Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  Instead of relief, Merckx being Merckx, he now felt a daunting responsibility to repay C&A’s faith. It didn’t matter what anyone said, there was always a reason to keep on training, keep on racing and, in Merckx’s deluded imagination, to keep on winning. He fell ill, again, at the team’s training camp in the south of France, but was soon back on the bike and finishing fifth in the Tour du Haut Var in the hills behind Nice. Merckx was relieved and delighted with the result; suddenly, losing wasn’t a drama but cause for quiet celebration. And if that wasn’t evidence that the Cannibal was nearing or had already sat down to his last supper, the world wouldn’t have to wait much longer.

  18

  a spoonful of sugar

  ‘Did he have some product that others didn’t have access to? That’s the eternal question.’ CHRISTIAN RAYMOND

  WITH THE BELLS about to toll for the greatest career that professional cycling had ever seen, it was natural that in 1977 and early 1978 thoughts were already turning to Merckx’s legacy. At first glance, there appeared to be nothing to debate, only to admire. The statistics said, and had been saying for years, that Merckx was just that: the greatest.

  Sadly, however, a Classics campaign unbefitting his name and palmarès wasn’t the only stain added to Merckx’s gilded endowment in the spring of 1977. For the third time in his career, at Flèche Wallonne, he had tested positive for a banned substance.

  If twice was a coincidence, three times was starting to look like a pattern. Yes, as on the previous two occasions, at Savona in ’69 and Lombardy in ’73, there were caveats and conspiracy theories; no, as had been the case on those two occasions, the advantage procured cannot have been significant. But the blemishes remained – three asterisks that were part of the Merckx patrimony, like his 500 victories, plus the questions that would now legitimately outlive him about how many of those had been achieved with artificial aid.

  On this occasion there at least seemed to be little doubt that Merckx was guilty, as were Freddy Maertens, Walter Godefroot, Michel Pollentier, Willy Tierlinck, Karel Rottiers or Walter Planckaert, all other illustrious victims of what was immediately dubbed the ‘Stimul affair’. For Godefroot and Maertens it was a case of déjà vu; in 1974, the then Flandria teammates had both tested positive for a previously undetectable class of stimulant, piperidines, unaware that the Gent professor Michel Debackere had secretly developed a method of tracing the substances in urine.

  In 1977, Godefroot and Maertens were on different teams and a different kind of stimulant, Stimul, of the pemoline family. The drug could be used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy – and heighten alertness and concentration in athletes, while attenuating feelings of fatigue. Again, the same professor, Michel Debackere, the same top-secret research and this time an even weightier catch of major names within a fortnight of each other in 1977, including the biggest fish of all, Eddy Merckx.

  To say that Merckx didn’t contest the charge would be inaccurate. At the time he claimed that he had ‘never heard of Stimul’ and ‘no longer believed in dope tests’, despite declining the ‘B’ test to which he was entitled. The idea that he was oblivious to the drug’s existence struck Debackere as implausible for a simple reason: three years earlier, the effects of Stimul had been the subject of Merckx’s brother Michel’s thesis at the end of his degree in medicine at the l’Université Libre de Bruxelles. Not only that but once Merckx had finally admitted his guilt years later, he also suggested that, in his opinion, Debackere had become interested in Stimul and suspicious that Merckx was using it the moment he got wind of Michel’s research. ‘I’m convinced of this,’ Merckx told the journalist Joël Godaert.

  To anyone not familiar with how cyclists down the ages had been almost as adept at shirking moral responsibility as pedalling their bikes, it would have come as a surprise to hear the incriminated parties slamming Debackere for his conniving, or bemoaning their misfortune. At the time only Walter Godefroot was honest enough to admit that ‘Ninety per cent of riders take Stimul’, but even that sounded like a way of discharging the blame. Merckx told Godaert, but only two decades later, that ‘the riders who weren’t caught that year were lucky’ and was adamant that Stimul was ‘no magic potion’. Both points probably contained large elements of the truth. Nonetheless, and despite support for the guilty parties from the public and the press, the scandal highlighted the extent to which the riders’ ethical paramaters differed from the ones to which they were supposed to adhere, the ones laid down by the list of banned products.

