Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Kuiper’s teammate Joop Zoetemelk had been taunted throughout the race by Belgian fans wielding giant lollipops – a snarky reference to his ‘wheel-sucking’ during the Tour de France – but that pair and Knetemann had had the last laugh. None of this trio was a superman yet their combined might had been easily enough to overcome Merckx, De Vlaeminck and Van Impe in the lead group on the final lap. As had been the case in July, on the hills, Merckx looked powerful but also uncharacteristically one-paced. As he crossed the line, Kuiper appeared almost to be beckoning with his right arm as he turned to look back down the finishing straight, as if to say, ‘Come on! What’s keeping you?’ Over the next two years, Kuiper’s Dutch Ti Raleigh team would be at the forefront of a generation that began to make Merckx and his teammates look like yesterday’s men. Ti Raleigh’s manager, Peter Post, jettisoned the all-for-one Italian model of which both Rik Van Looy and Merckx had been benefactors in teams sponsored by Faema in favour of a modern, multi-pronged and highly dynamic approach which over the next four years would bring Ti Raleigh a staggering 28 Tour de France stage victories. ‘The tactical meetings would go on for hours,’ says one Ti Raleigh rider from that era, the Briton David Lloyd. ‘Post had been forced to come up with something new, because when the team started Merckx was so strong. He was like ten men on his own, plus he had another ten brilliant riders to help him!’

  Thus, necessity had been the mother of invention, giving rise to teams, individuals and a peloton which, when the moment came, had prepared and knew exactly how to seize on and perhaps hasten his decline. As the formerly oppressed scented blood, they also sharpened their fangs and their performances. It was hard to know whether De Vlaeminck and Maertens had won nearly 60 races between them in 1975 more because they had improved or because Merckx had decayed. ‘He was perhaps deteriorating, but not much in 1975,’ reckons De Vlaeminck. ‘It was easy to say that he wasn’t as strong any more, but he was still finishing second if not first. It also coincided with my best year. I won over fifty races that season and was first or second in eighty. A bit later, Merckx became like a wounded lion: it was normal that everyone gathered around to tear off their strip of flesh.’

  As far as Maertens is concerned, ‘he didn’t really weaken in one-day races until 1977’ and indeed even Maertens at his best couldn’t prevent Merckx from winning his seventh Milan–San Remo in March 1976. ‘It was Maertens who was strong that day, but he somehow contrived to get everyone riding against him, for various reasons, whether it was stuff that he’d said in the press or that Driessens had said,’ recalls Walter Godefroot. ‘We are all looking at each other, De Vlaeminck’s there, and just before the Poggio, Merckx attacks, but we can see it’s not the best Merckx. We certainly don’t think that he’s going to win.’

  Usually, it was Godefroot warning people not to discount Merckx. But having been joined on the Poggio by a 20-year-old compatriot, Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, Merckx proceeded to wriggle clear on the descent and solo to his seventh victory in ‘La Classicissma’, one more than Costante Girardengo. ‘It was the beginning of the end,’ Merckx admitted later. It was also to be his last major victory.

  The win in San Remo fooled everyone for a while. At the Setmana Catalana a week later, there were even glimpses of a vintage Merckx until a empty lunch-bag got caught in his wheel and caused a crash with consequences nearly as grave for Merckx’s season as Joseph Bruyère’s in the same race a year earlier. Merckx’s ‘luck’ was definitely, revealingly, running out. Despite the resulting injury to his left arm, copious amounts of painkillers and sleepless nights that lasted almost throughout the Classics, he continued to threaten and scored top ten finishes at Gent–Wevelgem, Paris–Roubaix, Flèche Wallonne and in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. It was enough to convince some that he was still the favourite to win a sixth Giro d’Italia, and their faith was intact after ten days of racing. A cyst like the one that had hampered him at the 1974 Tour de France, however, now combined with more ordinary physical degeneration to send him plunging down the general classification.

