Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  ‘I was trying to stop the back wheel with my feet! You have to think like a skier in those conditions,’ Wagtmans cackles now. At the time, the Mercier directeur Louis Caput struggled to see the funny side. ‘Wagtmans diced with death today,’ Caput said that evening.

  The result of the Tour, at least, was suddenly beyond doubt. Merckx had looked the strongest rider in the race ever since the Alps, and he took no further risks en route to second place in Luchon and what had turned from a seven-minute deficit on general classification to a two-minute lead over Zoetemelk. José Manuel Fuente, one of the KAS riders rescued from the wrong side of the time limit in Marseille, had escaped early in the stage and held on to win by over six minutes in Luchon.

  While Merckx glumly allowed himself to be draped but not properly clothed in the yellow jersey, Ocaña was evacuated by helicopter to a clinic in Saint Gaudens. Initial reaction to his fall had been hysterical. Some of the first on the scene feared that he had broken his spine. After briefly losing consciousness in the helicopter, Ocaña was given painkillers, an X-ray and a much less serious diagnosis once he reached Saint Gaudens. ‘The current diagnosis, providing there are no more complications, is thoracic contusions and a pronounced state of shock,’ said a doctor’s communiqué.

  A question that at this point no one dared to ask, preoccupied as they were with another big ‘if’, would stalk Ocaña to and beyond the grave. Given that he was discharged from the clinic in Saint Gaudens at noon the next day, were his injuries so severe that he couldn’t have soldiered on? Most at least respectfully let a decade or two pass before uttering the unspeakable. Thus Merckx’s friend, the television journalist, Théo Mathy, left it until 1999 to confess that, in his opinion, Ocaña was physically capable of continuing but had been broken psychologically. The storm and the Tour doctor’s panicked conclusions had done the rest. ‘I ask myself whether Ocaña didn’t abandon a bit quickly; it was his second abandonment in three Tours,’ Mathy speculated. Another journalist, Walter Pauli, endorses and supplements the same view with another premise: ‘I’m pretty sure that Merckx would have carried on, in Ocaña’s shoes. Pretty sure. When you look at what pain Merckx endured in later Tours… Physically, there was no way that Merckx could beat him but you had to know Ocaña. The psychological destabilisation was enough.’

  Whether they do or don’t believe that Ocaña could have at least tried to ride on, most generally agree that the ‘Merckx factor’ played at least some part in his downfall. Lucien Van Impe says that Ocaña was ‘the first rider who wasn’t afraid of Merckx’, but no one can know to what extent it was all bluster, and how much bravery genuinely remained now that Merckx was homing in. There were certainly signs that Johny Schleck had been right about his teammate’s vulnerability to pressure. As much as Bernard Labourdette, for one, told Ocaña to forget about Merckx, he seemed determined to ape his former bête noire. That meant responding when Merckx attacked and even sending his teammates with Merckx’s Molteni men whenever they broke clear. Hence, early on the stage, the Bic pair Désiré Letort and Alain Vasseur went to mark Roger Swerts and Herman Van Springel. ‘He wanted to ride like Merckx and Merckx’s team, but there was no need,’ says Merckx’s wing-man in the mountains, Joseph Bruyère. ‘By doing so, he wore out men who could have been there with him and given him some security on the Col de Menté. Maybe he wouldn’t have taken those risks then…’

  Bruyère’s next observation would make uncomfortable reading if Ocaña were still alive. ‘It’s too easy to say that Merckx would have won the Tour anyway…but Ocaña preferred to leave us guessing by abandoning.’

  Thus Bruyère pre-empts the debate that has outlived Ocaña and will outlive Merckx, namely who would have won if fate hadn’t intervened. In almost all other circumstances, in any other Tour, the arguments would all have been fatuous. Contrary to the widely held, nigh-on fundamentalist misconception that the Tour winner had to be the strongest man in the race, it was actually about negotiating the course, manoeuvring around fortune – and these were talents on a par with the ability to pedal. Merckx would win not ‘à la pédale’ but fair and square nonetheless. In 1971, though, at stake was a bigger and more prestigious prize than just the maillot jaune: Merckx’s scalp and by extension the title, like a boxer’s gold belt, of world’s strongest cyclist.

