrived at the hotel an hour before our teammates who had been blocked on the mountain.
‘In the end it was much ado about nothing,’ Van Den Bossche puffs. ‘Both of us had been fine all the time. My directeur sportif Giorgio Albani had pinched my hand in the ambulance, and I’d pinched back. Meanwhile, our mechanic Ernesto Colnago was outside, sobbing and thinking that I was dead. Albani opened the door and told him to stop the cinema!’
If Merckx’s victory wasn’t assured before then, barring accident, it was now. In his hotel bed in Avignon, he had much to ponder besides what was now nearly a ten-minute lead over the second-placed rider on general classification, the Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk. As well as thoughts of Giacotto and Simpson, on the Ventoux’s barren upper slopes, Merckx had been haunted by the old neurosis that ran straight down his spine and into his leg. As it did, as he had done on numerous other occasions during the Tour, he had reached into his back pocket for his allen key and began adjusting his saddle height as he rode. At the top of every pedal stroke, he braced himself, waiting for his leg to lock completely.
The panic was more frightening than any pain, and Merckx didn’t intend to reacquaint himself with the feeling at any point in the Tour’s last nine days. He would limit himself to ‘just’ two more wins, in the time trials in Bordeaux and on the final day at La Cipale in Paris, scene of his second consecutive enthronement as the Tour de France winner.
It would be wrong to suggest that Eddy Merckx’s battles were over, that he faced no more opposition after Stage 14 to the Mont Ventoux. Neither Ocaña’s token, consolatory breakaway win at Saint-Gaudens, nor the young Frenchman Bernard Thévenet dropping and beating Merckx by over a minute on the Pyrenean stage to La Mongie, however, provided the champion elect with anything like the challenges which were increasingly coming from behind the barriers and inside the press enclosure.
Goddet’s remark about Merckx’s ‘catastrophic’ early lead betrayed the resentment which had again festered throughout the Tour, and which Merckx seemed powerless to assuage. Coming from him, the tiniest faux pas could be magnified to assume the proportions of a blasphemous insult. While Ocaña was winning at Saint-Gaudens, the Faemino soigneurs had arrived at the team’s allotted sleeping quarters in a stuffy school hall, and immediately taken the executive decision to check the entire staff into a hotel up the road in Barbazan. Later that evening, while they were eating, the former rider turned Tour bigwig Albert Bouvet strode through the dining room towards Lomme Driessens, race regulations in hand; sleeping and eating in a location not selected and approved by the race organiser, Bouvet reminded Driessens, was forbidden. Merckx and company duly trudged upstairs, packed their things and, in Merckx’s case, had barely slept when the alarm sounded for the next stage to La Mongie. Later that morning Merckx didn’t help himself by adding the lunch-pack laid on by the race organisers to his list of grievances, tipping its contents on to the tarmac in front of a group of journalists and squashing an unripe peach under his feet. ‘We anxiously await the day when the champion demands moules marinières in Sainte-Marie-de-Campan [the village at the foot of the Tourmalet], or maybe Lobster Thermidor,’ Antoine Blondin wrote in L’Equipe the following day.
The subtext was that Merckx was abusing his power, perhaps without even realising it. Whether he meant it or not, he had been swept along i
n the slow, seamless transition from boy genius to superstar, with all its trappings and the added complication, in cycling, of the authority that the best rider could exercise over other competitors. The French rider Cyrille Guimard was one of a number complaining that Merckx was now so strong that he was able to play God; he could ‘choose’ who was allowed to win at his own convenience. Godefroot had been ‘allowed’ to win the green points jersey only because Merckx liked him, and as a result of an agreement with Driessens even before the race started in Limoges that Merckx would grant him this privilege in return for the odd favour along the road.
