Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Was this another indicator, the faintest portent like Barcelona that, even if his opponents weren’t yet encroaching, maybe the sporting gods were closing in? The unbroken winning run in major tours dating from the 1968 Giro coincided with a six-year period during which Merckx’s longest lay-off due to injury had been the 12 days after his crash in Blois. There had been punctures, illnesses and crashes, some at crucial times, but nothing that had compromised an entire major tour or Classics campaign. History had shown that the best riders possessed an uncanny knack of avoiding such ‘imponderables’, and indeed this was one of the reasons why they took their place among the elite. What passed for luck was also, actually, often nothing of the sort. Merckx was ‘luckier’ than Ocaña, for example, because he happened to be a better bike handler in wet weather, because Mother Nature had blessed him with a more robust constitution and immune system, and in all sorts of other regards that owed more to genetic or nurtured merit than random forces. The day when Merckx’s ‘luck’ took a turn for the worse would in fact be the day when he no longer had a sufficient margin of superiority to master his rivals, the weather, the politics of the peloton, media pressure and anything else that professional cycling could throw at him. Barcelona and the positive test at Lombardy had been isolated blips, but they were harbingers of the kind of adversities that would one day overwhelm and outnumber his coping mechanisms. And on that day, if not before, Merckx knew that there would be no shortage of volunteers to dig and then dance upon his grave.

  Plenty were already toting their spades early in 1974, for Merckx’s spring was by general consensus a ‘disaster’. The first symptoms of a chest infection appeared at Paris–Nice, then kept him out of Milan–San Remo. Soon he was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. He did admirably to come back and finish fourth at the Tour of Flanders, then second behind Barry Hoban at Gent–Wevelgem. He then lined up at the 1974 Paris–Roubaix believing that he was nearly back on song, only to be eclipsed by an irresistible Roger De Vlaeminck. The next day, Merckx was told by his doctor that his lungs were not yet clear and that he must rest for another two weeks. He therefore missed Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Flèche Wallonne. Not since 1965, his first season, had Merckx finished the spring without a single Classic win.

  It was little wonder, then, that the press in Italy was already uttering that unspeakable word – ‘decline’ – when he returned to action there at the end of April. A report in La Stampa said that he was ‘agitated and insecure’ and ‘no longer himself’. The evidence? Merckx had said himself before the Coppa Placci that he was only racing to train. And Merckx never, ever raced just to train.

  In May, Maertens riled him at the Four Days of Dunkirk, where a series of on- and off-the-bike spats confirmed that their made-for-TV reconciliation the night after the Barcelona Worlds had been a PR charade. The trend of other riders troubling if not beating Merckx then continued at the Giro, which he had only decided to ride when his illness in the spring left him short of racing. Again, the main thorn was José Manuel Fuente, although it was the Italian pair of Gianbattista Baronchelli and Felice Gimondi who both came heart-stoppingly close to beating him. As in 1972, Fuente took the pink jersey at the first mountainous opportunity, on Stage 3 to Sorrento. He then won two further stages to lead Merckx by over two minutes by the halfway mark. Fuente’s fate, though, was already sealed according to Franco Bitossi; having been critical of his tactics in 1972, Bitossi now says that, maybe like Ocaña in the 1971 Tour, the Spaniard had been lured into trying to beat Merckx at his own game. ‘He’d had the pink jersey for over a week and during that time had tried to ride like Merckx and make his team ride like Merckx’s. In doing so, he had worn himself and them out completely. He then paid the price and collapsed,’ Bitossi says.

  Fuente hinted at the same thing when, in a documentary about the 1974 Giro fittingly entitled The Greatest Show on Earth, he said the rest of the peloton lost its bearings when Merckx wasn’t leading. He, clearly, had not known quite what approach to take and duly buckled on Stage 14 to San Remo.

  He won one more stage, to the Monte Generoso, but that day Merckx didn’t care about the result. Fifteen kilometres into the stage, Giorgio Albani had pulled alongside him in his Molteni team car and announced that Jean Van Buggenhout, Merckx’s long-serving manager, was ‘in great pain and has had to be hospitalised’. Merckx worked out instantly, from the look in Albani’s eyes and what he knew about Van Bug’s recent heart problems, that his old friend and business brain had died.

