Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (21 page)

The winter for a cyclist was the time to rest, but for the restless mind and body the long, cold months could be a purgatory of self-doubt. In Merckx’s thoughts, the memory of the Baracchi, its thunderous first half and calamitous second, could quickly turn into a microcosm of two alternative versions of his future: the former, a
continuation
of the crushing supremacy he had reached at the Tour, the latter a sharp decline.

What Merckx didn’t yet fully realise, but would soon find out, was that his life and cycling would never quite be the same after 1969. He would conclude years later that Savona had changed him psychologically and Blois physically. Whether and how those differences would manifest themselves in 1970, the world waited to discover with a mix of hope and trepidation.

a new merckx

‘The crash had left physical and psychological scars… To compound it, Savona was still on his mind. He had some black days after what happened there.’
I
TALO
Z
ILIOLI

BY 1970, CYCLING
had itself a sportsman who, later that year, would be voted the world’s greatest in a poll of judges from 50 countries. In Mexico at around the time of the Giro, Pelé would orchestrate probably the finest team display in football history at the World Cup, and glitter as an individual, yet even he came up short of Merckx. Joe Frazier won the heavyweight boxing title of the world, Jack Nicklaus the British Open in golf, John Newcombe Wimbledon in tennis, but a 24-, soon to be 25-year-old Belgian cyclist seemed to tower over all of them.

And yet, as far as the man himself was concerned, the Eddy Merckx of 1970 and indeed every year thereafter was far inferior to another rider: the Eddy Merckx of 1969.

It is remarkable how many epoch-defining athletes have had their careers compromised by some, often widely unrecognised adversity or injury. The Spanish golfer Severiano Ballesteros is a pertinent example when discussing Merckx. According to one of his brothers, Ballesteros was already a shadow of his former self when he burst on
to
the international scene and almost won the 1976 British Open at 19 years of age. For three years in his teens, and until the onset of back problems that later bedevilled him, according to his sibling, Ballesteros played the best golf in the world and ‘never missed a single shot’. If this raised the question of how good Ballesteros could and would have been, the same consideration could be made of Diego Maradona, who discovered cocaine at Barcelona in the early 1980s, peaked at the 1986 World Cup aged 25, and was practically finished as a footballer by his 30th birthday. Or about Ali, who lost three of his best years to the Vietnam War. Or about Fausto Coppi, who lost five shots at the Giro d’Italia and seven at the Tour de France to the Second World War. Or about Greg LeMond, who surely would have won more than three Tours but for his hunting accident in 1987. And so forth and so forth.

The prospect of Blois and its consequences hampering the remainder of Eddy Merckx’s career was of course a remote one when the first signs appeared in the winter of 1969 to ’70, but the fears would grow like a gangrene over the weeks, months and years that followed. If the Trofeo Baracchi had really only highlighted Merckx’s lack of fitness and racing, a bout of tendinitis at the Six Days of Cologne a few weeks later was the first, true warning sign. Not that Merckx’s partner in Germany, Patrick Sercu, could see or hear anything different from what he had become accustomed to with Merckx. ‘Yes, he was complaining, but he was always like that,’ Sercu says. ‘Even when he was fifteen, he was always sick before the start, and it carried on when we did Six Days together. It’d be, “Ah Patrick, my stomach, my knee, my back. Take it easy tonight.” Then we’d get on to the track, start the Madison, and on the first changeover he’d be asking me whether he should attack yet. On the bike he was another man. Cycling was the best medicine for him.’

To the outsider, there was nothing particularly new even in the way, that winter, Merckx was constantly tinkering with his bikes and his riding position. Only those in the very tight inner circle comprising family, Van Buggenhout and Guillaume Michiels perhaps began to notice a mounting unease – and even that largely relied on their powers of intuition or observation. The fact that he showed up one day at Jules and Jenny’s to rescue two oblong mirrors from their shed, ‘so I can look at my position when I’m on the rollers’, might have confirmed nothing more than that Merckx was as focused as ever, despite the distractions of the previous few months and the impending birth of his first child. Added, though, just for instance, to Claudine one day finding the allen key with which Merckx adjusted his saddle height under a pillow in the marital bed, it would perhaps have been clear that, in Merckx’s mind at least, his desire for Blois to one day be ‘just a bad memory’ seemed increasingly wishful.

