There were endless, multiplying challenges off the bike, but a diminishing number that hadn’t already been met on it. He hadn’t yet won (or indeed ridden) the Vuelta a España, Amstel Gold or Paris–Tours, but otherwise little remained except records. One in particular fascinated him: the one people in cycling referred to just as ‘The Hour’.
With doubts persisting about whether Merckx was merely the best of a bad bunch, a generation of riders weaker than those faced by Anquetil and Coppi, here was one way to prove his value in its purest terms. The prize was so prestigious because the exercise was so simple: ride as far as possible, on a track, in an hour. Merckx called it the ‘the supreme test of cycling’. In 1876 Frank Dodds had set the first mark of 26.508 kilometres, and since then some of cycling’s most illustrious names, including Coppi and Anquetil, had clambered over each other to raise the bar. The record had last been broken in 1968 by the Dane Ole Ritter. It now stood at 48.653 kilometres. To maximise his chances, and minimise his drag through the air, Ritter had made his attempt at altitude, in the velodrome built for the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City. Having also considered the tracks in Munich, Milan and Rome, Merckx finally decided that he too would head to the Agustin Melgar velodrome in Mexico.
He was fortunate in that not since Blois had he felt as powerful, as agile and free of pain as in the autumn of 1972. The World Championships in Gap in France had been a failure due more to a flat course and the usual competing interests in the Belgian team than the winner Marino Basso’s brilliance or Merckx’s own mistakes. Over the following five weeks, Merckx had embarked on a winning spree that rekindled memories of 1969: in 33 starts, he won 22 times, very often with spectacular solo gallops like the one that brought him his second Tour of Lombardy.
Lombardy took place on 7 October. Exactly a fortnight later, Merckx was due to fly to Mexico. What his preparation lacked in time, he made up for in diligence and input from experts. The rarefied air at the velodrome, 2,285 metres above sea level, would be the main problem, as well as a potential advantage over everyone who had attempted or broken the record before Ritter. That, at least, was the opinion of Paolo Ceretelli of the Physiological Institute of Milan, who irritated Merckx by revealing several ‘secrets’ of the tests they had conducted on 12 October. ‘Eddy Merckx has a special gift for long, marathon-type efforts,’ Ceretelli said. ‘He’s in the top five out of the hundred elite athletes we’ve examined here. He can consume seventy-three cubic centimetres of oxygen per kilo per minute. Only a few Nordic skiers have gone as high as seventy-six cubic centimetres. His heart-rate is very slow, so his oxygen debt shouldn’t be too great in Mexico. He’ll lose five per cent in terms of physiological output because of the altitude, but he’ll gain around twenty-five per cent in terms of aerodynamic drag, so his average gain on what he could do at sea level will be between 12 and 15 per cent.’
The most striking stat of all pertained to how many doctors Merckx was consulting. It was at least eight, including Ceretelli; Merckx’s Molteni team doctor, Cavalli; his personal doctor Lemage and five others more or less connected with the University of Liège – Messers Petit, Pirnay, Noret, Maréchal and Deroanne. They had turned Merckx’s garage in Kraainem into an enclave of Mexico on the outskirts of Brussels. Six times a day, Merckx would ride for half an hour on his rollers while the doctors pumped rarefied air into an adapted miner’s mask covering his face to simulate the effects of altitude. If in the Agustin Melgar velodrome, Merckx would be pedalling 2,285 metres above the sea, in his garage the doctors had him riding at the equivalent of 3,600. Within four days, at the end of the sessions, his heart-rate was descending from over 150 beats per minute to under 100 within 60 seconds. Ceretelli said that Merckx’s powers of recovery were ‘exceptional’ and reckoned that ‘Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, he would break the record.’
Merckx, of course, was leaving nothing to chance. He knew that he had much to lose and little to gain. As Claudine said, ‘Beat the record and he’d stay exactly where he was; fail and he’d come home a lesser rider in the public’s eyes.’ It didn’t bear thinking about. On the Boeing 707 departing Brussels for Mexico at 4 p.m. on 21 October, he tried to distract himself by discussing his favourite football team, Racing White, with some of the 20 or so journalists on board. He also snaffled ‘an enormous chicken’, drank ‘two or three whiskies’, and polished off a police novel.
