Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (19 page)

‘My daughter asked me why Merckx always had to win, and I tried to explain that it was normal, because he was the best rider. She went quiet for a minute, then looked at me quizzically and said, “Well, then, he’s a real cannibal…”. I liked that name, “The Cannibal” straight away, and mentioned it to a couple of journalists that day. They, evidently, liked it too.’

Merckx was poised to live up to the new moniker and win the time trial into the old Cipale velodrome when, suddenly overwhelmed by the noise coming from the track, he almost rode straight past the entrance and into the crowd. The next few seconds, as he regained composure to win the stage by nearly a minute and the Tour by close to 18, would be and forever remain, by his own reckoning, the sweetest of his career. After a kiss from Claudine, one from mother Jenny and another smacker from Driessens, Merckx thanked
his
teammates one-by-one then joined them for a lap of honour. ‘Eddy, Eddy!’ chanted 25,000 spectators. The Faema ensemble circled the track two or three abreast with Merckx and Driessens, riding the special yellow street-bike he’d had prepared for the occasion, waving to the crowd on the front row.

In Belgium, special trains had already been chartered, and would ferry thousands to greet the hero in Brussels the next day. In previous Tours, the Walloon radio reporter Luc Varenne hadn’t even been allowed a press motorbike; before the 1969 Tour, sensing the nation’s excitement, his bosses had laid on an aeroplane.

At just gone nine o’clock French time
Apollo 11
prepared to make its landing on the moon. Belgian state TV would be blessed with a pundit
par excellence
, having scheduled a double video link-up – one to Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon’s surface and another to Merckx in a studio in Paris. Unfortunately, Jean Van Buggenhout had forgotten to pass on the message, and Belgium’s most popular citizen was celebrating with its Prime Minister and his teammates in a restaurant on the other side of town. Merckx’s friend, the TV journalist Théo Mathy, was dispatched to find him, a terrifying slalom through the Paris traffic ensued, and Merckx finally arrived on set, like a superhero, having cleaved his way out of a broken elevator.

‘One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind…’ said Armstrong.

If Savona had supposedly marked the Belgian public to an equal degree as the assassination of JFK, TV and radio networks were now faced with an on-the-spot dilemma: for some, if not all, Merckx was the first news item and events in outer space the second.

The following day, what seemed to Merckx like the entire Belgian population congregated in Brussels to see the prodigal son return
and
ride through the city in an open-top car. He and his Faema teammates were then received by King Baudouin and Queen Fabiola at the Royal Castle of Laeken. With tears in his eyes, Merckx presented Baudouin with one of his yellow jerseys from the Tour before the gathering moved inside.

‘It was a quiet thing,’ recalls Martin Van Den Bossche. ‘The king asked us a couple of questions: were you thirsty, that kind of thing. We were there about two hours. Then the queen asked whether everyone there was married. I was the only one who wasn’t, so she wished me a lifetime of love and prosperity. After that they started handing out cigarettes. I was the only one who really smoked, but only cigars, so they went to get cigars with the royal crest on them. I got two. After that it was thank you, thank you, thank you and goodbye.’

down and out?

‘I looked at the blood coming from Merckx’s ear and thought that it was over for him, that he was a goner.’
R
AYMOND
R
IOTTE

THE ROUGH TRANSLATION
is ‘full throttle!’, the literal meaning more convoluted and cryptic. All that matters for now is that Claude Lair keeps saying it, over and over…

‘
A fond la caisse! A fond la caisse!
’

Lair is talking about a different crash from the one we’re in Blois to relive, but this clearly doesn’t faze him. And neither should it. As athletic and up-and-at-’em a 77-year-old as you’re ever likely to meet, Lair is explaining that our car is approaching the spot where the American David Zabriskie fell and lost the yellow jersey in the first week of the 2005 Tour de France. As he does so, he breathlessly interrupts himself with assorted observations on the topic that for the last seven decades has quite clearly been his
raison d’être
: cycling.

