Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal

by Daniel Friebe

  ‘Eddy was a great footballer!’ Van Himst says with no hesitation. ‘He could strike a really good ball and he had great vision. Of course as you can imagine, his movement was a bit stiff, not like a normal football player. His muscles, after all those years of riding a bike, weren’t adjusted to it. But he was good.’

  Paul Van Himst, like Joseph Bruyère, is known to be a master of understatement, so it is no surprise that neither of them uses the word ‘depression’ when describing those first few weeks and months of Eddy Merckx’s retirement. The diagnostic criteria of that illness are, in any case, as hotly debated as its causes. What most psychologists would agree is that rumination is a significant risk factor, and there wasn’t a soul who knew Merckx who didn’t also know that he was a worrier. Lack of purpose is also often cited as one germ from which depression can burst forth. ‘Depression is the inability to construct a future,’ said the influential existentialist psychologist Rollo May – and he could have been talking about Eddy Merckx in the second half of 1978.

  Merckx’s first Tour de France as a directeur sportif for C&A convinced him that this couldn’t be his second career. The autumn was approaching, he still seemed lost, and Claudine was worried. ‘His retirement was so different to how I imagined it would be,’ she said in an interview in September. ‘The climate at home has changed completely. We have stumbled into a vacuum, into a void, the tension and the hellish pace of life, unique to competition, has fallen away totally. I miss that, more than I could ever have feared. It’s been hard for me to get used to.’

  Merckx called the same period ‘horrible’. The more he tried to embrace freedom – the parties and indulgences that a cyclist wasn’t allowed – the worse it felt. He said later that he ‘knew he was doing some stupid things’ and that ‘the danger comes when you’re not self-aware and you think that’s what life is’. What exactly he got up to, however, neither he nor anyone else ever revealed in public.

  The limbo lasted months, until a conversation with one of his old mechanics and framebuilders, Ugo De Rosa, from Milan. It was March 1979. ‘Why don’t you get into this business? Start making bikes?’ De Rosa suggested.

  At first Merckx just smiled, but the seed had been planted. There was one thing that he loved nearly as much as cycling, and that was bikes. Once at the start of his career he had totally dismantled one just so that he could count the pieces, ‘for fun’ he said. Now he spent six months studying the art of the master framebuilder, often travelling to Milan to watch De Rosa at work. By the start of 1980, he had bought disused farm buildings formerly owned by his business adviser Freddy Liénard in Meise, just north of Brussels, and made plans to convert them into a factory and a new family home. With De Rosa’s help, he then started buying up equipment. On 28 March the factory was officially opened. Among his first employees were former teammates Jos Huysmans and Edouard Janssens and his old directeur sportif Bob Lelangue.

  Thirty years later, the Eddy Merckx bike brand is firmly established among the most prestigious in the world, with an annual turnover of around six million euros. However, Merckx relinquished a majority stake in the company to the investment group Sobradis in 2008.

  Money was certainly never his motivation, for all that he was believed to have passed the equivalent of one million euros in earnings around 1974. ‘He wouldn’t know or care how much money he has in his account,’ says a friend, the journalist Hugo Coorevits, echoing something that Claudine has often said in interviews. She, incidentally, was ‘fifty per cent of Eddy’s career’ by Coorevits’s reckoning. ‘Claudine was everything, the PR person, the manager, the accountant, the mother – she was everything. Now they have created ten positions to do what she did,’ he says.

  Sometimes, however, Merckx has had to rely on people other than his wife, and sometimes he has regretted it. Thus, the first major scandal of his retirement arose just nine months after his bike company opened for business, when he was charged with committing tax fraud. It had nothing to do with the factory, was apparently his adviser Liénard’s fault, and the full details never emerged. The sum involved was too small to warrant an arrest but, in one way or another, with legal fees and so forth, Merckx said that it cost him ‘earnings equivalent to several racing seasons’. That and considerable embarrassment; at a bicycle trade fair where Merckx was exhibiting months later, the Belgian Prime Minister Wilfried Martens refused to shake his hand.

