Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (3 page)

Years later, in an early glimpse of the anxieties that could gnaw at Merckx, he would reveal that this had been his own greatest fear on winning the world amateur road race title in Sallanches in 1964: he would turn pro and then sink without a trace. He feared the different speed, the longer distances of pro races, their reputation for violent
and
unexpected changes of pace, so unlike the cruising speed of most amateur competitions. Claudine, whom he had begun to woo within weeks of that 1964 Worlds win, watched apprehension threaten to overwhelm him.

The truth was that Merckx’s problems in his first professional year would come mainly off the road. They began when he signed for Rik Van Looy’s Solo-Superia team. This had been his manager, Jean Van Buggenhout’s idea. An accomplished track rider in the 1930s, ‘Van Bug’ had reinvented himself as the burly, bespectacled big kahuna of Belgian cycling, some said its most powerful man. He was part agent, part promoter and, says Patrick Sercu, ‘part dictator – absolutely terrifying’. He was also undeniably passionate about his sport, and had been immediately struck by the same quality in Merckx when they became acquainted in a brasserie opposite the Palais des Sports in Brussels in 1963. The previous day, Merckx had claimed victory in his first ever stage race, the amateur Tour de Limbourg. ‘The way you talked to me about the race that day won me over. You sounded like a young man full of fervour,’ Van Bug told Merckx years later. Needless to say, when Merckx became amateur champion in Sallanches, it was Van Buggenhout who acted as his agent, and who went on to fulfil that role for the next ten years.

On the face of it, Solo seemed the ideal place for Merckx. He was, after all, already being tipped as the new Van Looy. But therein lay the problem: as far as Van Looy was concerned, there would never be another Rik Van Looy, let alone a younger and potentially even better version in the same team. The Belgian cycling journalist and Merckx expert Walter Pauli says that this is because one word summed up, and still sums up, Van Looy: ‘Pride’. It came from his modest upbringing in Herentals, in the far north-east of Belgium, a region of which Walter Godefroot remarks with a smirk ‘the people
are
the most intelligent in Belgium…they say so themselves’. It came also, though, from Van Looy’s uncompromising character, which had been sculpted like his extraordinary calf muscles as he hauled newspapers around Herentals as a teenager. Van Looy’s early successes as a cyclist, including back-to-back Belgian national amateur titles, had then hardened his conviction that the very zenith of professional cycling was where he belonged. The condescending nickname ‘Rik II’ – and the inference that Rik Van Steenbergen remained the original and best of Belgium’s post-war cycling superstars – merely reinforced that belief still further. His other moniker, the Emperor of Herentals, would soon more accurately reflect a palmarès bejewelled with every one of cycling’s one-day Classics, and sit snugly alongside its owner’s reptilian smile.

Van Looy’s jealousy was, then, the brew resulting from many more or less organic ingredients. As is often the case with sportsmen, his pride and passion had also inspired the same fervency in his followers, which in turn fed Van Looy’s own vainglory. Says journalist Walter Pauli, ‘If you were Van Looy, you never left Van Looy, even when Merckx arrived. My grandmother, for example, was a die-hard Van Looy fan. He was mythical, he was strong…but he was also a very bad character.’

‘Bad’ or understandably frustrated, having warred for years with Van Steenbergen, finally outlasted him, then seen the nouvelle vague of Belgian riders threaten to engulf him. Moreover, early in 1965, Van Looy was still blissfully unaware that he was about to embark on his final season as the finest one-day rider in Belgium and probably the world. Supported by his now legendary ‘Rode Garde’, the ‘Red Guard’ which had first formed in his Faema days and which some still describe as cycling’s first true sprint train, Van Looy was in no mood to make way for or groom possible heirs. The closest he came to endorsing a
young
rider was faint praise for Godefroot – who happened to be riding for another team, Wiel’s-Groene Leeuw. Today, Godefroot is emphatic about why Van Looy and the Rode Garde didn’t welcome Merckx. ‘It’s very simple,’ he says. ‘If I’d been a footballer, I’d have been a midfielder: I’d have been in the middle of the park, controlling the game. But Merckx is the guy putting it in the net. Van Looy too. As a super-champion, you’re not a good teammate. You’re a bit selfish, a bit individualistic. It’s not your fault; it’s the reality…’

He continues, ‘Van Looy is the king, the “Emperor” as we say, and Merckx is the king in waiting. So of course there’s a battle. And two clans form: the Van Looy clan and the Merckx clan. Some people in Van Looy’s team are even in the Merckx clan. And you see it in races, even in the fight for bonus sprints. It lasts three or four years. And the public loves it, because it’s war between Merckx and Van Looy and war between their fans.’

