Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Merckx contemplated this eventuality from his bunk in the Club du Soleil, the resort resembling a prison where he and his shell-shocked Molteni tribe were due to spend the next two nights. He didn’t know it yet but his efforts in defeat would be the subject of gushing tributes in the next day’s papers. Jacques Goddet called it the most moving performance of his career. And yet, says Rini Wagtmans, Merckx was ‘completely depressed, saying silly things, like that he’d never beat Luis Ocaña again. We all tried to gee him up but he was having none of it.’

  At least Merckx was still in the race. Ocaña’s blitz had cost Walter Godefroot his place in the Tour. Godefroot had finished outside the time limit. It had also cost Gaston Plaud, Godefroot’s Burgundy-glugging, foie gras-guzzling team-manager, all hopes of keeping Godefroot at Peugeot in 1972. ‘I punctured twice on the Col du Noyer, but Plaud had sent our second team car up ahead of me because he was obsessed with the team classification,’ Godefroot remembers. ‘After the second puncture, I’m standing at the side of the road and along comes the broomwagon. The door swings open and Roger De Vlaeminck is sitting there. “Walter, get in!” he says. But I want to carry on. I’m overtaking riders all the way up the final climb, they’re telling me to slow down, and I end up missing the time limit by a few seconds. Plaud says that he’ll pull some strings and get me back in the race but I’m furious with him. I say, “I did my job as a rider, you didn’t do yours as a directeur sportif.” The next day’s a rest-day, and I spend it getting a lift back to Belgium with Jean Van Buggenhout, who’s come to the Tour to see Eddy!’

  Even if he hadn’t wanted to admit it, perhaps not even to himself, Merckx had not given up entirely in Orcières. Before retiring to the dreary confines of the Club du Soleil, he had taken delivery of a new bike from one Belgian mechanic, Charles Terryn, and readied it for battle with another, Marcel Ryckaert. The next day was a rest-day, but unwinding was the last thing on Merckx’s mind. Instead he summoned his teammates and descended the road where his agony had climaxed the previous afternoon, and which they would have to negotiate downhill the following day. Merckx watched Rini Wagtmans, the ‘White Blaze’, flashing though the bends and an idea began to flicker in his head. He mentioned it to Wagtmans, then they spoke again at the end of the ride. That night, the ten Molteni riders that formed Merckx’s strongest Tour de France team to date went to bed knowing that the next day’s supposedly ‘flat’ and ‘routine’ 251-kilometre stage to Marseille would be anything but.

  Earlier, Ocaña had held an impromptu press conference in his room and invited the 15 or so attendees not to spare him ‘trick questions’ about the Tour being over. His teammate Bernard Labourdette agreed that, ‘With a phenomenon like Merckx, you never know what to expect’. Prophetically, Labourdette added, ‘Maybe he’s plotted an attack somewhere where we think nothing will happen.’

  The 10th of July dawned bright and, at first light and some 1,800 metres above the sea, already warm. Raymond Riotte of the Sonolor team was up with the cocks, like every day. The son of farmers from Burgundy, Riotte couldn’t kick certain habits even if now there were no cows to milk or hay to bale. Often at first light, he would pad the hotel corridors or head outside for a stroll, savouring the last silence before the world stirred back into life. Now, though, as he made his way through the grotty bowels of the Club du Soleil, Riotte noticed a strange whirring noise coming from an adjacent room. He followed it to a doorway, poked his head around the corner and rubbed his eyes. It looked like…no, it was Merckx, churning away on the rollers.

  ‘Eddy, Eddy, what are you doing?’

  ‘Oh, you know, my legs didn’t feel great so I was just trying to loosen up,’ Merckx told him.

  ‘But have you seen the length of the stage? We’ve got 250 kilometres to do, in this heat…’

  When his teammates woke and assembled for breakfast, Riotte told them what he had seen. Clearly, no one had passed the message on to Luis Ocaña. The forecast ‘canicule’ or heat wave had prompted Lévitan and Goddet to move the stage start from 8h10 to 8h00, but Ocaña was still dawdling with Spanish reporters when the appointed hour drew near and the riders began to gather on the start line. Merckx had seen him, and Johny Schleck had seen Merckx position himself in the front row of riders beneath the start-banner. ‘I said, “Luis, look out. Le Grand is on the front line.” Luis just said, “Come on, he’s not going to attack on the descent.”’