  There would be other minor controversies, some relating to cycling, others not. In 1988, the Flemish television network BRT aired a documentary about the Second World War which connected Merckx’s birthplace, Meensel-Kiezegem, the Merckx family name and the touchy issue of collaboration with the Nazis. Merckx was incensed, later protesting that the only collaborators in his family were cousins of his father, and pointing out that he had been given the middle name Louis in memory of a maternal uncle who had been captured by the Nazis and never returned. Memories of the war were so painful, he said, that it was a taboo subject in the Merckx household when he was growing up.

  On the whole, though, there was little appetite for muck-raking. Criterium audiences had plummeted within a year or two of Merckx retiring, as the press and public slowly realised that there would be no Merckx redux or even pale equivalent any time soon. What popularity cycling had started to lose was gobbled up by football, with Belgian clubs Anderlecht and Club Brugge suddenly among the best in Europe and the national side reaching the final of the European Championships in 1980. With a few years’ hindsight, Merckx’s era in Belgian cycling began to take on the glow of exactly what it had been – an unrepeatable golden age. Instead of thriving, the men who for years had looked or made out as though only Merckx blocked their path to a cycling Eldorado also plateaued or floundered. De Vlaeminck carried on winning Classics – but only really for a couple more years. Freddy Maertens had all manner of problems, from financial to personal, and says today that ‘only the best wife in the world saved me’. He won another World Championship in 1981 but not too much else. Johan De Muynck finished fourth in the 1980 Tour de France and got slaughtered for it. De Muynck, who of course Merckx had nearly salvaged when De Vlaeminck went AWOL in the 1976 Giro, had once looked at Merckx and seen a ‘recluse’ trapped by his own popularity and lust for success, and his teammates held captive with him. De Muynck was not envious. Now, though, with Merckx gone, he and others found themselves in their own form of confinement, with Merckx’s ghost their cruel jailor.

  So, no, against this backdrop, it came more naturally to celebrate Merckx than to scrutinise or forget him, with the odd exception. In 2004, the extra kilograms that he had gained since the end of his career seemed to disappear overnight, and Merckx had to deny claims that the reason was a form of cancer or cosmetic surgery. The real explanation, he said, was an operation on a long-standing and hereditary stomach problem that had caused a hernia.

  ‘The Belgian press wasn’t interested in his private life, and even if they knew they wouldn’t write anything negative,’ says Walter Pauli, once of De Morgen, now with the Belgian news magazine Knack. ‘We have so-called tabloid press but by British standards it’s very mainstream. Het Laaste Nieuws is a “tabloid”, but when Merckx was a rider the journalists from that paper would eat out of his hand and lick his shoes clean.

  ‘As a human being…Merckx is a human being. He is not a saint,’ Pauli goes on. ‘He was treated like one from the age of 21 – and after that you almost have to be superhuman to be human, extraordinary to be ordinary. You have to be bigger than bigger than big to be beyond that kind of adulation. Other guys from his generation, like Patrick Sercu and Walter Godefroot, are smarter, have more experience in life. If you lose, you have an experience. Merckx also has the experience of losses, but for the others it was also a kind of reality. For Merckx, it wasn’t reality – it meant that something was wrong if he lost a race. It wasn’t normal. The rest of us win some, we lose some. But with Merckx there was always an excuse, always a reason. It never just was. In 1968, Herm
an Van Springel beat him in the Tour of Lombardy, and Merckx said to him, “Herman, today you were the best.” Van Springel started remonstrating with him, “No, no, it’s impossible. You were the best, Eddy.” You see even when Merckx has these moments of clarity, there’s always someone to reassure him that he’s the greatest.’

  If the trend has continued since his retirement it is also, undeniably, because some of Merckx’s most attractive and long-hidden qualities, particularly his warmth and humour, have risen slowly to the surface, above his natural shyness and suspicion. Gianpaolo Ormezzano, who has covered more Olympic Games as a journalist than anyone on the planet, and met more sportsmen than most, says that his enduring image of Merckx is of a laughing fit on the podium of Paris–Roubaix, and not his victory that day or any other.

  ‘He saw me running and said, “Hey, Senatore, you’re running well. You’ve lost weight!” I told him that it was because of these herbal diet pills I’d been taking, but that unfortunately they were also giving me diarrhoea. “Well, they’re working. You’ve lost weight,” he said. I said, yeah, I had shifted a few kilos – but only because of all the running I was doing to and from the toilet. He couldn’t stop giggling. He almost toppled off the podium.’

