Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (4 page)

Van Looy had ended the season with 37 victories, Merckx with nine. While others like Godefroot admit now that they were in awe of Van Looy, so much so that Godefroot initially addressed him as ‘Sir’, Merckx had never been his fanatical supporter. Yes, the first
real
professional cycling jersey he had ever owned had been a Faema kit from Van Looy’s time with the Italian team, but that had been a gift from the former rider Guillaume Michiels, a family friend who was also now Merckx’s ‘soigneur’ – Francophile cycling speak for a personal assistant. Merckx may not have idolised Van Looy, but that didn’t dilute his bitterness at how their year of cohabitation had turned out. While nine wins was a good first return, neither, it has to be said, had the 1965 season persuaded too many people that Eddy Merckx was a new king, or for that matter the new emperor in waiting.

*

Having already spent most of 1965 under the rule of one of the pro peloton’s crowned heads, Merckx almost found himself in the same invidious position the following year. At the Worlds in San Sebastian, the volatile ‘Grand Fusil’ or ‘Big Gun’ of French cycling, Raphaël Géminiani, had approached him with an offer to join him and five-time Tour de France winner Jacques Anquetil at the Ford-Hutchinson team. Fearing his manager, the volcanic Van Buggenhout’s reaction to not being consulted, Merckx had agreed in principle but stopped short of signing on the pretext that he was still nine months short of his 21st birthday and needed his father Jules’s approval. Soon Van Bug had learned of Géminiani’s overtures and was furious. He stormed into Merckx’s room. ‘You ugly monkey, you’ve gone and signed for Gem, haven’t you?’ he raged. It took minutes to convince him otherwise, and for Van Bug to calm down. Needless to say, on their return to Belgium, the idea of Merckx pairing up with Anquetil had become no more palatable, and a deal was duly signed with Peugeot and its manager Gaston Plaud in the autumn of 1965.

The choice seemed a good one when Merckx rode brilliantly at Paris–Nice in March ’66 to win one stage and finish fourth overall. If Solo-Superia adopted the same, all-for-one ethos that Van Looy had imported from Italy and Faema, Peugeot under the fine-dining Gaston Plaud was a much more ad hoc affair. In Tom Simpson and Roger Pingeon, they had two of the most coveted riders on the international scene – but neither came with the same entourage or ego as Van Looy. Had, indeed, that been the case, it’s highly unlikely that Merckx would have been allowed to shoot out of the peloton just after Capo Berta in Milan–San Remo, then win an 11-man sprint on the Via Roma to take his first major victory.

While Gianpaolo Ormezzano of
Tuttosport
, the journalist who had tipped Merckx after Paris–Nice, rubbed his hands, others in the
press-box
began a frantic forage for biographical nuggets, anything beyond the amateur world title in Sallanches two years earlier. ‘He knows Latin – so says a Flemish colleague,’ was the best
La Stampa
’s Gigi Boccacini could come up with. Naturally he didn’t check with Merckx, who would have told him that his Latin translations were in fact so ropey that he’d had to retake his exams in his penultimate year at school before giving up altogether a few months later.

What Merckx did admit was that his victory had surprised him as much as anyone. ‘I didn’t consider myself one of the favourites because I had no idea how well I could do,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know my rivals, but I’d have played my cards in a sprint anyway. I tried and it turned out well. I’m as happy today as when I pulled on the rainbow jersey in Sallanches. No, actually, I’m even happier.’

It wasn’t only the journalists who now began monitoring rather than just noticing Merckx. Fellow riders gathered information, quizzed Belgian colleagues, scrutinised Merckx in the bunch. On 9 April, he took to the start line for his first Tour of Flanders, already a marked man.

It wasn’t long before he had made a lasting impression. On the rutted, cobbled road heading out of Berchem towards Kluisbergen and on to the first
berg
or climb of the race, the Kwaremont, a filthy scrap for position ensued.

‘The cobbles there led on to a cinder cycle path, and there was always a huge fight to be near the front,’ recalls the Yorkshireman Barry Hoban, at the time a member of the French Mercier team. ‘I was in a good position when suddenly I felt something hit my back wheel. I stayed upright and kept going but then it happened again. I looked around and saw that it was Merckx. “
Passen!
” I said – pay attention. No sooner had I turned around than he’d hit me again and we all came down. He’d caused one of the major crashes in the Tour of Flanders that year.