  What he was losing in power, agility and reputation, Merckx at least maintained in resilience and dignity. While he toiled at the Giro, another Belgian, Johan De Muynck, looked to be closing in on victory, but De Muynck’s teammate Roger De Vlaeminck was preparing for an ignominious, ignoble exit. After one stage in Italy, Merckx saw De Vlaeminck walking past his door in the hotel that their teams were sharing and called him inside. ‘My God, I had even more respect for him after that,’ De Vlaeminck says. ‘He showed me this wound that he had in his groin. It was as thick and deep as a finger. I couldn’t understand why he was carrying on.’

  Soon, indeed, De Vlaeminck would be leaving, apparently for no other reason than he couldn’t bear to see De Muynck win the Giro, and certainly wouldn’t contemplate helping him. According to another teammate, Ercole Gualazzini, somewhere near Calamento, halfway up the Passo Manghen, De Vlaeminck climbed off his bike then, inexplicably, ran straight into the dense forest lining the road and hid from his directeurs sportifs. They, De Muynck and Merckx were disgusted. On the penultimate day of the race, whether out of sympathy, patriotism or just plain decency, Merckx waited for and effectively saved De Muynck by pacing him back to the bunch after a fall on the descent from Zambla Alta into Bergamo. Sadly for De Muynck, it proved to be in vain as the 33-year-old Felice Gimondi narrowly overhauled him in the time trial deciding the outcome of the Giro the following morning.

  Merckx’s eighth place represented his worst finish in a grand tour since the 1967 race but was a testament to his courage. True, Molteni had offered him financial incentives to stay in the race, but as at the Tour a year earlier it was Merckx’s stoicism that had kept him going. Whether riding through the pain had been sensible or not was another matter. When, a year or two earlier, his father Jules had suffered a heart attack, Merckx pleaded with him to heed the warning and scale back his hours in the family grocery store in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. Jules had responded with a shrug; the urge to work was more powerful than he was. Merckx tried to protest but knew deep down that he felt exactly the same.

  When he was in his twenties and his body’s ability to repair and regenerate was still miraculous, his appetite for racing and winning had been his greatest strength. Now the coin had flipped and it became a weakness, as the pressures remained the same or even increased while his resources diminished. His least favourite parts of the job had always been the ones demanding his attention off the bike, and since Jean Van Buggenhout’s death during the 1974 Giro Merckx had sometimes felt overwhelmed. Claudine took up some of the slack, but even she admitted that Van Bug’s passing ‘left a void’. Her husband may no longer have been the pedalling deity he once was, but he remained, for example, the man that journalists turned to for a reaction and teammates for a new home when Molteni left cycling in disgrace at the end of 1976. It would perhaps be too harsh to say the company owners’ arrests were in keeping with Merckx’s declining fortunes, but their exit certainly left a putrid taste. It wasn’t the first time that the Molteni brothers had been in trouble with the law; never before, though, had they been accused of exporting ‘sausages’ which were actually just plastic wrappers pumped with manure and dumped at sea in an elaborate smuggling ruse.

  What Merckx was supposed to know about any of this, nobody stopped to ask. The fact was that the Molteni brothers’ fraudulent gains had been paying Merckx and his domestiques’ salary, and there was now no Van Bug to find a replacement. Merckx would end up signing for Raphaël Géminiani’s new FIAT-France team and taking old faithfuls like Joseph Bruyère, Jos Huysmans, Roger Swerts and Frans Mintjens with him. ‘He was still as motivated as ever,’ Bruyère affirms. ‘That was one thing that never changed. Even in 1977, he thought he could win every race he entered. Unfortunately he was like a car that had been pushed to breaking point, driven over the speed limit for more than ten years. The engine was completely worn out.’

  Before the end of 1976, he had done another patriotic good t
urn by helping Maertens to win the world road race championship in Ostuni, Italy, despite their feud still festering. Merckx himself was fifth, and sporadic flashes like this added to his conviction that another Tour de France or at least ‘one more big one’ was within his grasp. Always the most straight-talking member of his entourage, Van Buggenhout might have nipped his self-deception in the bud. As it was there were plenty, like his father-in-law Lucien Acou, who would assure anyone prepared to listen that Merckx the Cannibal was on temporary not permanent leave. ‘Just you wait…’ Acou would say, and wait everyone including Merckx did, or at least tried to. Patience had never been his forte in races, and at times now he turned himself into a sad caricature of the rider he had been, precisely the ‘shipwrecked, stranded sailor clinging to the buoy of his former glory’ that he had vowed never to become.