  Attributes that once Merckx manifested only in flashes now shine more brightly, so much so that Godefroot says, ‘he can seem like a different person’. That was no doubt how he appeared to Luis Ocaña, once his bitterest enemy, when before Ocaña’s death Merckx helped him find Belgian distributors for his Armagnac. The former French rider Raymond Riotte says that he had relatively little contact with Merckx during his career, but that Merckx still helped out Riotte’s friend with bikes for his amateur team a few years ago. When the friend didn’t settle his debt, Riotte was mortified, but Merckx told him it was no big deal. ‘He was always a gentleman, even as a rider. He would always return any favours,’ Riotte says.

  Mainly now, the riders he once infuriated rhapsodise about what they gained, not what they lost, from having him as an opponent. The cycling press at the time often made unfavourable comparisons with his predecessors, but no pundit worth his salt could today argue that Merckx’s palmarès doesn’t dwarf that of any other rider. Lance Armstrong won seven Tours de France, two more than Merckx, but these were his only major tours. The score in one-day Classics (including Gent–Wevelgem and Flèche Wallonne) and world championship road races is Armstrong three, Merckx 30. Merckx indeed won twice as many Classics and road race world championships as Armstrong and the five-time Tour winners Jacques Anquetil, Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain combined. Purely in terms of panache, bravery and tactical inventiveness, Merckx also far outshone any of his fellow nonpareils apart, perhaps, from Fausto Coppi. ‘Cycling in Merckx’s era had a touch of the old and a touch of the modern about it, but what he was doing seemed to belong outside any time frame,’ says the former Italian national coach Alfredo Martini. For Barry Hoban, quite simply, ‘Merckx reinvented cycling.’

  Presumably for these reasons, Merckx was voted the best sportsman in the world three times in the early 1970s, and finished second only to Michael Jordan in one poll to elect the greatest athlete of the millennium.

  ‘He’s not only the greatest rider of all time but the most important sportsman of all time, in any discipline,’ argues Giancarlo Ferretti. ‘In football there was Pelé but there was also Maradona. In tennis there was Borg but there was also McEnroe. There hasn’t been anything remotely like Merckx in cycling.’

  This is also, Ferretti’s former teammate Gimondi says, why headlines like the Corriere della Sera’s ‘Merckx first, Gimondi beats the rest of the world’ after the 1971 World Championships in Mendrisio were the source of pride, not indignation.

  ‘Today, I look back and I’m glad that my generation and I had Merckx,’ Gimondi says. ‘I’d have won more without him there, earned more, but life isn’t just about money. The respect, the rivalry, the memories…they’re all more valuable. Even three million euros more doesn’t have the same impact on your life as that stuff, some of the battles I had with Eddy.

  ‘We were friends, but it was a beastly rivalry,’ he goes on. ‘I never actually got depressed but it was like being beaten with a stick, time after time. He could be cruel, Eddy. People in my family would tell you – he never let me win a race. Never. His engine capacity was superior to ours, he could change pace a lot more easily than I could – he could go from a hundred and twenty heartbeats per minute to two hundred in the blink of an eye. He was faster. There was nothing you could do. And on top of it all, there was this great determination, this application, this rigour. He didn’t just have God-given talent. It was that plus his temperament, his character, his determination. Everything he did, he did with amazing rigour. Where did the hunger come from? Some people have cycling in their heart. It’s in your DNA. You can be born here or there, in this family or that family, but that’s the bottom line. The passion burns inside.’

  Gimondi’s bitter rival, Gianni Motta, regrets only that, ‘When Merckx was reaching his peak, I was on the way down because of my blasted left leg. I would love to have fought against Eddy at my best. He was determined, nasty on the bike, clever and strong. He’d been built to ride a bike.’

  Even the one surviving rider who according to the Belgian journalist and broadcaster Marc Uytterhoeven ‘never accepted Merckx’s superiority’, Roger De Vlaeminck, today acknowledges that his was an unwinnable crusade. In 1986, Merckx began a ten-year stint as the coach of the Belgian national team at the World Championships in Colorado Springs, and De Vlaeminck and Merckx found themselves renewing hostilities on what was supposed to be a friendly pre-Worlds trundle with VIPs. At one point, Uytterhoeven found himself riding next to and chatting with De Vlaeminck when all of a sudden The Gypsy broke off mid-sentence to ask whether they couldn’t carry on the conversation a bit later. ‘Look, there’s Merckx, five positions ahead of me. I can’t have that,’ he called over his shoulder to Uytterhoeven as he sped off up the road.