‘You could see he was this enthusiastic young lad, but he was a bit impetuous,’ Hoban continues. ‘You wanted to pull him aside and say, “Look, lad, you’re an apprentice. Learn your trade!”’

Merckx had paid for his overzealousness with a smorgasbord of cuts and grazes and an abandonment in his first Tour of Flanders or
Ronde
. Those three weeks straddling San-Remo and Flanders would set the tone for his 1966 season: by the end of the year there were 20 wins, mainly in minor races in Belgium, moments of inspiration but also many a time when, in Merckx’s own words ‘my inexperience or ignorance was mercilessly exposed’.

At the second major Classic of the Belgian spring season, Liège–Bastogne–Liège on 2 May, Anquetil had underlined just how far Merckx needed to progress with a consummate performance, almost desultory in its power and grace. Usually uninterested in the Classics, ‘Master Jacques’ had allowed himself to be goaded by his team manager Géminiani and a remark about Felice Gimondi’s capacity to win not just the Tour de France but also Paris–Bruxelles and Paris–Roubaix. As much as Merckx would never quite understand how Anquetil seemed to pick and choose his objectives like canapés at a dinner party, it was clear later that the Frenchman’s procession in the ’66 Liège had left its mark on him. ‘I’m sure that Anquetil could have won Paris–Roubaix, the Tour of Lombardy or a world championship, with the class he had,’ he told Marc Jeuniau in the 1971 book
Face à face avec Eddy Merckx
. ‘He only needed to get annoyed one day to win Liège–Bastogne–Liège. But [winning everything] didn’t interest him. He’d decided to organise his career differently.’

At the Grand Prix des Nations time trial at the end of 1966 Anquetil would highlight another facet of Merckx’s riding, besides his temperament, that needed work by inflicting a three-minute defeat. Although undeniably powerful, Merckx’s pedalling style looked too
untidy
to be effective against the clock and the pacing of his efforts too ragged. Not that his performance in the Nations wasn’t rich with promise; third behind Anquetil and Gimondi but ahead of Poulidor and Pingeon was no disgrace. Jacques Augendre later wrote in
Miroir du Cyclisme
that, ‘A lot of observers noted, not without astonishment, that Merckx was good against the clock as well as in sprints.’

Some seemed to think during his first 14 months at Peugeot that there were other areas of the Merckx skillset that required more urgent attention. At the Tour of Sardinia, his first stage-race of the 1967 season, more than Merckx’s two stage wins, the Italian Giancarlo Ferretti remembers his crash on an unchallenging descent. ‘People had been talking him up in the press, but it was the first time I’d got a good look at him in the flesh,’ Ferretti recalls. ‘We were going down and I saw him coming, this flash of his black and white jersey, and he just went straight off the road. I thought to myself that he couldn’t be that good if he was crashing there.’

Ferretti wasn’t the only one who noticed Merckx’s vulnerability on descents. Marino Vigna, who had seen Merckx struggle whenever the road climbed in his first ever pro race, the 1965 Flèche Wallonne, now made the same observation as Ferretti when Merckx went downhill. ‘He was a bit stiff, rigid,’ Vigna confirms. Merckx certainly hadn’t been flattered by the comparison with Tom Simpson’s feline efforts while descending at the 1967 Paris–Nice. He would later admit to learning a lot just from watching his Peugeot teammate sway and slide effortlessly through the hairpins.

Italo Zilioli, who would later strike up a bond with Merckx after their brief encounter near the summit of the Blockhaus in the 1967 Giro, disputes that Merckx was ever a poor descender, but concedes that this was one area where his head could rule his legs. ‘He wasn’t the instinctive descender that, for instance, I was. When he had to
descend
fast, Eddy could, whereas I would get carried away in the moment and do things that perhaps weren’t very sensible.’

So, on that evidence, bike-handling posed Merckx no problem. What could bother him was the same anxiety which often caused him to throw up before races in his junior and amateur days, and which early in his pro career manifested itself in assorted forms of psychosomatic pain. ‘Around the age of twenty, I suffered with terrible pain in my kidney for several months,’ he revealed years later. ‘The doctors I went to see couldn’t find any cause…and it turned out to be a nervous thing. I was in the pit of despair, having put all of my eggs in the same basket and gambled everything on cycling. It was one of the blackest moments of my career.’