  At the ’77 Tour of Flanders, he seemed to want to teleport himself and his fans back to the summer of ’69, but instead all he did was make them wince. His slow suicide began the moment when he creaked clear of the peloton 140 kilometres from the finish and ended about an hour later when he was passed and left for dead by young tyros like Maertens and even older yet more successfully aged veterans like Godefroot. Friends in the peloton watched him and grimaced. ‘I would try to talk to him whenever I saw him in those last couple of years,’ says Franco Bitossi. ‘I’d say, “Eddy, you know, you were so much better than us before that maybe you didn’t have to make the same sacrifices as us. Perhaps you have to change some things. Race a bit differently. I don’t know…” He’d just blankly nod his head, but I never got the impression that he was really taking much notice.’

  Another old friend, Christian Raymond, says that the nickname that his daughter Brigitte had coined years earlier now ‘caught up with Merckx’. ‘Even if he always rejected the nickname, he wanted to be the Cannibal right to the very end,’ Raymond says. ‘He was convinced that the 1975 Tour was just a mishap, a blip, but it wasn’t: it was a sure sign that he was on the decline. I always got on great with Eddy, both during and after his career, but I have to say that he was stupid to carry on after 1975. He’d always told me before that he would give up at age 30, so why didn’t he?’

  Hennie Kuiper is no doubt right when he confirms that Merckx’s ‘problem’ had once been the very cornerstone of his success: his pure love of the sport and of winning.

  ‘He seemed OK from the outside but I think on the inside it was tough for him,’ Kuiper says. ‘Years later I was a directeur sportif for a team which used Eddy Merckx bikes, and I can remember asking him, “Eddy, why did you do so many races?” He said that he just loved riding his bike so much. Which of course was fantastic for the sport. These days the Tour de France is so huge that a rider’s season is judged on that and maybe a couple of Classics. Back then Eddy felt as big a responsibility to perform in a little criterium as he did in the Tour, because people were paying to go and watch him. He was angry when Greg LeMond came along later and only started focusing on the Tour. It wasn’t the riders’ fault, it was just the way sport had turned into a business. If you look at Eddy’s palmarès, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he won Milan–San Remo, which comes at the start of the season, seven times, and the Tour of Lombardy, which comes at the end, only twice. He probably would have won Lombardy seven times if he wasn’t so exhausted by his racing when he got to October. If he’d maybe given himself a couple of months’ break in the middle of the season, like riders do now, he perhaps could have won two more Tours de France.’

  As far as Merckx was concerned, all hope of extending his and Jacques Anquetil’s record of Tour de France wins to six still wasn’t lost when he set off for the 1977 Grande Boucle. At the start of the Tour, even People magazine in the United States was ladelling his ‘comeback Tour’ with hype, and quoted Merckx vowing once again that, ‘When I abdicate my throne, it will be in full glory – I’m not made to be second best.’

  A bout of glandular fever had in part mitigated a wretched spring, and he seemed convinced, or at least tried to convince everyone else, that he was starting to rekindle his old sparkle. Aided by a route that barely skimmed the Pyrenees, remarkably, he maintained the illusion for 15 stages and was 25 seconds from Bernard Thévenet’s yellow jersey on the cusp of the only two, truly difficult Alpine stages on the route. But on Stage 16 the next day, under the imposing silhouette of Mont Blanc, Merckx’s limitations were brought abruptly into focus on the Col de la Forclaz. Having sunk out of the top ten of general classification, he then drowned completely on the Col du Glandon 24 hours later. His ascent of Alpe d’Huez was among the fastest in the field, a rally in some ways as gutsy as his ride to Marseille the day after Orcières-Merlette. But it was less the rise of a phoenix than the final, desperate flap of a bird whose wings had been clipped by age and his ceaseless determination to rule the skies.