  When Wagtmans also glanced over his shoulder and saw Ocaña still nattering, he knew that the heist was on. Félix Lévitan climbed into his race director’s car, raised his flag and – if Ocaña’s later complaint was to be believed – hadn’t yet lowered it before, to use Wagtmans’s sound effect, ‘BOOM! Off I went. Like an atomic bomb.’

  Within seconds, while Ocaña flapped, Merckx and two teammates, Joseph Huysmans and Julien Stevens, were in Wagtmans’s jet stream and divebombing towards the valley. Another ace descender, Lucien Aimar, had also joined them together with Ocaña’s teammate Désiré Letort and four others. Behind, Barry Hoban was among the riders caught with Ocaña in the screeching mayhem. ‘Everyone had had new tyres glued on the previous day, and they hadn’t bedded down yet. People were falling off all over the place,’ Hoban remembers. ‘The other thing that made it so hard was that usually when you’re descending it’s after a climb when the size of the peloton has been dramatically reduced. There, over a hundred of us were trying to come down this little hair-pinned road together…’

  By the time the ten kamikazes had reached the valley, their advantage was already around a minute. The stage was set – ‘the greatest in Tour de France history’ according to Rini Wagtmans. What followed could be summed up as a 240-kilometre, five-hour game of cat and mouse – but with the speed and suspense of the most gripping action thriller. Throughout those five hours, the gap between the peloton being pulled at least initially by Bic and Merckx’s group was never greater than one minute 50 seconds and once or twice dropped as low as 40 seconds. Before long, the ten in front had shrunk to nine with just three Moltenis; Stevens hadn’t trained on the rest-day, with Lomme Driessens’s blessing but to Merckx’s annoyance, and couldn’t hold the wheels. Merckx and Driessens then disagreed again – Merckx protesting that they were getting nowhere and should give up, and Driessens overruling him. The other Molteni directeur sportif in the race, Giorgio Albani, then committed a costly error by sending four Molteni riders back to help Joseph Bruyère when he punctured after 45 kilometres. With the peloton barrelling towards the Med at 50 kilometres per hour, there was no hope of the quintet regaining contact and hence being able to lurk near the front of the peloton, infiltrating the Bic paceline and hindering their chase. These spoiling tactics were Josep Spruyt’s speciality, but he was among the riders sent back to rescue Bruyère. Merckx was not the only one to suggest later that Spruyt’s harrowing could and would have killed the chase and killed the Tour in his favour.

  As the route headed out of the Southern Alps and towards the lavender fields of Provence, Ocaña was beginning to struggle, three or four positions from the front. He shouted to Schleck to slow the pace. ‘We’ve got enough of an advantage…’ Bic were now getting help from the riders of two other teams, the all-Spanish Werner line-up and Cyrille Guimard’s Mercier.

  Reaching Marseille, Merckx and his group had the feeling that they were entering a ghost-town. Some barriers were still being erected, and behind them the pavements were devoid of spectators until the final 200 metres. Common mythology and the first-hand accounts of most who were present that day have it that the race was ‘two hours ahead of schedule’. In reality, it wasn’t much more than half an hour, but that was still enough to catch hundreds of fans, a few TV crews, and one or two VIPs on the hop. The mayor of Marseille, Gaston Deferre, was furious. ‘The Tour de France will never set foot in this city again, as long as I live,’ he ranted, having seen the Italian Armani pip Merckx for the stage win. Sure enough, the Grande Boucle would not return to Marseille until 1989, after Deferre�
��s death. Downhill stage starts would also be a thing of the past. No sooner had he crossed the line than Ocaña was moaning on live TV about Wagtmans’s ‘false start’ back in Orcières-Merlette.

  Merckx had regained two minutes and 12 seconds and was now second on general classification, just over seven and a half minutes behind Ocaña. His instinct told him that it had all been ‘a lot of work for too little reward’. Before heading for the showers near the finish line, where his frustration would turn to anger on learning that four of his teammates had been sacrificed for Bruyère, Merckx made his way towards the podium. As he walked, Wagtmans accosted him. ‘Eddy, I’m coming with you,’ he said. ‘I want to watch Ocaña.’