The real problem, though, was that there was no longer anything cute or coltish about Merckx to the outside world. He was 25, his face still fresh and unlined, but it had somehow transmuted out of its previous innocence into a colourless, frigid mask. The more the high-brow magazines searched, the more they sent their best and most intuitive interviewers to stare and forage deep inside his soul, the more mystified they became. The now defunct L’Aurore newspaper had taken the bold and unusual step of dispatching one of its top female writers, Odélie Grand, into what must have been – and remains – one of the more male-dominated and lecherous environments in professional sport. The interview requests rained down, not from Grand in the direction of the riders, but the other way around. When she met Merckx, however, Grand was confronted with an opaqueness that she had only previously encountered, she said, in the film star Ryan O’Neal. ‘Most of the time I did feel that the attitude of my subject was influenced by the fact that I was a female reporter,’ Grand told Roger Bastide. ‘I’m used to it, whether it’s an actor, a politician, a finance magnate or a writer that I’m talking to. It’s only ever a kind of mockery or scorn, at least a kind of humour that’s not particularly charitable. But in front of Eddy Merckx…nothing! His gaze gets lost somewhere over your shoulder and erases you from the picture. It’s a black-out. You no longer exist. He replies with a yes or a no, but he’s thousands of kilometres away, on his own inaccessible planet.’
Grand could rest assured that she wasn’t the only one. Another ‘name’ writer on the 1970 Tour, Lucien Bodard, had built his reputation on one of the toughest beats in journalism, reporting on the rise of Communism in China, but even he couldn’t get to grips with Merckx. Of his stage win in Grenoble, Bodard remarked, ‘Merckx, a super-winner in unprecedented fashion, scurries away looking a tiny bit bored, with nothing to say, not even a word of satisfaction… It comes as the biggest surprise to discover that Merckx isn’t a robot constructed by engineers. He turned himself into a robot. With him there is no sense of aspiration, no sense of predestination, no flame. Just the realisation that he was unique, different from the rest, and he had to take advantage of that. And so he turned himself into a machine with extraordinary attention to detail and permanent application. He is the human bicycle.’
Bodard’s portrait was well observed, but from Merckx’s vantage point, on the inside looking out, it was pointless for these people to want or demand answers or a charisma as transcendental as his talent. The issue, indeed, was their expectations as much as his inarticulacy, the smile that his mother had told him ‘wasn’t commercial’ all those years ago in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, or his profound awareness of his own limitations. He told Marc Jeuniau, ‘I spend a third of my life on the bike, another third on the massage table or at the wheel of my car, and I need another third to sleep. In five years, when I’m not racing any more, then I’ll have time to read, to go to the cinema and the theatre, or go to conferences, and I imagine that I’ll enjoy it very much.’
If former teammates recall that one of his pet hates was poring over tactics at the end of races, wouldn’t it also hold true that he had little appetite for discussing them with journalists? On all other matters, one of the pressmen who perhaps genuinely understood and sympathised with Merckx, Gianpaolo Ormezzano, perhaps sums it up when he says, ‘To me Merckx was just a superior person, in his head and his legs, but I mean by a sportsman’s standards. Maybe if you had put him in charge of a nuclear physics laboratory he would have blown up planet Earth. I don’t know… What I’m saying is that he was smart but his gift was for riding his bike.’
Merckx had demonstrated it again to win the Tour de France by nearly ten minutes. Thirty positions on general classification and one hour, six minutes and 59 seconds was the size of the abyss between him and Luis Ocaña.
12
deplumed
‘For the first time, I was dictated to by a stronger rider than me. Now I think it’s all over.’ EDDY MERCKX
FOR THE SECOND time in little over two years, Eddy Merckx lay in a foetal position on a hotel bed, his bottom lip quivering. The role fulfilled in turns in Savona by Vincenzo Giacotto, Italo Zilioli and Martin Van Den Bossche now fell to the Dutchman Rini Wagtmans.
‘It’s over. This Tour, me as a rider…it’s all finished,’ Merckx sobbed.