‘
A fond la caisse! A fond la caisse!
He was coming down here, down here…there’s the château on our right, the Château de Blois… Oh no, you must never stop cycling!
Never!
Never stop! I do 300 kilometres a week. We do 90 kilometres in three and a half hours! Three and a half hours! So he’s coming down here, Zabriskie, the American,
à fond la caisse
! Then, hup, on that manhole cover! Down
he
goes! Down he goes! The yellow jersey, on the floor! It was there,
there
, not where the newspapers said the next day…’

But like Lair, we can’t stop. Moments later we’re crossing the Loire on the Pont Jacques Gabriel – ‘there are three bridges in Blois! Gabriel, De Gaulle and Mitterrand!’ – and bearing down on our final destination, the real reason for our visit. Given that the previous night he had been racing in Brittany this, in all likelihood, is also the route that Eddy Merckx and his soigneur Guillaume Michiels took out of town and towards the Pierre Tessier velodrome on the afternoon of 9 September 1969. It was going to be a post-Tour track meet, a night like any other.

At least so they thought.

Claude Lair was in the velodrome that night, as he had been hundreds of times before and has been maybe thousands since. Shortly he’ll be standing on the spot where he heard the clatter of bodies and bikes.

‘It wasn’t just the worst crash I’ve ever seen, it was the worst crash there’s ever been,’ he says, his characteristic vim draining from his voice. ‘Awful, just awful.’

Merckx couldn’t say that Jacques Anquetil hadn’t warned him. Twice. First about the toll taken by the second tour of France, which began immediately when the first one ended, and consisted mainly of mammoth drives across the country followed by a circuit or track race in the evening. When it wasn’t France, it was Belgium. The races were traditional, they were lucrative and they were also more competitive than the rigged costume balls that later became the norm, and were inevitably won by the most popular rider. ‘Yah, it was a real race,’ says Patrick Sercu, Merckx’s track partner and teammate at Faema in 1969. ‘They were only 80, 90 or a 100 kilometres, but it was serious.
A
lot of the peloton wasn’t getting a wage, or a very small one, so they had to make their money in the criteriums. You were on the max from the first lap to the last.’

With a sizeable slice of Merckx’s appearance and prize money going to Jean Van Buggenhout, it was clearly in Van Bug’s interest to accept as many offers as the calendar allowed, and so he set Merckx a punishing schedule. Between the end of the Tour de France on 20 July and his appearance in Blois on 9 September, Merckx rode a staggering 36 criteriums. On 17 August, while Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young performed at Woodstock, Merckx raced in the afternoon in the Dordogne and in the evening in Moorslede in Flanders.

The races on home soil, and the volume of the Merckx supporters there, were the best possible barometer of how Merckx’s popularity had now definitively outstripped Van Looy’s. Numerous and intense, they also served as the ideal theatre for some of the pair’s final, bitter and bloody conflicts. Two days after the Tour, no more than a kilometre from the family grocery store in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Van Looy enraged Merckx by leeching his back wheel on the pretext that he was ‘dead’, then rocketing out of his slipstream to beat the Tour champion in the closing metres. Three days later, in Denderleeuw, the rivalry reached its zenith, or possibly nadir, when Merckx dropped off the back of the peloton and allowed both himself and Van Looy to be lapped in protest at the ‘Emperor’s’ perpetual wheel-sucking. ‘You dirty old goat!’ Merckx screamed at him, his patience finally snapping. Both were given suspended eight-day racing bans for their ‘insufficient appetite to race’. This only made Merckx hungrier in Rijmenam the same afternoon. With Van Looy again ensconced in his slipstream, Merckx produced a rabid performance, sprinting into every corner until Van Looy was unhinged.

Quite how anyone, and more precisely the Belgian selectors, thought the pair of them could dovetail in the national team at the World Championship in Zolder two weeks later is beyond comprehension. The ovation reserved for Merckx was, if anything, even more magnificent than the one he had received in La Cipale at the end of the Tour. That was at the start of the race. When Van Looy’s Dutch Willem II-Gazelle teammate Harm Ottenbros won in a breakaway to cause one of the biggest upsets in World Championship history, Merckx rode off the course 500 metres from the line to avoid the boos. Earlier in the race, staying onside with the fans and preventing Merckx from winning had appeared to be Van Looy’s only objectives. ‘Whenever Merckx accelerated, Van Looy jumped on to his wheel. But he did it very smartly, immediately, so that the fans didn’t notice and start booing,’ revealed the Italian Vito Taccone. While Merckx took refuge in a hotel and refused to speak for 90 minutes after the finish, finally emerging to say that Van Looy had been his ‘worst enemy’, even Lomme Driessens was speechless. ‘What Van Looy did doesn’t merit any commentary,’ he said.