For all that, to some, it could seem there was much to dislike about Rik Van Looy in his twilight years, no one doubted either the bike racer he had been or the cunning old lizard he remained. While others cocooned themselves in denial, were blinkered by their own youthful ambition, or simply weren’t paying attention, Van Looy had one beady eye permanently trained on the surrounding seas. It can’t have been long before he noticed a stirring in the waves.

‘Bikers are bikers, pros are pros,’ says Walter Pauli. ‘Van Looy could see what was coming, he could smell it. I’m sure of it…’

If that was true, the ‘Emperor’ appeared determined to revel in his own equivalent of the last days of Rome, winning his third Paris–Roubaix in 1965 even before Merckx had officially joined the Solo-Superia ranks. The amateur world champion would make his professional debut on 29 April 1965, in the Flèche Wallonne or
‘Walloon
Arrow’. The first half of the Ardennes double-header climaxing with Liège–Bastogne–Liège, Flèche is now known primarily for a mazy route through the wooded hills of southern Belgium and especially its grandstand finale atop the brutally steep Mur de Huy. ‘Back then it was a very different race,’ notes one of Britain’s best riders in the 1960s and ’70s, Barry Hoban. ‘It was renowned more for the cobbles and tramlines in the town centres than for its hills. It was all about the rough roads.’

Given Merckx’s reputation as a fast-finishing, bulldozer of a rider, there could have been no more hospitable venue for his professional premiere. But as Hoban points out, ‘In Britain, we put amateurs on a pedestal. In Belgium an amateur is just that. It doesn’t matter if you were a world champion. Their attitude is, “You’ve not done anything yet”.’

Nonetheless, everyone in the peloton had heard of Merckx, most had seen him win his amateur World Champion in Sallanches the previous year, and many a neck was craned to catch a first glimpse of the new
wunderkind
. Many, though, would also be underwhelmed. In one quiet moment early in the race, the Belgian Emile Daems rode alongside his Peugeot teammate, the Italian Marino Vigna.

‘You see that kid over there,’ Daems said, nodding towards an eager-looking, raven-haired figure in a scarlet Solo jersey. ‘That’s Eddy Merckx. He’s going to be a champion.’

Vigna was, naturally, intrigued.

‘I kept an eye on him after that, and I saw him struggling, going backwards in the peloton whenever the road climbed,’ remembers the Italian, who three years later would become Merckx’s directeur sportif. ‘He looked too big, too muscular to be good going uphill.’

Merckx would argue that there were other reasons for his huffing and puffing, and for his abandonment well before Roberto
Poggiali
beat his compatriot Felice Gimondi in a sprint to the line. Merckx had punctured early and, he claimed, lost too much energy in his futile chase to rejoin the leaders, or indeed to compete in Liège–Bastogne–Liège two days later. The Classic known as
La Doyenne
was promptly scratched from his race programme.

Merckx was present in the Rocourt velodrome for the Liège finale – but as a spectator. He saw the sallow, sunken cheeks of the 34 riders who managed to finish and told himself he’d been better off on the sidelines. Nine days later that decision was vindicated: in Vilvoorde in the northern suburbs of Brussels, Merckx prevailed over his old training partner Emile Daems, the man who had pointed him out to Marino Vigna in Flèche Wallonne two weeks earlier.

It was Merckx’s first professional race win. The first of 525.

If Rik Van Looy’s internal sonar system had been humming before, it’s fair to assume that it was now bleeping with some urgency. Vilvoorde would also be the venue for the 1965 Belgian national championship road race, to be contested on 1 August. Van Looy had worn the black, red and yellow jersey awarded to the winner of two previous occasions. This year the Emperor had a further incentive: it would be his first major race with, or rather, against Merckx.

Technically speaking, of course, the pair were riding for the same Solo-Superia team. When Godefroot attacked in a dangerous group almost from the gun, however, Van Looy seemed either impervious to or quietly amused by Merckx’s growing state of alarm. ‘I identified more with Godefroot than Merckx, who got too easily wound up,’ Van Looy would admit years later. Sure enough, on this day, he ensured that Merckx got very agitated indeed by abandoning mid-race, without warning or explanation. It was left to Merckx to almost single-handedly bridge the gap and in doing so ride headlong into
the
trap laid by Godefroot and his Groene Leeuw teammate and future brother-in-law Arthur Decabooter. Decabooter jumped, Merckx pursued him, and Godefroot tootled in his wheel. Godefroot, a faster sprinter on almost any day or finishing straight, duly had too much zip for Merckx when Decabooter was caught. It was a sting that Godefroot would try to reprise on many occasions over the course of his career, always to Merckx’s immense frustration when it came off.