  Having initially wanted to abandon, Merckx struggled on, grief-stricken. If Maertens had at least contributed to his undoing in Barcelona, another member of the new generation, the 20-year-old Baronchelli, now assumed the same role. We know that Merckx was not superstitious, but there was a real risk of him crash-landing precisely where his Giro career had taken off, beneath the Tre Cime di Lavaredo on the final mountain stage in the Dolomites. Only a courageous last kilometre in pursuit of Baronchelli and Fuente under the three majestic Lavaredo spires saved him. Two days later the Giro was his…by 12 seconds from Baronchelli, the second smallest margin of victory in the Giro’s history, and 33 from Gimondi.

  Merckx’s edginess had been apparent throughout the race, not least in his constant fussing over his equipment. Faced with Merckx’s demands and incessant tinkering with the 15 bikes he had brought to the race, one of the Molteni mechanics had left the Giro ‘on the verge of a nervous breakdown and swearing that he would never work with me again’ – Merckx’s words in his Carnets de Route.

  The race had ended, incidentally, with Merckx claiming that another of his old mechanics, Ernesto Colnago, had offered him a substantial fee to gift the pink jersey to Baronchelli, something that Colnago denied. Baronchelli too naturally rebuffs the allegation, while also offering some interesting insight into how a new wave of riders was slowly dismantling the Merckx mystique.

  ‘The Colnago story is an old folk tale,’ Baronchelli says. ‘Why on earth would Merckx be selling a Giro to a twenty-year-old? Because he needed the money? Come on… As for his aura and whether I was intimidated by him in that race, I’d say you’re not scared of anyone at twenty years of age. The generation who had been riding with Merckx for years revered him and were terrified of him. I certainly wasn’t. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Gimondi and I ended up closest to Merckx in that Giro: on the one hand, you had a young and fearless guy like me and on the other you had probably the only guy from Merckx’s generation who had worked out that you couldn’t try to beat him at his own game. You had to feed off scraps. All those guys who went in thumping their chests, trying to challenge him head on, had been chewed up and spat out. It had happened to Motta, to Ocaña and to Fuente. If Fuente had waited for the last climbs in the mountains, he would have taken a Giro off Merckx, but instead he wanted to kill him by going on the first climb all the time. Merckx was maybe there for the taking but Fuente couldn’t take advantage.’

  If Baronchelli wasn’t blinded, if he could see signs of mortality, that didn’t necessarily mean that everyone would, particularly not those riders who had been tortured for years. Maertens and Baronchelli were still juniors in 1969, when Merckx created a memory that his old directeur sportif Marino Vigna said ‘terrorised’ the peloton for years thereafter. At around the same time Gimondi had learned through painful experience that trying to wrest control of a race from Merckx was akin to waking a sleeping giant. The consequences were often humiliating. Thus a pattern of resignation or submission had gradually taken root. That or just a way of racing which was hardwired for defence and, as Fuente said, left many disoriented or ill-equipped when Merckx was either absent or below his best. Maertens, Gimondi and many others had said that racing against Merckx was easy because, instead of monitoring 100 or more potential opponents, you only really had to watch him. Thus, the peloton’s rhythms became adapted to Merckx.

  Even when he did weaken, he would surely therefore have a year or two’s grace while those whom he had battered i
nto anaesthesia processed what was happening. Or if not grace, at least a time when all of the savoir faire he had acquired since Blois would make up for the fact that he was no longer quite as strong. Was this what was already happening in 1973 and 1974? Hard to tell. Certainly, though, there seemed to be a lot of truth and an element of denial in the long passage he devoted in his 1974 Carnets de Route to explaining why he was no longer wreaking such carnage in the mountains.

  ‘It’s mainly a psychological thing,’ he wrote. ‘A young rider taking on the mountains for the first time goes about it with a ferocious appetite. In the 1967 Giro d’Italia I was climbing big mountains for the first time in my life. What I did on the Blockhaus that year was the performance of a new champion who was getting to know not just the mountains but top-level cycling. The most unlikely challenges appealed to me… In 1969, my irrational exploit on the stage to Mourenx was the performance of a man riding his first Tour and needing, for the reasons you know about, to leave a fabulous mark.

  ‘If I found myself alone 100 kilometres from the finish in a Tour de France, now I would ease up,’ he continued. ‘I’d think about what lay ahead, the efforts I’d still have to make before the finish line. Five or six years ago, I’d have put my head down and plied on without thinking.’