What
exactly
was the problem? At first Merckx didn’t know the name, only the feeling. In this first winter after the crash, it was mainly localised in his left leg, and was more a
discomfort
than a pain. When he climbed, the old fluidity, the way the pedals seemed almost to liquefy beneath his feet, was replaced by a clunking motion of equal power but nowhere near as satisfying a sensation. Sometimes his left leg would outright lock up. In time, his masseur Gust Naessens would come to refer to it as Merckx’s ‘little leg’.

One thing had changed over the winter: the Faema team had switched its name to Faemino, like the instant coffee the company had just launched. Their first, pre-1970 season training camp was to take place in Loano on the Ligurian coast, 25 kilometres from where old ghosts lurked in Savona. Merckx’s old friend Zilioli was there for the duration, having moved to the team in the winter from Filotex. Merckx meanwhile would make only the briefest of cameos, having
remained
in Belgium for the due-date of what he and Claudine now knew would be a daughter. Little Sabrina, who would have been called Laurence had her parents not worried that it sounded too ‘French’ and therefore unpalatable to Flemish tastes, was finally born, well overdue like her father, on Valentine’s Day. Sod’s law: her birth immediately contributed to the end of the love affair that had begun two years earlier between Merckx, Faema and their owners the Valente brothers. Merckx’s late arrival and token appearance in Loano after the Milan Six-Days, which began within hours of Sabrina’s arrival, didn’t go down well with the local tourist board with whom the Valentes had arranged Faemino’s stay. Over the next few weeks and months, the relationship would continue to deteriorate.

When they watched Merckx on the road, Zilioli and the other Faemino riders saw nothing unusual except that, in Zilioli’s case, climbing wasn’t quite the joy that it had been in training at some of his previous teams.

‘Usually, after riding Six-Days over the winter, someone would give themselves a week or ten days to get used to their road bike again, but Eddy was out with us at eight o’clock the morning after arriving,’ Zilioli says. ‘As one of the better climbers, I always used to test myself on the hills. I said to myself that if ever I was going to drop Eddy on a climb it was now. So I accelerate and what happens? Eddy bullets past me and drops everyone.’

Zilioli, though, was one of Merckx’s closest and most perceptive friends, and soon got a sense of the anxiety nibbling if not gnawing at Merckx. ‘He was worried in that winter,’ the Italian confirms. ‘The crash had left physical and psychological scars. You should never underestimate what it’s like to see a guy die in front of you, your derny rider…To compound it, Savona was still on his mind. He had some black days after what happened there.’

In some ways – and not that Merckx saw it – Zilioli was living proof of what lay on the other side of the precipice above which Merckx may now have been teetering. Zilioli’s career had been sabotaged not by a physical weakness but a psychological one. People could and would speculate about how many more Tours and Giros Merckx would win, how many records he could break, but only the men looking down their own personal cliff-face, the riders, knew how precarious their footing was, and what a rocky landing awaited below.

No one felt the vertigo more acutely than Italo Zilioli.

‘Eddy was sensitive, like me,’ he says, ‘but I suppose the difference was that he seemed to be able to express his emotions and worries or turn them into something positive. I on the other hand keep them bottled up, which isn’t good. When you do that, eventually your head goes, or your liver, or your sleep… I used to get nightmares all the time when I was under pressure. Fortunately they stopped when I retired. It was because I couldn’t handle the pressure. As soon as something was being asked of me, it started to get to me. I wanted to be instinctive. Eddy also had those worries, nightmares, but again he seemed able to use that sensitivity as fuel.’

The early indications were that, whatever Merckx feared or could feel, its impact would be bigger in his head than on the road. His final harvest in 1969 had totalled 43 victories from 129 races, and now he commenced 1970 in similarly ominous form. At Paris–Nice, he won three stages, including the traditional La Turbie uphill time trial, but finished in agony due to a delicately positioned wound caused by his constant shifting in the saddle. This prompted more tinkering, a phone call to Vincenzo Giacotto to warn him that his participation at Milan–San Remo could be in jeopardy, and finally the decision to ride with one pedal crank longer than the other in a misguided attempt to alleviate the pain. The night before the race,
Merckx
called Zilioli into his hotel room and admitted that he was in no state to ride for victory. Instead, he promised, he would be Zilioli’s domestique de luxe. Merckx was as good as his word, and Zilioli got fourth. Merckx congratulated him, stopped for a couple of minutes to answer journalists’ questions, then rode straight up the coast, another 50 kilometres, to catch a plane from Nice airport. In total, that day, he had ridden 340 kilometres.