  Wagtmans had first come across Ocaña a couple of years earlier at the Ruta del Sol. Like most who came into contact with the Spaniard, he had been struck by Ocaña’s kindness and the way his heart seemed to throb from his sleeve, in success and failure. Wagtmans had also immediately picked up on another thing: ‘He was obsessed with the colour yellow. Whenever he wasn’t racing, he was always wearing something yellow.’

  Yellow was still the hue of Ocaña’s jersey on the podium in Marseille, but also, Wagtmans now remarked, of his complexion. ‘All the colour had drained from his face. He had lost too much power that day. When Merckx came down off the podium, I stopped him and said, “Eddy, Ocaña has no future in this Tour de France. Trust me.”’

  Later that evening, Wagtmans reminded Merckx of what he had seen and what he had said. As had been the case two nights earlier in Orcières-Merlette, however, Merckx seemed consumed by pessimism. ‘I’m finished. It was too much for too little,’ he repeated.

  ‘Usually,’ says Wagtmans, ‘after one hour, it was like he was waking up again – he was so fresh. But that day, he couldn’t pick himself up for three hours. I knew, though, even if Eddy didn’t, that Ocaña was worse.’

  *

  From the finish line in Marseille’s old port, they had gone straight to the city’s Marignane airport. A plane was waiting to deliver them to Albi, but before they boarded Raymond Riotte saw Merckx striding purposefully towards Cyrille Guimard. ‘Why the hell were you chasing with Ocaña?’ Merckx demanded. Guimard responded with a supercilious grin and by indicating that he had been riding to protect his own position in the points classification, and Mercier’s in the team standings.

  It was barely credible that this could be any team’s priority so early in the Tour, and no one knew that better than Merckx.

  ‘What do you take me for, a bloody idiot?’ Merckx snapped with a dismissive flick of the hand. ‘Anyway, why are you worried about those things? You’re not even going to make it to Paris,’ he added before turning and walking away.

  Nerves were clearly fraying. The following afternoon in Albi, that became apparent when Merckx triumphed by 11 seconds over Ocaña in a hilly 16-kilometre time trial, then complained angrily to Félix Lévitan about television motorbikes sheltering the Spaniard on the course. Not for the first time in his career, Merckx felt that he was being victimised. Why, also, had seven Spanish climbers from the KAS team been granted a reprieve having finished outside the time limit the previous day in Marseille? They would surely now be Ocaña’s allies in the Pyrenees. Lévitan made it clear to Merckx that he was wasting his time and breath.

  The atmosphere was turning febrile, with some nasty undertones. Predictably, Driessens had stoked Merckx’s ire and urged him to confront Lévitan, but he was far from the only agent provocateur. On live Belgian radio, seeing cars and motorbikes swarm around Ocaña, Luc Varenne had called upon the Belgian navy to bombard the French coastline. If that sounded like a joke in more ways than one, the French director responsible for the incriminated close-ups of Ocaña was quite serious when he accused Merckx and Driessens of ‘flagrant bad faith’. He vowed to limit Merckx and Molteni’s airtime should an apology not be forthcoming within 24 hours.

  But the real reason for Merckx’s angst was the general classification reminding him that Ocaña still led by seven minutes, 24 seconds. He was running out of stages. Just three big, back-to-back opportunities remained over three days in the Pyrenees. It was a good thing that he didn’t generally believe in omens: the first instalment of the troika was to head from Revel to Luchon, over the Col du Portillon which Ocaña’s father had crossed by foot on his way into France and a new future 20 years earlier. Not only that, but on the eve of the Tour, L’Equipe had published an unusual prediction from a mysterious correspondent-cum-soothsayer who had correctly predicted Rik Van Looy’s abandonment near Pau the previous year.

  ‘We gathered our most unusual snippet, just by chance, on our visit to Tour base camp [in Mulhouse]. We give it to you exactly as it was recorded, a whisper in our ear: “This Tour will be full of drama. Merckx won’t win. Not only will he fail, but he will abandon. He won’t even make it to Luchon. His defeat will be consumed on the descent off the Col de Menté, even before he climbs the Portillon.”’

  1 Monseré’s career and life would be tragically cut short in March 1971, when he was hit by a car which had strayed on to the course during a race in Reite in Belgium and died instantly. Felice Gimondi says today that, ‘Along with Merckx, he was maybe the biggest talent I’ve seen.’