Over the next four days, some anxieties faded while others grew and multiplied. One major concern had been the Italian former rider enlisted to liaise with the Mexican authorities and prepare the track. During his racing career, Luigi Casola had been better known for japes like feeding cats amphetamine tablets than his exploits on the road. To Merckx and Van Buggenhout’s relief, though, Casola had excelled himself. The same applied to the mechanic Ernesto Colnago, who had built what some were calling the most expensive bike ever made (estimated cost: one million lire) and also the lightest (5.75kg) using high-grade duralumin, aluminium and titanium tubes.
Merckx was less enamoured with the pollution in Mexico, which he called ‘suffocating’, and the weather, which was either too wet or too windy for training on the track or the attempt itself. He had wanted to visit Acapulco before the trip home but cancelled that plan when he heard that it was tacky and overdeveloped. He was beginning to sense that the whole expedition might be cursed. ‘When I think of all the journalists who have come all the way from Europe at great expense to see me in action, and of what this adventure means to Molteni, after all they’ve invested, I’m terrified. My morale isn’t good at all. Doing ten thousand kilometres and finding the same weather here as in Belgium…’ he wrote in his Carnets de Route.
On the fourth day, finally, dawn sunlight flooded his bedroom in the Parc des Princes hotel. Doctor Cavalli did some quick checks: Merckx’s heart-rate was 48 beats per minute, his weight 75 kilograms and his blood pressure 50–125. He was good to go. After a light breakfast of toast, ham and cheese, they went straight to the velodrome and were on the track by 6.45 a.m.
At around eight o’clock, Merckx completes part one of his warm-up. The weather will hold and the record is on. Where are the official time-keepers? Merckx is edgy. He asks Guillaume Michiels for a change of underwear, and snaps when it doesn’t arrive immediately. The journalists with whom four days ago he was sharing drams and banter, he now ignores or just grunts at when they ask questions.
At 8.49, the officials have arrived. Around 1,000 non-paying spectators are banked around the trackside. The former king of Belgium Leopold and his wife Lillian are among the coaches, doctors and journalists gathered on the football pitch in the middle. The sun is now blazing. Merckx adjusts the collar of his silk skinsuit, mumbles one last unintelligible word to Michiels, then gets on his bike. There is applause, followed by a few seconds’ silence, then the snap of the starter’s pistol.
One hour and just over 149 laps later, the gun sounds again and Merckx pulls off the track. ‘Ritter 48.653.92 KMs; Merckx 49.408.68 KMs’ says the scoreboard. ‘Eddy, Eddy!’ go the crowd. ‘New world record!’ rasps the Mexican speaker.
Some had suggested that the figure in Merckx’s mind before leaving for Mexico was 52 kilometres. He had flatly dismissed this. The schedule drawn up for him by journalist and Hour-aficionado René Jacobs would have seen him beat Ritter by just 103 metres. Merckx had bettered that with a technically imperfect, aerodynamically unrefined exhibition of brawn and determination. He didn’t say it, but he appeared to have been inspired by Jacques Anquetil’s prediction after his second record attempt in 1967 that, ‘One day, someone will attack the Hour record as if it were a five-kilometre pursuit, then they’ll just carry on without dropping their speed.’
In Mexico as a pundit for the Europe 1 radio station, Anquetil was among the first to congratulate Merckx as he dropped his bike and staggered across the grass. Encircled by elation, Merckx’s face and body were still braided in pain. It took minutes before relief, not joy, finally overcame him. It was
the reaction of a man who later encapsulated his attitude to the record, his amazing ’72 season and his work in general in the following sentences: ‘My conscience is clear [ … ] There are a few more races that I still have to add to my palmarès, but I’ve completed the lion’s share [ … ] My success in Mexico allows me to look serenely to the future.’