The next month, like every April, would be spent almost entirely at home in Belgium as Classics fever gripped the nation. Rarely had anticipation of a spring campaign been piqued like now, and not only because Merckx had shown chinks of vulnerability – or at least a lesser degree of invincibility. No, the reason was something, someone else, specifically the first of two major new challenges that would present themselves in 1970, together with the twinges in Merckx’s left leg.

Later in the season Merckx would begin to gauge the ambition of the Spanish
caballero
Luis Ocaña, but his emergence would be slower and more
staccato
, despite victories in the Vuelta a España and the Dauphiné Libéré in the spring and early summer. The new and more immediate danger came in the Classics, and its or his name was Roger De Vlaeminck. The 22-year-old from Eeklo in East Flanders had justified his refusal to join Merckx’s Faema empire with a string of victories in 1969 which patently established him as Van Looy’s natural successor. De Vlaeminck was young enough and talented enough not to need his hero Van Looy’s conniving, but a bullish refusal to accept Merckx’s superiority was at least one similarity between him and the ‘Emperor’. For all that Merckx’s Tour win had sent his popularity soaring, De Vlaeminck also provided the dyed-in-the-wool Flemish speakers with a new totem for their linguistic, political or nationalistic hang-ups. Even some who weren’t on the Van Looy bandwagon, and had no particular prejudice before, had turned
on
Merckx when he and Claudine exchanged French and not Flemish marriage vows in December 1967. This despite the fact that the decision had come, entirely innocently, from Merckx’s mother Jenny, who assumed that she was sparing the priest the unnecessary inconvenience of translating two ways. ‘They raked up my wedding hundreds of times. Ever since then, they have always been ready to pick up any mistakes I make with the language,’ Merckx bitterly commented later.

While Merckx had spent the two or three subsequent years trying to redeem himself, taking immense care to give numbers of interviews in French and Flemish, certain sections of the public and press had continued to regard him as a divisive figure in an already bisected nation. At the 1969 Tour, three journalists from the Flemish Belgian Radio and Television network authored a Tour de France travelogue containing the following passage:

‘Maybe it’s too late to call the Flemish fans into action, but the fact is that this year we’re only hearing cries in French, we’re only seeing flags with French slogans. Brussels and Wallonia have adopted Merckx… Maybe it’s just a reflex that makes the Flemish shout in French in France, but if that’s the case they’re wrong. Could we ask Flemish tourists to encourage Merckx in Dutch or, at least, in their dialect?’

Later in the same book, the authors lamented that De Vlaeminck had lost too much time on the first mountain stage to be considered a genuine contender. ‘It would have been great,’ they argued, ‘if the first Belgian to win the Tour for forty years could have been “een Vlaeminck”.’ Or, their play on words seemed to suggest, anyone as long as he was ‘een Vlaming’ – a rider from Flanders.

Now, in April 1970, De Vlaeminck and his older brother Erik, the reigning cyclo-cross world champion, prepared to do battle with Merckx on the rutted roads and murderous, cobbled hills of Flanders
that
they considered more theirs than his. Roger was not only a thoroughbred Flandrian in name, extraction and upbringing, but also on a bike. Like Van Looy, he was speedy enough to beat all but the fastest finishers in a sprint and also among the best on the flat and short climbs or
bergs
. This made him the ideal candidate for victory at Gent–Wevelgem on 1 April, but it was Merckx who drew first blood in a repeat of his 1967 victory. Five days later, Merckx was beaten at the Tour of Flanders…but by the sprinter Eric Leman, not De Vlaeminck, who could only finish 13th.

Merckx’s next competition was the Tour of Belgium, one of a shrinking number of races not yet in his palmarès. After three stages, the pain in his left leg was back along with the anxieties and, also, the old winning itch. The next morning, in Jambes, the weather was fit only for sled-dog racing, and De Vlaeminck was among a group of riders pleading with the race director to cancel the stage as they set off across Wallonia towards Heist-aan-Zee. Popular myth has it that Merckx took this as his cue to shoot immediately from the pack. Walter Godefroot says that, in actual fact, it was he who launched the first attack. What matters, though, is not who was the instigator, but the way that Merckx was about to force two-thirds of the field to abandon the race and set up overall victory.