And so Merckx’s difficult initiation continued. Since the spring, Merckx claimed later, Van Looy had been showing his indecorous true colours as he led the Red Guard not only on the road but in their taunts. They had christened Merckx ‘Jack Palance’, after the Hollywood star who had played Attila the Hun in the movie
Sign of the Pagan
. It sounded innocuous, but Merckx later admitted that the constant mockery was ‘really hurting’, despite his best efforts to ‘make it look as though it was all washing over me’. Van Looy’s speciality, on a par with his sprinting, was his sarcasm. Whether it was Merckx’s fondness for rice pudding or his meek ripostes to the put-downs, everything he did was ripe for ridicule. ‘Van Looy knows exactly how to tease someone…for Merckx it must have been really humiliating,’ Jos Huysmans, one of the mainstays of what later became Merckx’s own inner circle, told the journalist Rik Vanwalleghem.

On the bike, too, Van Looy sometimes appeared to relish the role of the cruel cartoon villain. ‘The Tour of Flanders used to start in front of Gent’s Sint-Pieters station, and it would be mayhem,’ says Barry Hoban. ‘You’d be going at thirty miles an hour through the neutralised zone, then Van Looy would get the Red Guard on the front and go vroooooom on the Gent ring road and for ten kilometres until the first cycle path. Then Rik would swing over and have a good laugh. The French didn’t even know the race had started.’

As the ’65 season wore on, though, privately, Van Looy perhaps feared that Merckx had the strength if not the repartee to expose his waning potency, and so responded with even more venom. In August, they competed in their first stage-race together, the four-day Paris–Luxembourg, and Merckx outrode him. The younger man was third in one stage and second in another, while Van Looy and the Red Guard were notable by their absence at the front of the race. At the dinner table in the evening, the roles reversed as Merckx did his best to remain inconspicuous and indifferent to the sneers coming from the other end of the room. Again, that is what Merckx claimed; how much of it was good-natured raillery, and how much genuine unpleasantness, Van Looy has never truly cleared up. Either way, it was during one of these meals that Merckx made up his mind: he would tell Van Bug to find him another team for the 1966 season. Van Looy and his cronies ‘would never be my friends’, Merckx reflected in the 1974 autobiography
Eddy Merckx, Coureur Cycliste, Un Homme et Son Métier
. At the time he said that Solo felt to him like ‘Van Looy’s family business’. After just one season, it was therefore time to focus solely on beating, rather than joining, the man who had lorded it over cycling in Belgium for ten years.

After one stage in Paris–Luxembourg, the president of the Belgian Cycling Federation Arnold Standaert had taken Merckx to one side and asked him to promise that, if selected for the Belgian world championship team in San Sebastian, he would do nothing to sabotage Van Looy’s chances. Merckx was bemused, but reassured Standaert. In the race won by the Englishman Tom Simpson, Van Looy went on to abandon, Roger Swerts to claim a bronze medal for Belgium and Merckx to finish his first world championship in 29th place.

A few days later, at a circuit race in Zingem, the men who had made up the Belgian squad in San Sebastian were bundled together
for
a belated team photograph. The resulting image, of eight riders spread across the start line, is both a neat bookend to Merckx’s year with Solo-Superia and a tantalising snapshot of Belgium’s national sport on the eve of its revolution. At either end of the frame, two at least nominal servants of the Red Guard, Bernard Van De Kerckhove and Ward Sels, stand upright and unsmiling, the Solo-Superia logo on their torsos thrust forward; dead centre is the fair-haired Walter Godefroot in his Belgian national champion’s jersey, cool and unflustered as a riverboat rambler; to Godefroot’s left, we see a frowning Jos Huysmans, a grinning Roger Swerts, then the 20-year-old Merckx, more boy than man, but with both hands clamped firmly on the handlebars and eyes, brow and shoulders squared to the camera. To Godefroot’s right, Van Looy perches on his bike’s top tube, facing Merckx and the others with his body and fixing something or someone to the left of the camera with his glare. If Van Looy exudes confidence, Merckx’s hunger burns through the lens.