  The problem that maybe Merckx did or didn’t acknowledge was that his ‘irrational exploits’ were central to what had made him Merckx. As Walter Godefroot remarks, what had demoralised his competitors early in his career were not his victories but the manner in which they were achieved. ‘Merckx wasn’t just winning, he was winning with panache, attacking from a long way out, dropping everyone. He was the only one who could do that. It made him seem like a different species.’ As time went on, however, his wins were looking more and more like those of a mere mortal – a superior man to the others but a man nonetheless. Previously they hadn’t been just triumphs but traumas for those on the receiving end.

  Make no mistake, it was going to be a slow process. The old tyrant still stirred. He could still dole out gifts and punishments like the cycling Almighty he remained. At the Tour of Switzerland a few weeks after the Giro, Franco Bitossi seemed doomed for an agonising near-miss when his old friend caught him 400 metres from the line in Lausanne, only for Merckx to wink in his direction and let him win.

  Alas, there was no such charity for Barry Hoban in the first week of the 1974 Tour de France.

  ‘I’d done well in the prologue, which Eddy had won, and that put me in a good position to get the yellow jersey because there were eight stages before the mountains and lots of bonus seconds on offer,’ Hoban recalls. ‘There were three hot-spot sprints on every stage with thirty seconds going to the winner of each one. So, yes, being a fast sprinter, I thought I had a good chance of getting yellow. Anyway, on the first stage in Brittany, we’re going though this village, round a corner and towards this hot-spot sprint when who should appear under my arm and beat me but Merckx. I say “Eddy, what are you doing? You’re going to win the Tour by fifteen minutes. You can give the yellow jersey away for a day or two.” He just looked across and said, in that low voice, “Yes, Barry, but it’s my yellow jersey…”’

  So Merckx was still Merckx…for the moment. Hoban and his mates still feared the worst when he was quiet in the morning before stage starts. ‘You could tell when he was on a good day. You picked up on the nuances after a while,’ the Englishman says. ‘Some mornings you’d see him at the start and say, “All right, Eddy?” and he’d be happy to chit chat. “Good ride yesterday, Barry” – stuff like that. But on another day, you’d say “All right, Eddy?” and get a grunt at most. That’s when you’d say to yourself, “Uh oh, it’s going to hurt today.”’

  They would still, also, tell and laugh at the same jokes.

  ‘We’d always say, “Let’s hope there are no roadworks today.” In France there used to be these little robots waving flags to warn you before you got to roadworks. The joke being that Eddy would attack as soon as any flag went down.’

  Hoban, though, knew that Merckx wasn’t kidding when, with the mountains behind them and victory already assured, he rode straight out of the peloton 12 kilometres from Orléans and the end of Stage 21a. ‘I’d never seen anything like it. He went right up the middle of the road. I said to my mate Gerben Karstens, “He’s not playing around.” He just rode away from the whole peloton and won by a minute and a half.’

  The same attack gave the journalist Walter Pauli one of his abiding childhood memories. ‘My dad and I always used to eat French fries for lunch on Saturday, and I can remember eating my fries and calling to my dad in the kitchen, “Merckx has won the stage!” He said, “What? How? In a sprint?” No one could believe it. But all that had happened was that someone had said he’d won the Tour with no panache, and he’d got angry. That was the real Merckx.’

  As much as his lack of panache, the critics accused Merckx of equalling Anquetil’s record of five Tour wins against a threadbare field. Ocaña, Gimondi, Fuente and Zoetemelk were all absent for assorted reasons. This left the 36-year-old Raymond Poulidor to provide the stiffest resistance and even drop Merckx by nearly two minutes on the summit finish at Pla D’Adet in the Pyrenees. ‘I dropped him every day in the mountains in that Tour,’ Poulidor says. ‘I’d never seen Merckx like that before. The truth is that he was already slowing down. On the Mont du Chat in the Alps, I left him for dead. Or so I thought. But he was still a fantastic descender, and he came back and beat us. That year he was already relying more on his head than his legs.’

  In fairness to Merckx, if at the Giro he had started short of racing, at the Tour he was hampered throughout by the leftover wound from an operation to remove a cyst in his groin four days before the start. Most riders wouldn’t even have started the Tour. Merckx finished it and won, often enduring agony. His phenomenal resistance to pain would be one of the last pillars of excellence, maybe the last, to crumble.