  13

  if

  ‘All things being equal, he would have still beaten Merckx, but, you always have to put something in brackets: Merckx was Merckx.’ JOHNY SCHLECK

  ONE DAY EARLY in May 1994, Philippe Brunel looked across a restaurant table at Luis Ocaña and for a few seconds allowed his thoughts to drift with his friend’s. Ocaña’s face was rounder than it once had been, his hairline had slightly receded, but the cheekbones still jutted and when Luis spoke of the Tour de France embers, if not exactly the old fire, still glowed in his eyes. ‘You know what, Philippe?’ he said. ‘Nowhere else in life have I got back the feelings I used to have as a cyclist. If someone told me now that I could ride the Tour de France and die the second I crossed the finish line, I’d sign without a moment’s hesitation.’ Brunel smiled but there was still a lump in his throat and his eyes were damp. A few minutes earlier Ocaña had told him that he had an incurable, fatal form of hepatitis. Ten days later, Ocaña took destiny, and a pistol, into his own hands.

  In 1971, the Tour de France wasn’t yet finishing on the Champs Elysées, the cyclist’s Elysium, as it does today. Even if this had been the case, however, Luis Ocaña couldn’t end the Tour in Paris and access paradise – for he had been consigned to hell a week earlier on the Col de Menté.

  That morning in Revel Eddy Merckx had warned or tipped off his friend from Belgian radio Luc Varenne: stick with me today, I’m going to batter Ocaña until one of us breaks, him or me. The first 140 kilometres passed off largely without incident before Merckx began his bombardment on the Col du Portet d’Aspet. One attack, two, both quashed by Ocaña. Merckx now settled calmly back into his saddle, ready to double the dose on the Col de Menté.

  His legs felt good going uphill for the first time in the Tour. Ocaña’s, by the look of things, did not. The Col de Menté rears steeply out of Ger de Boutx before settling into a steady 7 per cent gradient as it tacks from east to west across the Bois Epais or ‘Thick Wood’. Halfway up the climb, Merckx resumed his assault and Ocaña again responded, but black clouds were now gathering like portents of disaster. ‘I notice that Ocaña’s progress isn’t as smooth as it was and, above all, that he hasn’t been able to eat. Could he be on the brink of collapse?’ Merckx wondered in his Carnets de Route. As the storm began pummelling their backs, Rini Wagtmans glanced across at Merckx and at first mistook the rainwater for tears. Then he too turned to observe Ocaña and saw the premonition he’d had in Marseille materialising before his eyes. Thunder clapped and lightning flashed. The so-called ‘White Blaze’, Wagtmans, recalls that it was ‘like World War II – or like the Devil was playing with us’.

  Ocaña’s own lieutenants, Johny Schleck and Bernard Labourdette, could see trouble not in the skies but in the way
their captain insisted on answering every Merckx attack. ‘Luis, calm down!’ they told him.

  Minutes later Merckx and Ocaña, in that order, were aquaplaning off the road on the other side of the pass within milliseconds of each other. In weather that has been variously described as ‘cataclysmic’ and ‘apocalyptic’, Ocaña overshot a left-hand hairpin and rag-dolled into a tiny brook. He was remounting within seconds when another rider also careered off the tarmac and into his midriff. Merckx was back on his bike immediately, while Ocaña made it momentarily to his feet before a second knock-down. He and his yellow jersey lay sodden in the flood, as the French author Pierre Carrey put it, like something painted by El Greco or sculpted by Rodin. This time he would not attempt to continue.

  Joop Zoetemelk claimed the next day – and the annals have recorded ever since – that he was the rider who struck Ocaña. Oddly, however, what jerky footage exists of the crash suggests that Zoetemelk may have only glanced Ocaña and that it was the Portuguese rider Joaquim Agostinho who ploughed into him. This version has been confirmed in the past by Lucien Van Impe, who witnessed the accident from the inside of the bend. It is also backed up by Johny Schleck. Agostinho, alas like Ocaña, can now never have the final word: he also died tragically, almost ten years to the day before the Spaniard, when he hit a dog and crashed while leading the Tour of the Algarve.

  Before the debates and conjecture could begin, Merckx pressed on, oblivious to the drama unfolding higher up the mountain. On one hairpin, he saw Wagtmans appear over his shoulder, fly off the road and 300 metres into a field in an ‘unbelievable position – lying horizontally on his saddle, legs akimbo’. ‘Both wheels of his bike were broken but he never fell! We were the puppets of a monstrous fury,’ Merckx shuddered.