For now, Merckx sat slumped in a chair, behind a locked door in the changing room to which only Michiels, Giorgio Albani and other members of his inner circle had access. Anquetil and his co-commentator, the ex-rider Robert Chapatte, were the only members of the media to have snuck past the police guard. There was pandemonium on one side of the door, nothing except Merckx’s groans on the other.
‘Oh, it hurts. It hurts so much…!’
Anquetil took a step closer, with Chapatte close behind him holding the microphone.
‘Where does it hurt, Eddy?’
Still grimacing, Merckx held the underside of his thighs.
‘Why? Did you not train over a full hour beforehand?’ asked Anquetil disapprovingly. Merckx responded that, no, he hadn’t.
‘You’re a real gherkin!’ Anquetil now told him. ‘I can’t believe that you managed to pull off such an exploit in these conditions! Imagine what you would have done if you’d taken the precaution of preparing properly! Imagine you’d have been ready, and how far you would have gone. It’s quite simple – you would easily have broken 50 kilometres!’
Almost as soon as he stepped off the track, Merckx had indicated that his hour in the Agustin Melgar velodrome had been the most excruciating of his career and an experience he did not intend to repeat. Initially at least, the exploit had the desired effect of strengthening Merckx’s claims as the finest athlete the sport of cycling had ever seen, before bike and in some cases medical technology blurred the historical hierarchy over the following two-and-a-half decades. Thus, the Italian Francesco Moser used blood transfusions and a space-aged ‘time machine’ to overhaul Merckx and smash through the 50-kilometre barrier in 1984. The Scot Graeme Obree, the Englishman Chris Boardman and the Tour de France stars Tony Rominger and Miguel Indurain then waged a four-way arms race in the mid-1990s, culminating in Boardman’s 56.375-kilometre ride in the elongated ‘superman’ position in Manchester in 1996. Uneasy about what now seemed more like a mad scientists’ symposium than a benchmark of sporting excellence, the International Cycling Union announced in 2000 that the Hour Record would revert to Merckx’s 1972 mark and that all future attempts must be carried out on equipment procuring no great advantage over what he had used in Mexico. Boardman immediately returned to Manchester, added 110 metres to the new-old record, and promptly retired. Five years later, the Czech rider Ondej Sosenka rode 49.7 kilometres to oust Boardman.
A supreme technician and hugely experienced pursuit rider on the track, Boardman now says that the contrast between his performance and Merckx’s merely underlines the Belgian’s talent.
‘I didn’t pay a huge amount of attention to what Merckx had done before my attempt, but I saw some footage afterwards and I was pretty impressed with the oxygen work he was doing in training. It was quite advanced,’ Boardman says. ‘Where he was ragged was when he got on the bike. His first kilometre was one minute and nine seconds, which was almost the same as what I rode when I broke the world four-kilometre record. It was just suicide. I spoke to him about it later and he just said, “Oh, I wanted to go off fast.” You go off at that speed there’s no way back. I mean, from a technical point of view, if you look at his graphs, it was appalling. That’s not a criticism – if anything, it just shows how talented he was. It’s actually a bit of a shame that he went off so fast because I think he could have gone further.’
In terms of equipment, Boardman says, Merckx was at a slight advantage, having ridden with just a leather skullcap, while the UCI insisted in 2000 that Boardman wore a full-size protective helmet. The debate about venue and altitude, however, is more complicated.
‘I’m guessing that it would have been worse at altitude, where he was,’ is Boardman’s hunch. ‘I mean, I was an hour from home and I knew exactly what the conditions were going to be. Temperature is a massive thing. Anyone who has ridden a bike will know how much it can affect your performance, if you go out and it turns suddenly hotter or colder. Then there was the wind. We looked at doing it at altitude and decided that sea level was the better way. As for equipment, if you look at the video, I’d say his pedals were roughly the same volume and the rest is pretty similar. The thing about the UCI insisting on a modern helmet did aggrieve me slightly. That cost me five hundred metres, in aerodynamics. Merckx’s position actually wasn’t too bad for a big guy. He got into quite a good crouch, maybe by accident. I think in those days the fact that they didn’t have specific time trial bikes with different bars maybe helped; he was that much more used to doing that kind of effort in that kind of position.