  It is to Merckx’s credit not only that he refused to don the yellow jersey on Stage 15, but also that he has largely refrained from hypothesising in the 40 years since. The closest he came at the time was admitting in his Carnets de Route, ‘before the accident the conviction was growing in me that I was going to beat Ocaña’. That evening in the Lycée des Garçons de Bagnères where Molteni were staying, and even the following morning, Merckx was utterly demoralised and threatened to abandon. Jacques Anquetil pleaded with him to keep going, but even more compelling was Lomme Driessens’s reminder that the wheel-sucking Zoetemelk or Van Impe stood to triumph if Merckx left. Merckx agreed but already sensed that his third Tour victory would be perceived as a hollow one. That hunch was corroborated by the French press after the next day’s stage to Superbagnères. ‘It’s obvious that Merckx, dragging the ubiquitous Zoetemelk in his wheel, wouldn’t have been able to make up even a fraction of his handicap on the radiant Luis,’ wrote Jacques Goddet in L’Equipe. In the same paper, Pierre Chany decreed, ‘without any danger of getting it wrong, and on the faith of the dramas we saw yesterday, that Luis Ocaña would have condemned everyone else to the role of bit-part players if he’d been in the race today’.

  Zoetemelk is one of those who maintains today that Ocaña would have held on. Johny Schleck, as you might expect, is another. Seven stages remained between Luchon and Paris when the Tour was ‘decapitated’. They included the bizarre 19.6-kilometre mini-stage straight out of Luchon and up to the ski resort of Superbagnères, a 145-kilometre leg-breaker taking in the cols of the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque the next day, four stages for opportunists then the traditional time trial, traditionally won by Merckx, to the Cipale velodrome on the final day. As it turned out, Merckx had also hurt himself on the Col de Menté, specifically his right knee, and ended up riding economically in the remaining two Pyrenean stages. Sure enough, he then finished two minutes ahead of everyone in the 53-kilometre time trial to La Cipale in Paris. Against Ocaña, he would no doubt have summoned even more strength, not to mention motivation.

  ‘All things being equal, he would have still beaten Merckx, but, you always have to put something in brackets: Merckx was Merckx, and Luis had never beaten him before in a grand Tour. Merckx would have attacked him all the way to Paris,’ Schleck says.

  This, indeed, is everyone’s doubt: to what extent was Merckx going to ‘harass’ Ocaña on the road from the Pyrenees to Paris as he had promised, and how much resilience did Ocaña have left? Raymond Riotte says that Merckx had not left Ocaña in peace for ‘a single second since Orcières-Merlette’ and would not until he had the jersey. Riotte is also one of those who considered Merckx, and not bad luck or bad weather, to be the architect of Ocaña’s demise. ‘It was only a matter of time before he exploded,’ he says. ‘Even on the Col de Menté, Eddy had attacked him and made him chase. I don’t care what anyone says: Eddy provoked that crash. Eddy lit the bomb. OK, so there was the storm, but that wasn’t what did for Luis. I was convinced, and still am, that Eddy was going to win that Tour. He would just have carried on bombarding Luis.’

  In other words, if Ocaña’s fragile body wasn’t going to desert him, it somehow seemed inevitable that his nerve and ability to make lucid decisions eventually would. It was and is the hallmark of all great self-saboteurs – or, as they are now commonly known in sport, ‘chokers’. For some, like Italo Zilioli before Ocaña, the pressure was never greater and the magnetism of failure never stronger than in the antechamber of glory. But did Ocaña deserve the label? Had he choked on the Col de Menté? The future would provide some indication. Awaiting that there was tragedy, not irony, in the notion that Ocaña had
been obsessed with crossing the Portillon, where his father had entered France two decades earlier, ahead of Merckx if not at the front of the race.

  ‘Luis wanted to lead the Tour into Spain after the Col de Menté – that’s why he desperately wanted to follow Merckx. If it had been someone else besides Merckx, he would have done the same thing,’ says Bernard Thévenet, who would finish fourth in the ’71 Tour. ‘It’s certain, though, that the duel between Ocaña and Merckx was top-notch stuff. Luis was someone who was really hyper-motivated with an opponent in front of him. Maybe, in front of Merckx, his motivation was even greater and became excessive. He really wanted to beat Merckx, but then Luis wanted to beat everyone in the mountains. That warm blood perhaps just boiled a bit hotter against Merckx…’

  Luis Ocaña and Eddy Merckx were both 26 at the time of their 1971 showdown. Merckx’s orchestrated visit to Ocaña’s newly built, ‘tastefully decorated’ (Merckx’s words) villa in Bretagne-de-Marsan on the morning of Stage 17, the champagne Ocaña gave to him, Merckx’s invitation to ‘come back and win next year’, and their handshake at the end carried with them the promise of further, more bellicose encounters. Battles which, alas, would never materialise, as Ocaña failed to ever reproduce the heroics of 1971, except when Merckx was absent from the Tour in 1973. That year, liberated from his nemesis, Ocaña rode and dominated in a manner worthy and reminiscent of Merckx. Then the ogre returned in 1974, the hex resumed, and Ocaña scuttled for cover.