  Today, though, De Vlaeminck admits that Merckx was ‘just more talented than me’ and a ‘fabulous athlete’. So fabulous, in fact, that De Vlaeminck chose ‘Eddy’ as the name of his son born in 2000.

  Such is De Vlaeminck’s esteem for Merckx, you will no longer even hear him bragging on behalf of his hero Rik Van Looy that Van Looy won every Classic, including Paris–Tours, which eluded Merckx. Merckx and Van Looy themselves still have a complicated relationship, alternating periods of rapprochement with murmurs of the old rancour. Merckx was touched when Van Looy attended his mother’s funeral in 2009 (Merckx’s father, Jules, had died in 1983), and they occasionally bump into and eat together at official functions. Merckx, though, seems the one more inclined to forgive and forget.

  Merckx’s son, of course, ended up becoming a successful professional cyclist in his own right. In his teens, Axel had seemed destined for the football career that his father would have pursued, he said, if he hadn’t been a cyclist. One day, though, when he was injured, Axel decided that he would rather try cycling. The legend goes that he scrawled, ‘I want to give up football’ in lipstick on a mirror in his parents’ bedroom. The reality was slightly different – he left a letter in the bathroom – but it amounted to the same thing. In a decade-and-a-half spent riding for some of the world’s leading teams, and unfortunately coinciding with the most scandal-laden chapter in cycling history, he won 15 races and an Olympic bronze medal in 2004 in Athens. His best result in the Tour de France was a 10th place finish overall in 1998. Théo Mathy, the old TV journalist and family friend, put these achievements nicely in perspective: ‘When he started racing, kids would fight tooth and nail to beat him in a sprint for eighth place. Frankly, I never thought he’d become a professional. To make it, he must have had an amazing head on his shoulders. What’s amazing is that he accepted the situation. He never knew whether he was getting offers because of who he was or who his father was.’

  As of 1996, when King Albert II made his father one o
f around 300 titled barons in Belgium, Axel, his mother and sister also became part of a noble lineage. Already a ‘Cavaliere’ of the Italian Republic, in December 2011 Eddy Merckx received the even higher honour of ‘Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur’ from French president Nicolas Sarkozy at the Palais de l’Élysée in Paris. On receiving his medal, the man who once detested lounges and awards ceremonies smiled boyishly, his mother might have said even ‘commercially’. Who knows, perhaps Eddy Merckx would have made a decent green grocer after all.

  epilogue

  ‘Come on, can we go? Let’s go. Can we?’

  Eddy Merckx looks and sounds restless. His fingers are wrapped tightly around his handlebars and carbon dioxide is spewing from his nostrils into the chilly November air. Either side of him, Jos Huysmans, Jos De Schoenmaecker, Roger Rosiers, Herman Van Springel and their bikes stand in perfect alignment, blocking the right-hand lane of the road, but their heads are turned to face each other and their gloved hands act mainly as props to add humour or emphasis to noisy banter. Two or three minutes ago, Merckx was in the line and in the thick of the jokes, but now he positions himself a few paces ahead of them on his own – Roger De Vlaeminck would probably say like the lone striker ahead of a four-man midfield.

  ‘Can we go yet? Let’s go…’

  De Vlaeminck, by the way, is also here, instantly recognisable in a different, dark-blue jersey from the rest. Like a libero he lurks slightly behind and apart, and he also looks noticeably younger and leaner than the others, even if it’s them who were up at dawn to ride 40 kilometres, and De Vlaeminck who has just unpacked his bike from his car. A few minutes ago, another big, silver saloon like his pulled into the town square in Erps Kwerps, where 1960s and ’70s Belgian cycling royalty is assembled. Walter Godefroot got out, and now moves up the line shaking hands. In September, at his house in Nazareth near Gent, Godefroot explained that he was recovering from a heart operation. When his friends ask now why he’s dressed in a suit, and not lycra, Godefroot points to his throat. ‘I’ve got a bit of a cold. The doctor says best not, after the operation…’