Naturally, Merckx was soon back to his winning ways, including at Châteaulin in Brittany on 8 September. That night, as was often the case after criteriums and particularly this one, the drink and the camaraderie flowed at a banquet laid on by the race organiser. A legendary
bon viveur
even in his Tour-winning days, Jacques Anquetil was in the last weeks of his career and completing his final lap of honour around France in a daze of demob happiness. The one arena in which Anquetil could still give Merckx a run for his money, he felt, was in the bar. He took Pingeon to one side before the meal and winked towards Merckx. ‘Let’s see if the young lad can take a drink,’ he whispered. After several glasses of champagne, one or three of white and red and multiple invitations to ‘Have another one, Eddy’,
Anquetil
was leading the woozy congregation towards another marquee where more whiskies were waiting. Round one had been equal on points, Merckx was still standing steady, and the bell sounded for round two.

More whisky. Doubles now. Through the booze-addled blur, what looked like a photographer. The flash of a camera, a lunge by Anquetil, the sound of a lens smashing on the floor, a slur of expletives, and finally the intervention of Anquetil’s wife Janine. She had stopped both fights; Merckx had won his by technical knock-out. Janine now took her husband by the arm and headed off in the direction of their hotel, while Merckx rounded up Pingeon, Lucien Aimar and Jan Janssen and went in search of food. Pingeon was now semiconscious, or at least thought he was dreaming when Merckx ordered a bowl of onion soup liberally topped with grated cheese, a breast of chicken, then an enormous steak. The tales of Merckx’s elephantine constitution and invincibility in eating and drinking games were apparently true.

The following day, needless to say, Guillaume Michiels and Merckx enjoyed a calmer and more clear-headed journey through Brittany and into the Loire Valley than the Anquetils. With the nausea rising through his stomach, Jacques reached for the door handle and instructed Janine to pull over into a grass verge. The next noise wasn’t Anquetil retching but the door smashing into a signpost. If Anquetil had a headache before, now he was in pounding agony.

Anquetil’s second warning to Merckx came an hour or two later in Blois, once the crowds had started to congregate in the Pierre Tessier velodrome and with them the clouds overhead. Anquetil had ridden on the same 285-metre outdoor velodrome in an earlier meet in May, alongside Walter Godefroot among others. ‘This track is narrow, so let’s not ride more than two abreast at a time,’ Anquetil
now
instructed his five opponents for the night, Merckx, Jean Graczyck, Raymond Riotte, Francis Perin and Jiri Daler. The congestion and danger would be exacerbated by the fact that tonight’s was a ‘derny’ meet: each man would be riding behind a motorbike or derny, and the pace would be blistering.

It was on nights like these that Merckx cursed Van Buggenhout, as he looked again at the dismal skies, the poky velodrome and the 3,000 fans supposedly massed around the track, expecting a performance worthy of a Tour winner.

He reached for his leather skullcap, then stalled, without quite knowing why. He picked up his reserve helmet and unbuckled that before hesitating again and going back to his first choice. He then changed his mind again and reverted to his back-up. He chuckled to himself. Claudine always said he was indecisive.

If neither Merckx nor Anquetil was relishing what lay in wait, the local press had been doing its best to whip the people of Blois into a frenzy.
La Nouvelle République
had declared that the meet promised to be ‘sensational’ and would see the first ever head-to-head encounter between Anquetil and Merckx behind a derny. ‘The Normand has the advantage from an aesthetic point of view, but he’ll have to reckon with the fighting spirit, the panache and efficacy of the Belgian champion,’ said the paper’s preview.

In 1970, Claude Lair was to inherit the position of velodrome director, but for now worked as a mere mechanic and track supervisor. A fine amateur racer himself, he idolised Merckx, but didn’t dare to approach him as the Belgian ummed and ahed over his headgear. ‘He was the president, the
grand patron
,’ says Lair. ‘I didn’t speak to him, but I heard Anquetil harping on about the track: “Don’t ride three abreast! Don’t ride three abreast!” The track here’s narrow – only four
metres.
When you’re going at 80 kilometres an hour, which they do behind a derny, that doesn’t leave much room for manoeuvre.’