Fortunately for Merckx, his own prodigious physical gift was becoming irresistible to even the minor weaknesses he did possess. A susceptibility to cramps at the end of long races had also been rectified. When the familiar aches scuppered his hopes of a first professional world champion’s rainbow jersey at the Nürburgring in September 1966, Merckx had been so distraught that it took all of Jean Van Buggenhout’s powers of persuasion to coax him on to the set of
Lundi-Sports
for a live television debrief the following evening. It turned out to be a wise decision, as within hours of the programme airing, an 85-year-old viewer had called to recommend a miracle pomade that would cure his cramps forever. With it, another obstacle to perfection suddenly vanished.

For the most part, though, Merckx was creating his own luck, and was the architect of his own inexorable advance on the Felice Gimondis, the Gianni Mottas, the Walter Godefroots and the Roger Pingeons who had mistaken themselves for the next anointed ones. In an age when the first significant racing in a season took place in March, and many riders barely started training before February,
Merckx
was hardly off his bike, competing and winning on the track throughout the winter. His Belgian teammate at Peugeot Ferdinand Bracke was flabbergasted by his work ethic. ‘It’s extraordinary – he trains with the same intensity in November as in January,’ Bracke told
Miroir du Cyclisme
. ‘People come up with all sorts of statistics about Eddy, but I’d be curious to know how many hours he’s spent on his bike between races and training. I’m not far off thinking that he spends more time in the saddle than he does in his bed. This man is made of a metal tougher than steel.’

No one, though, was suggesting that all a rider needed to do was train longer and further than the rest to be the best, if indeed that’s what Merckx did. The 125 kilometres he rode on average per day, 365 days per year, were remarkable, mind-boggling. But he wasn’t the only rider covering that kind of distance. Gimondi, for one, knew and could follow the recipe of hard graft at least as well as Merckx.

No, there would have to be something else, something even beside his dauntingly powerful, God-given engine. Because even on that score, and even allowing for the fact that he was still growing in 1967, Merckx was outstanding, but not to the extent where major tour and Classics victories could be considered an inevitability. His lung capacity was at a good but not exceptional 5.9 litres, as compared with the Italian rider Marino Basso’s 6.7 litres. His resting heart-rate was in the high 30s, but everyone knew that constituted no gauge of athletic potential. His VO2 Max, a measurement of the body’s capacity to transport and use oxygen during exercise, today considered the ultimate gauge of athletic potential, was inferior to that of the best cross-country skiers. One of his most valuable endowments may in fact have been what looked like a morphological imperfection, his disproportionately long femur bones. According to Roger Bastide in his
Eddy Merckx, Cet Inconnu
, published in 1972, ‘this
creates
a longer lever, and the rider gains power, as the angle of the pedal-stroke is less open’.

Bastide, though, followed this potentially crucial information with a disclaimer: the French rider Jean-Pierre Parenteau also had long thighs and short calves, but nothing like the success of Merckx.

There was, in truth, already something very different, unique about Merckx as the 1966 season ended and 1967 began, but it remained easier to discern than define. ‘Hunger’ partially covered it, but only partially. For all his pragmatism, his champagne-quaffing and alleged philandering, Anquetil was also ravenously ambitious – but in a way that couldn’t have been more starkly juxtaposed with Merckx. Born poor, the Frenchman hoped to get rich, and realised that he could do so thanks to his one extraordinary talent: riding bicycles. ‘I was inestimably lucky,’ he said once. ‘I didn’t have to fight my way up because I became a star very quickly, but if I hadn’t succeeded, I’d have really scrapped and I’d have become a star anyway.’

At this stage still relatively little was known about Merckx’s upbringing in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, the Brussels suburb where his parents owned and ran a grocery store. Enough, though, had filtered into the public domain for most to realise that the Merckxes were now solidly middle-class, and there was no way Eddy’s motivation was an escape from poverty. Neither, it was quite clear, did money and fame occupy a prominent place in his hierarchy of needs. An old Merckx family maxim, ‘Whatever you do, do it well’, echoed permanently in his consciousness, and Merckx knew that the limelight was one place in which he could never excel. ‘I’ll admit that I’m a lot more at ease on my bike than in a lounge,’ he told Marc Jeuniau. ‘I don’t have a commercial smile. My mother already used to say that when I helped my parents at the grocery store.’