  On returning to their hotel room on the Alpe that afternoon, having himself finished outside the time limit, Merckx’s teammate Patrick Sercu says that, ‘I looked in the mirror, saw my sunken face and decided then and there that it was time to call it a day on the road.’ Sercu, though, had won three stages and in some ways, at 32, was riding as well as at any time in his career. A year his junior, Merckx was really the rider with nothing left to give. His performance in the Alps had been affected by food poisoning, but surely that wasn’t the only excuse for him finishing 13 minutes behind the leaders on the Alpe. Merckx didn’t care. Sercu remembers, ‘The next morning, while I was packing my bags, Eddy was already saying “Just you wait and see, next year…”’

  Sure enough, having claimed all year that this would be his last season, his last Tour, he now called Claudine to inform her that, no, he wanted to come back and leave the Tour with a bang in 1978. ‘Everyone at the Tour thinks that Eddy Merckx has suddenly gone crazy,’ wrote Cesare Diaz, not mincing his words in La Stampa in Italy. Nothing of the sort, said the accused: ‘I can’t leave the people, my fans, with a memory as ugly as my Tour this year. Once again, I’ve lost the Tour because of an illness, not through my own fault, against riders who I still believe that I can beat.’

  If his sixth place overall in Paris, over 12 minutes behind Thévenet, didn’t pull the wool from his eyes, finishing dead last in the 1977 World Championships in Venezuela perhaps should have. Again, it was admirable that he had kept going, just as there had been lessons about his respect for himself and his audience in an unblemished record of starting and concluding 15 major tours (excluding his disqualification from the ’69 Giro). Nevertheless, it can’t have escaped Merckx that riders born before him, but subjected to different self-inflicted and external pressures, were still competing and winning.

  Felice Gimondi was the oldest swinger in town at 36, yet still had kept pace with the youngsters to finish 11th in Venezuela.

  ‘I lasted a couple more years than him at the highest level, but I never had the workload, either physical or psychological, that he had,’ Gimondi says. ‘As far as racing was concerned, it was more the way he raced than the amount. Whether he was in Belgium, France, Germany or Italy, he took his aura with him, but also the immense pressure on his shoulders. That must have taken its toll. Sometimes I was in awe of that, as well. He had that for ten years. And I think it got him down in a similar way to the effect that he had on me. I think we all have a certain pool of energy and resilience, but there’s only so much ball-breaking you can tolerate. You explode.’

  From his first-floor lounge in Izegem in West Flanders, Patrick Sercu can look back today and say that in the end his old friend, teammate and Six-Day partner Eddy Merckx ‘exploded psychologically and not physically’. Merckx signed contracts for no fewer than 14 Six-Day meetings in the winter of 1977 to 1978, perhaps because without Van Bug his arm was too easily twisted. He certainly hadn’t considered that FIAT fully expected him to retire at the end of 1977 and wouldn’t be interested in accommodating Merckx and his teammates in 1978. That, though, was what they told him, and what FIAT president Lorenzo
Cesari announced at the Grand Prix des Nations at the start of October. This left Merckx with the monumental task of finding an existing team prepared to absorb him and his entourage or a new backer, all while honouring his track commitments. Within a few weeks, he had lined up the razor manufacturer Wilkinson, the team’s new jerseys had been designed and everything including the riders were in place. Patrick Sercu was with Merckx when the deal was signed at the Six Days of Zürich at the end of November – and vividly remembers hearing the news that Wilkinson had changed their minds on 12 December. Perhaps it would have been better for Merckx at this point if everyone went their separate ways, but the loyalty of men like Bruyère and De Schoenmaecker left him under the moral obligation to come up with an alternative. Christmas came and went, Merckx was still searching and racing frantically, and the outlook was still bleak until he attended a Standard Liège–Anderlecht football match in January 1978, then went to dinner with a director of the clothing firm C&A the same evening. Twelve days later, his new C&A-sponsored team was unveiled to the press in Brussels. Merckx’s big objective, he said, was the Tour de France.