  The bottom line at the end of 1974 was that he was still number one. He proved it by winning a third World Championship road race on a brutally difficult circuit in Montreal, Canada. His celebration was as effusive as any in his career. Claudine watched on TV back home and told her husband on the phone that it had been the best day of her life. Even if, to others, Merckx winning still seemed routine, ‘the heaps of problems’ he had faced in 1974 meant that to him the taste of victory had never felt sweeter or more ephemeral.

  16

  knockout!

  ‘I mean, besides the fact that it was the shittiest podium presentation I’ve ever seen, it was such a shock, such an earthquake for cycling.’ BERNARD THÉVENET

  JOSEPH BRUYÈRE WAS the kind of domestique who was worth his weight in gold, all 82 kilos of him. In the 1974 Tour a few people had questioned Merckx’s team, but no one was in any doubt about the value of the rider Merckx called simply ‘mon Joseph’. Self-effacing to a fault now like he was then, even Bruyère admits: ‘In 1974, I did a great Tour de France.’

  It wasn’t just the fact that he had worn the yellow jersey on the Tour’s first ever trip across the English Channel, on the stage leaving and finishing in Plymouth. With Merckx’s limitations in the mountains becoming ever more apparent, it was vital that his teammates kept the racing in the Alps and Pyrenees under control, at a cruising pace safe for Merckx’s ageing diesel engine. Merckx had outlined the problem in his 1974 Carnets de Route: ‘I’ve never been a true climber… Counter-attacking or even responding to a real climber’s attack is impossible for me. My strength in the mountains consists of keeping a very high pace to make it very difficult if not impossible for the real climbers to attack… My tactic is simple and known by everyone: I try to keep the pace very high going uphill to suffocate my rivals.’

  Bruyère notwithstanding, if Merckx had struggled in the mountains in 1974, it was partly because his team was ageing with him. He had been challenged on this topic in an interview with Miroir du Cyclisme early in the season, and conceded, ‘It’s true that I’ve had a f
ew disappointments with young riders and so I prefer to surround myself with experienced men.’ The question that some were asking when July and the Tour came around was whether, in the same way as Merckx, riders like Vic Van Schil, Jos Huysmans and Joseph Spruyt weren’t compensating for their waning strength with other ‘attributes’. Bullying and intimidation, for example. After days of complaints that Merckx and Molteni had installed a sporting dictatorship, refusing even the most innocuous rider any freedom of movement, Joseph Spruyt overstepped the mark on Stage 16 to Pla D’Adet. Unspoken ceasefires at certain points in certain stages of the Tour were nothing new; neither, as Merckx pointed out, was it unusual for a rider who broke them to feel the wrath of the peloton. What wasn’t acceptable was the venom in Spruyt’s tirade at Cyrille Guimard after the Frenchman’s early attack, and even less so Spruyt’s punches after Guimard’s second breakaway attempt. In the ensuing controversy, Guimard wasn’t blameless himself, but still received most if not all of the public’s sympathy. He, too, saw Spruyt as a Luca Brasi-type figure, the chief heavy in a team of mobsters. ‘Mafia’ was the word that Guimard actually used. Merckx was naturally cast as its boss. While condemning Spruyt’s assault, Merckx wanted people to understand that ‘Spruyt has rarely frequented the salons of Madame de Pompadour and his vocabulary isn’t quite as refined as [the famous Belgian journalist] Luc Beyer’s.’ In other words, yes, he had behaved like a thug but that was just Spruyt. Guimard was the real villain, said Merckx. Why had he gone telling tales to Jacques Goddet and then repeated his accusations on TV?

  Even Bruyère had been whistled the next day, but then he was used to it. The difference this time was that the abuse was coming from the fans and not members of the peloton. Everyone in the bunch knew that when Bruyère loped to the front to begin his demolition derby, pain in ample doses would follow close behind. They made their displeasure heard accordingly. Thus Bruyère became the unlikeliest, most unassuming of public enemies. Had he learned to be nastier, a bit more thick-skinned, he might have been another Merckx. ‘But Bruyère could never have been a leader,’ says Walter Godefroot, ‘because when Bruyère starts to hurt he drops back immediately, whereas Merckx attacks.’ It didn’t seem to matter, either, whether the distress was physical or psychological; at the 1974 Giro, Bruyère’s performances had supposedly suffered terribly because he missed his wife.