  In other races, for a short time, he seemed unaffected by what had happened. The pair squared up again a few weeks after the Tour at the 1971 World Championships in Mendrisio. Ocaña looked in imperious form before committing a mistake that was too easy to dismiss as bad luck – drifting backwards to get a drink in Merckx’s line of sight. Merckx’s attack was instantaneous, a second professional rainbow jersey was on its way, and Ocaña was furious. ‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ he said.

  He still won big races, notably the Dauphiné in 1972 and of course the 1973 Tour, but also went out on a low note with a positive dope test at the 1977 Tour. The last few years of his career had been a regret-tinged diminuendo. In 1973, he had already begun planning for the future, buying an old Armagnac distillery and its 20 hectares of vines. The Armagnac trade, though, was an expensive and volatile one to enter – certainly a dangerous environment for someone with moods as fickle as Ocaña’s. ‘I don’t think 1971 ruined his career – he still went on to win the Tour in 1973,’ says Johny Schleck. ‘Anyway, Luis wasn’t going to carry on racing for the rest of his life. He wanted to put away enough money to get the vineyard up and running. That was his big passion, his land. But Armagnac’s not an easy product. I think he’d maybe invested too much and got a bit short of cash. He could have sold his land, but he was very emotive about the whole thing and what someone else would do with it. He’d say, “My land’s for making Armagnac, and making it the way I want it made.” That’s how Luis was. He’d made a big investment, emotional and financial… I don’t know if it was because of that, but he became very stressed, then ill, and what happened happened. In any case, stress was in his life every day.’

  Philippe Brunel’s eyes and voice still mist with nostalgia when he talks about Ocaña. Over the course of a long career reporting and poeticising on cycling for L’Equipe, Brunel has met and become close to many now departed cyclists, but has cried only for Ocaña. In 2002, he wrote a fine biography of Merckx and today often wishes ‘that when I see Merckx, it could be just as another human being and not Eddy Merckx, because he’s a wonderful person to spend time with’. Of Ocaña, though, Brunel says just, ‘We were brothers.’

  ‘I would never say that Luis died on the Col de Menté, but when he falls there’s this sense that his family history has given him, of his father who flees Spain and Francoism, over the Portillon, carrying all his worldly possessions. There’s this sense not of malediction but at least melancholia about Luis and his life, and that increases with the fall. There are people who say that he could have got up but that’s false. Two riders smashed into him. I also think there was a third thing – this idea, somewhere, that happiness wasn’t for him. I think that like all Spaniards, he had a relationship with fatality that unconsciously made it impossible for him to get over that thing. To him, there was a sense of “I fall, it’s fatal, it couldn’t have gone any other way.”

  ‘In any case,’ Brunel continues, ‘Luis died a bit every day when things didn’t go as he wished on a bike. What he told me that day in 1994 about wishing he could ride the Tour again and die on the finish line…that showed that he had a visceral, almost mystical relationship with his profession, which is perhaps why he had problems after he retired. Merckx is the greatest champion in the history of cycling, but there are other riders who are the very expression of the sport, who left a very deep impression, who expressed what cycling should be. It’s like in life – occasionally you do things that you shouldn’t do, but you do them anyway, and you’re right, because you can’t always be calculating or rational. Cycling’s not a sport for accountants. The mark that Luis left on cycling wasn’t much more than one performance, his ride to Orcières-Merlette, but that mark was indelible, like the essence of cycling distilled in a perfume bottle. That’s why I loved Ocaña and also why he and Merckx would have become great friends in other circumstances. I’m sure of that. Ocaña, Merckx and Jacques Anquetil were kindred spirits. They had this relationship with life, this attitude of, “We’ll grab life by the scruff of the neck. We won’t conform. We’ll take it head on.” Yes, if Luis was still alive, he and Eddy would get on famously now.’