‘I had two very different experiences. 1996 didn’t really hurt at all – I couldn’t go any faster but I didn’t hurt. I had such fantastic form. It was just foot to the floor all the way through,’ Boardman continues. ‘But the 2000 one was just horrendous. I knew after ten minutes that it was going to be one big grovel with a sprint at the end, which is not a nice prospect. The difference compared to time trials or big efforts is that there’s just no letting up for an hour. You can’t freewheel at any point, there are no corners, no time for letting up. I couldn’t walk for four days afterwards. It was just horrible.’
In Merckx’s case, by the reckoning of Felice Gimondi’s long-time directeur sportif Alfredo Martini, it was ‘even greater than what he had done at the Tre Cime di Lavaredo’. Mexico was also, says journalist Walter Pauli, where Merckx and his career met ‘the end of perfection’.
15
sign of the times
‘I’d never seen Merckx like that before. The truth is that he was already slowing down.’ RAYMOND POULIDOR
EDDY MERCKX WAS at least a year out when, at the end of his career, he claimed that by 1974 the press and public were fed up with his reign and pining for new faces. When a precocious, sandy-haired 21-year-old from the North Sea coast began winning sprints and contending in Classics in the spring of 1973, for some the future couldn’t come soon enough. They had been here before, of course, with Roger De Vlaeminck and Luis Ocaña, but Merckx was now inching ever closer to his thirties. Meanwhile, Freddy Maertens had the air of a young Dick Whittington setting out for a land where the streets were paved with cobbles of gold.
For those who don’t already know how Merckx and Maertens’s careers continued and ended, there might be some clue on the morning of a Tour of Flanders 38 years after Maertens’s breakthrough in the same race. While Merckx strides imperiously through the crowds in Bruges’s Grote Markt, a few hundred metres away, Maertens joins the queue of journalists behind the espresso machine in the press room. Merckx wears a suit; Maertens sports a jumper. Merckx can’t walk a yard without someone yelling ‘Eddy! Eddy!’, taking a picture or chivvying a son or a nephew to ask for an autograph. Perhaps if Maertens was out there among the crowds it would be similar for him. But that’s just the point: Merckx would never be in the press room waiting for coffee. And if he was, there is absolutely no way he could stand there in his golf sweater, acknowledged only by the odd Flemish reporter who nods or says ‘Hey’, then moves swiftly on.
A day later in a café overlooking another handsome square, this one in Oudenaarde, a dozen or so women sip hot chocolate amid heated debate. Names like ‘Devolder’, ‘Nuyens’ and ‘Gilbert’ – all protagonists in the previous day’s Ronde – waft through the room with the steam coming from their cups. If this doesn’t erase all doubts about how much cycling impregnates the psyche in these parts, a 50-metre walk to the Tour of Flanders museum just might. Of all the artefacts stored here, one national treasure attracts more attention and curiosity than the rest, and it, or rather he, generally lurks in the café at the back of the building. The museum’s curator, Freddy Maertens is also i
ts star, and here no one ever makes him queue for coffee.
Merckx knew all about Maertens even before the youngster finished second in the Flanders of 1973, and Merckx was only third. That day Lomme Driessens, now in charge at Rokado, shamelessly assigned the journeyman Willy De Geest to stick like superglue to Merckx’s rear wheel for almost the entire race. Merckx went back to Kraainem that night and vented his spleen to Claudine about opponents being more interested in hindering him than winning themselves. Maertens’s performance, though, was hardly a shock. ‘I heard that Merckx had been keeping tabs on me when I was still riding as an amateur,’ Maertens says now. ‘I think he already knew or imagined then that I’d become a rival for him.’
‘When I turned pro, it was both easy and difficult. All you had to do in races was follow Eddy or get as close to him as possible, which of course wasn’t easy. That was the problem. The other one was that, while it was the smartest thing to do most of the time, by focusing on him and trying to stop him winning, you could also lose races. I saw that a lot with riders at the start of my career.’
Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal Page 24