  The start of Merckx’s career had of course coincided with the very first of those dope controls that he claimed by 1977 had lost all credibility. In reality, the war on drugs in cycling had come a long way since the first official tests at the French national championships in July 1965, and the first at a Tour de France and a World Championship the following year. Given what we have already said about how cyclists would gladly discredit any measure they saw as an encroachment on their freedom or popularity, some of their horror stories about those primitive first tests should be treated with caution, but perhaps not blanket distrust. Although himself caught three times between 1967 and 1972, the 1968 Tour winner Jan Janssen admits today that action to combat doping was necessary to ‘stop second-tier riders doing these sensational performances, then the next day finishing half an hour down’. Nonetheless, Janssens maintains, the testing conditions could be alarming. ‘One day you had to piss one way, the next day another way; one day with a doctor, one day without,’ he says. ‘Also, there was a certain doctor on the Tour de France who everyone had concluded was a pervert! He thought it was great fun to see naked bike riders. Oh yes, he’d be kneeling right down in front of you holding the bottle when you gave the urine sample…’

  Merckx never complained about this particular ‘breach’, but he did propose several others to justify his positive test in Savona in 1969. After the uncertified mobile laboratory, the unauthorised B-test, then the possibility of swapped samples, with time Merckx appeared to settle on sabotage as the explanation for what remains the murkiest of his three transgressions. In more than one interview since his retirement, he has blamed but refused to name a particular individual who, Merckx has said, ‘bows his head when I see him’. ‘I know what happened. I know who spiked my water bottle,’ he told the journalist Gianpaolo Ormezzano in 1982. ‘There is someone who, when they see me, has to hide in the next doorway or behind the next corner.’

  At the time, Janssen and a few others other apart, most of his peers sympathised, just as they do now. Rumours still flourish about former teammates knowing ‘the real truth of what occurred in Savona’, but those individuals, like his roommate in Italy Martin Van Den Bossche, feign ignorance or refuse to answer when pressed. The same warped solidarity, the omertà or law of silence which only now is fracturing in the modern peloton, still reigns among riders whose last race was in the 1970s or even ’60s. ‘A couple of years ago, I did a fantastic four-way interview with Godefroot, Herman Van Springel, Merckx and Sercu, the generation of 1965, but as soon as I broached the subject of doping, they started coughing and looking at the floor,’ says Walter Pauli, the former De Morgen cycling writer.

  Pauli says that his predecessors in the Belgian media had a similar attitude to doping as Merckx and the riders with whom they shared hotels, dinners and often friendships. Their feelings were encapsulated in a euphemism which became de rigueur in the reporting of positive tests in the Flemish press: the rider had taken some ‘forbidden candy’. In fairness, it was hard to take doping seriously when the authorities clearly did not, at least if the sanctions were any gauge. A meagre time penalty of 10 or 15 minutes, a one-month ban or sometimes just disqualification were the judicial equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Whether the sentence was intended to fit the perceived crime or unfair advantages, including financial, that substances like stimulants were supposed to bring – or whether the authorities just felt that they had to do something, implement even meagre dete
rrents, with substance abuse becoming ever more rampant and dangerous – only the men in power could really know. Either way, the tests were too little, too late to uproot a culture of indifference and complicity which far pre-dated Merckx and would persist when his career ended.

  It bears repeating: it was hard for riders in Merckx’s era to take doping seriously, or even get upset about one rider being more medically ‘enhanced’ than another, when officialdom did not. It is often erroneously stated that attitudes to doping changed only after Merckx’s heyday, when syringes, so-called ‘heavy doping’, took the place of tablets similar in appearance if not composition to what professional riders had been ingesting since the first Tours de France. Thus, ‘forbidden candy’ and its purveyors were overtaken by evil needles and shady Svengalis who could alter not only the outcome of races but also upend the hierarchy of the sport. Only then did drugs in cycling become such a moral hot potato, and with good reason. This interpretation, though, is flawed: as discussed in an earlier chapter, Gastone Nencini was injecting hormones and morphine even before Merckx turned professional. It would also be disingenuous to suggest that stimulants ‘wouldn’t have permitted you to win Paris–Roubaix’, as Merckx has said about Stimul. If there was no benefit, who would have subjected himself to the sleepless nights that Merckx claimed were the drug’s most potent effect? Merckx took many of his 525 wins by kilometres rather than centimetres, but he of all people knew that the most meagre advantage could be the difference between victory and second place. Even Jacques Anquetil, who never concealed his opposition to dope tests, admitted that ‘doping can turn a mule into a thoroughbred race horse’. No, both then and now, the Merckx generation’s ambivalence about doping is mainly a result of the fact that they were never truly held to account, never received punishments proportionate to sometimes game-changing misdeeds, and had been steeped in a culture too old and established to revolutionise its view of doping just because it had become actionable.