  14

  hour of need

  ‘You’re a real gherkin!’ JACQUES ANQUETIL

  MERCKX ENDED UP winning the 1971 Tour – the one that he said he and Ocaña both ‘lost’ when the Spaniard crashed – by a shade under ten minutes. If he was the villain before, the emergence, then downfall of a tragic hero, had eroded his popularity still further. Again, Merckx didn’t or couldn’t help himself. On the Pyrenean blockbuster to Gourette, he chased then berated Lucien Van Impe, guilty of wheel-sucking for 12 kilometres on the Tourmalet then ‘jumping away under my nose’. He then sought retribution on Cyrille Guimard for his earlier ‘conspiracy’ with Ocaña by attacking in the pine forests of the Landes. The ambush gave Merckx his fourth stage win in the Tour and the green points jersey formerly held by Guimard. ‘I think Guimard’s green jersey is still hanging from a pine tree somewhere in the Landes!’ he tittered years later.

  If he didn’t know to what extent the French public had turned on him before, even after those threatening letters early in the Tour, he did when a fan pelted him with stones in Angoulême. Or when the choruses of ‘Eddy, Eddy’ he remembered from La Cipale in 1969 had turned to jeers two years later. ‘It was particularly bad that year,’ says Rini Wagtmans. ‘I can remember the stones in Angoulême. The French just couldn’t understand Eddy. They had Thévenet and Poulidor, and to them he’d just ruined the party.’

  Even away from the Tour, in the criteriums, it seemed that age and money were doing nothing to curb Merckx’s cannibalism. Losing was still that ‘big drama in his life’ that so mystified Dino Zandegù. One afternoon in 2011 – for the record at around two o’clock – Zandegù’s memories of a circuit race in Modigliana four weeks after the ’71 Tour come cascading back.

  Dino, Dino, what’s this: Zandegù first, Merckx second?! Amazing! How did you do it?

  ‘Oh yes, I don’t know what it was – my dinner the previous night had gone down well, or I’d slept well – but I was on one of those days, a day with a capital “D”! It was a hard race, circuits six kilometres long with a climb called the “Calla”. Three laps from the end, Merckx starts stirring the pot then puts in this vicious attack. Suddenly there are only six of us left. On the penultimate lap we’re all still there, then we get to the hill, this “Calla” for the last time. Merckx thinks he’ll put on a show…but I go away with him! Six hundred metres from the top
of the climb, I’m dropped, but not by so much that I can’t catch him on the descent. He knows I’m on his wheel, but I’m too tired to come through. “Pull! Pull, you good-for-nothing…!” he’s shouting. He’s calling me all the names under the sun in this half-Flemish, half-Italian, half-French, half-invented patois – “Verdomme this, bastardo that!” – then he tells me that he’ll see to it that I never race again if I do the sprint. I say nothing – part of the prize is a golden hen that’s worth quite a lot of money, and I want to win it. So, anyway, we come under the kilometre-to-go kite and I go like a rocket and do the sprint of my life to win. Five metres beyond the finish line, I spot a gap in the crowd, turn off the road and down this little gravel path. At the end of the path is a house. I jump off my bike, sling it over my shoulder, burst through the open door of the house and run upstairs into one of the bedrooms. An old woman is there in her bed. I wake her and she starts shrieking. I say “Granny, granny, be quiet! I won’t hurt you, but Eddy Merckx is coming after me and he wants to rip my face off!” She says that she’s going to call the police, but eventually she calms down, and I end up staying in there for half an hour. I finally poke my head outside, check he’s not waiting, then ride off to get my prize. When I get to the podium it’s just me and the organiser because everyone else has gone home. It was worth it, though – I still treasure that golden hen!’

  At around the same time, while Merckx was preparing for the World Championship road race that was another nail in Ocaña’s coffin, Lomme Driessens was getting ready for a change of scenery in 1972 in a team other than Molteni. Driessens informed Merckx that he would be leaving Molteni at the end of the season in a letter in August. The writing, though, had been on the wall for weeks if not months. His policy of allowing some riders’ wives to stay with them at stage races and banning others was just one of many things that irritated Merckx. Over the summer a bad relationship had slowly turned into an unsustainable one. Merckx didn’t ride Paris–Tours in September, but even from afar he could tell what to expect from Driessens when he took up his new role with Van Cauter-Magniflex the following year. If Magniflex’s Rik Van Linden was able to win in Tours, Molteni’s Marino Basso reported back to Merckx, it had been in large part thanks to Driessens. Had he not known it before, Merckx would soon discover that, as journalist Walter Pauli reminds us, ‘Driessens was obsessed with revenge.’