‘Come on, don’t be ridiculous,’ Wagtmans told him, paraphrasing the words expressed in manifold ways, in manifold languages, in the thousand or so telegrams that the Tour postman had just delivered to Merckx’s bedroom. ‘Remember what I told you under the podium this afternoon. Remember what I saw. I tell you, it’s not over…’
Almost a year to the day earlier, during the 1970 Tour, Merckx had sent Jean Van Buggenhout to meet Wagtmans in a hotel car park in Pau and offer him a ride with Merckx’s new Molteni team the following year. Wagtmans had immediately given Van Bug his word and his signature – if he remembers correctly, ‘on the back of La Dépêche du Midi newspaper’. The idea had been for Wagtmans to enter the fold of Merckx’s disciples, but until a few days ago he felt that, alas, Merckx had given him a lot more help than the other way around. A fast-talking, even faster-descending livewire of a rider, Wagtmans was also something of a maverick. His nickname, the ‘Witte Bles’ or ‘White Blaze’ referred both to the shock of white which struck his hairline like a lightning bolt and to his speed going downhill, but there was also something luminous and volatile about his whole approach to riding his bike. At a time when Merckx spent much of the winter competing in Six Days and racking up thousands of kilometres in training, Wagtmans consigned his bike to the garage in October then barely touched it again until March. Usually, within weeks, the sparks would be flying from his pedals, and Wagtmans would have fireworks prepared for the only race that mattered to him: the Tour. But not this year. Still desperately short of fitness in May, he had become so demoralised and downbeat about his prospects of making the Molteni Tour team, that it had taken a phone call and a stern pep talk from Merckx to bring him around. ‘Rini, you can’t train a thousand kilometres in three months and expect to be good. You wonder why I’m so good, but I ride more than two hundred kilometres most days…’
Previously, Wagtmans had thought that Merckx ‘trained like a foolish man’. As the Tour approached and he finally discovered his sparkle, Wagtmans realised that there was logic in the lunacy.
Now, though, in Marseille, he watched Merckx writhe, listened to his moans and briefly reverted to his old assessment. If Merckx thought that he was finished, that the 1971 Tour de France was over and Luis Ocaña had won, ‘foolish’ really was the only word.
As for what had happened between Orcières Merlette and Marseille a few hours earlier, well, says Wagtmans today, that was simply ‘the greatest Tour de France stage of all time’.
There had been signs, just a lot of little things and one or two big ones all spring. The previous season had ended not with a whimper but no real rousing finale, either, as the next phenomenon off the Belgian cycling production line, Jean-Pierre ‘Jempi’ Monseré,1 overshadowed Merckx by winning the World Championships in Leicester. The following week, Rik Van Looy headed out for a training ride, saw Vic Schil and Jos Huysmans on the road from Herentals to Grobbendonk, and told them no, he couldn’t think of anything worse than riding with them all the way to Namur. The old ‘Emperor’ then turned around, pedalled back to his house and hung up his bike for good
. Thirty years later, Van Looy would dedicate just three sentences to Eddy Merckx in his autobiography. After initially agreeing to an interview for this book, one of the first he would have done for half a decade, Van Looy changed his mind midway through the first question about the 1965 Paris–Luxembourg, wished me well, and put down the phone.
It had been goodbye and good riddance from Merckx in 1970 too, Merckx’s farewell to the Valente brothers and Faema was tinged with regret both at Giacotto’s passing and the way their relationship had deteriorated since the spring. Merckx’s new team would be Molteni, the cold meat manufacturer, whose gold and navy-blue jerseys had previously been sported by Gianni Motta and Michele Dancelli. Merckx finally signed a two-year contract four days after a Tour of Lombardy in which Motta had stifled his every attack, and Franco ‘Crazy Heart’ Bitossi had won in a sprint. In their meeting at Molteni’s headquarters in Arcore near Milan, team manager Giorgio Albani agreed that Merckx could bring ‘with him’ ten Belgians and one Dutchman, Wagtmans, but insisted that there was no room for Marino Vigna as a third directeur sportif alongside Lomme Driessens and Molteni’s current Italian coach Marino Fontana.
Two months later, in mid-December, Merckx and Claudine accepted Italo Zilioli’s invitation to join him and his family at their alpine retreat in Limone Piemonte, close to the French border but hundreds of kilometres from the maelstrom of scrutiny and intrusion which life had become in Belgium.
Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal Page 19