  Where Merckx would be correct is in thinking that almost no one, either then or now, would argue that his superiority was the product of the laboratory. By 1973, he had been subjected to over 500 dope tests and by 1977 had lived and won consistently through 12 seasons and two big breakthroughs in testing technology – Debackere’s development of a test for pipedrines in 1974 and pemoline in 1977. In theory, Merckx could have been taking pemoline with impunity for years, but if that was the case, no, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that 90 per cent had been doing the same, at least since pipedrines became detectable in 1974. Over half of the riders (52 per cent) who started the 1977 Tour de France had, after all, tested positive or would at some point in their career, despite the fact that only frequent winners were regularly summoned to give samples. By doing so they had proved that most would take any advantage that they could get – and certainly that using banned substances posed them no great moral dilemma.

  The same riders would surely have no qualms whatsoever about products and methods that weren’t yet forbidden – unless that is they posed dangers to their health. Merckx told Rik Vanwalleghem in 1993 ‘the conventional medical supervision you received in cycling scared me off a little’ and Ormezzano in 1982 that he ‘always had a terrible fear of certain products, a fear greater than the temptation to try them’. Presumably this applied to cortisone. That is, if Merckx was aware, on starting his career, of the ruinous long-term effects that surely outweighed the hormone’s pain-numbing advantages. Evidence of cortisone use on the Tour de France was first uncovered in 1960 by the assistant race doctor Robert Boncour, but it wasn’t until 1978 that the International Cycling Union added it to their banned list, and not until 1999 that a detection method was finally ratified. Perhaps the real landmark moment, though, also came in 1978 when Bernard Thévenet, none other than the ‘tombeur de Merckx’, admitted in France Vélo that three years of cortisone abuse had wrecked his health to the point where he was ‘no longer capable of getting on a bicycle’. The treatments dispensed by Peugeot doctor François Bellocq had helped Thévenet to win two Tours de France, but also ravaged his adrenal glands. Of course there was no question of Thévenet losing his Tour titles because at the time cortisone use was legal.

  Speculation about Merckx and the same substance had appeared years before Thévenet’s mea culpa, but was seemingly based on flimsy evidence. One of the known side-effects of prolonged cortisone use is severe bloating and weight gain, and Merckx’s expanding waistline (Ormezzano in 1982: ‘Eddy Merckx has put on weight. He’s in danger of ending up like a football’) in his post-retirement years led some to conclude that he had used the drug, despite all Merckx’s claims to the contrary. This is precisely what former director Jacques Goddet was getting at in an interview with the Sport ’90 magazine in 1992. ‘I remember that Merckx put on a couple of kilos in weight when he retired,’ Goddet said. ‘Not that cortisone was a banned substance in those days, it’s just that the famous always have trouble coping with the first signs of decline. It is a very difficult time for many athletes, and it explains why so many of them look for artificial ways of seeing them through their problems.’

  Merckx told Rik Vanwalleghem that the comments betrayed Goddet’s long-standing prejudice against him. ‘When I won the Tour for the fourth time in a row I can remember the way the Tour organisers celebrated it with a forced sense of merriment. They had had enough of me, they were afraid that I might ruin everything for them. I think it is very small-minded of Goddet to attack me in such a way so many years later.’

  If Merckx could claim that personal animosity was driving Goddet, he would certainly say the same about Freddy Maertens. Maertens admitted in an interview with Eric De Falleur of Vélomédia in 1987 that he had used cortisone during his career ‘but only on medical advice’. He then added, ‘From time to time you need that kind of thing, otherwise why would it exist?’ This was all a prelude to Maertens claiming that he was ‘far from the only one’.

  In the past Maertens has also, incidentally, made accusations against two prominent members of Merckx’s entourage, Guillaume Michiels and Gust Naessens. Maertens alleges in his autobiography that Belgian drugs police searched Michiels’s home in 1984 and found amphetamines. In the same book, he writes that at the World Championships in Montreal in 1974, Merckx’s masseur Naessens spiked his water bottle with a substance that brought Maertens’s challenge to an abrupt and painful end. ‘The culprit admitted it… His name was Gust Naessens; he was the physio for Eddy Merckx at the time and later became my personal soigneur. He can’t confirm the story himself any more as he died a couple of years ago, but he did admit to me that he had put something into my bottle that day to enable Merckx to win the rainbow jersey for a third time without any problems.’

  When talking about himself, if the robustness of the omertà was in any doubt, Maertens is capable of rebuffing even claims of doping that have come from his own mouth. Asked now to confirm what he said in an interview with La Dernière Heure a few years ago about having taken amphetamines in ‘small races’ throughout his career, Maertens purses his ample lips and asserts, ‘The press made that up. I never said that. I never took amphetamines.’

  There is, it’s true, one prominent contemporary of Eddy Merckx who seems delighted when anyone mentions dope tests. In his kitchen in Kaprijke, Roger De Vlaeminck grins as proudly when you remark that he was one of the few active riders in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s never to have failed a drug test as if you had just told him that a democratic vote of everyone who ever saw The Gypsy and Eddy Merckx on a football field had unanimously confirmed that, yes, he was by far the better player.

  ‘At the Tour of Flanders that I won in 1977, the second and third riders were both positive. But if you don’t take anything you can’t be caught!’ De Vlaeminck says triumphantly.

  In his first season as a professional, with the Flandria team, De Vlaeminck claims that he rode the Tour de France ‘without even a vitamin’. In that 1969 Tour De Vlaeminck says that he went ‘three days withou
t even a bottle’ and ‘certainly had no team doctor’, unlike Merckx who was already under the care of Enrico Peracino with the rest of the Faema team. Things only seriously changed for De Vlaeminck, he says, when he also moved to an Italian team, Dreher, in 1972.

  ‘There we had Doctor [Piero] Modesti, and I used to take the vitamins that he used to give me,’ De Vlaeminck says. ‘There was also a masseur who said, “You have to take all this.” I looked and his hand was full of tablets. “This is for the heart, this is for the lungs…” but I said, “No, keep it all.” There was a lot of cortisone at the time, and amphetamines…but not in Italy. In Italy you were always tested. In Belgium there were a lot of amphetamines. At my time, in Italy, no one took anything. They spoke to me about blood transfusions. When I was riding for Francesco Moser [in 1984], they asked whether I wanted to give half a litre of blood to put in the fridge. I said no…’

  De Vlaeminck has just dropped a small bombshell. Unfortunately he realises, and realises that we have realised. ‘Who asked you about blood transfusions? Moser?’

  ‘I can’t say. I didn’t see anything.’

  ‘Was it Moser who asked you?’

  ‘I didn’t see anything…’

  The association of Moser with blood transfusions is actually not news. It is a well-known fact, admitted by Moser, that he used this then legal if highly dangerous and effective method of performance enhancement to break Merckx’s Hour record in 1984. The revelation here would be the Italian proposing the same ‘treatments’ to teammates like De Vlaeminck, at a time when few would have imagined that so-called ‘blood-doping’ could be any more than a few mavericks’ crazy experiment.

  The truth of course is that blood transfusions were already being used to devastating effect in endurance sports in the early and mid-1970s, when Merckx was in his pomp. In the late ’60s, one of cycling’s great pharmaceutical pioneers, Jacques Anquetil, reportedly took to visiting what the journalist Roger Bastide said was a ‘luxury clinic’ every winter for an ‘exchange transfusion’. This consisted of replacing a large quantity of blood with an equal amount of compatible donor blood, supposedly to remove accumulated toxins. If in theory this technique had no significant effect on performance, the same could not be said of the transfusions used by Finnish distance runners in major athletics championships from the beginning of the 1970s, which increased the volume of red blood cells in the body and hence its ability to pump oxygen to the muscles.