Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (25 page)

The real problem, though, was that there was no longer anything cute or coltish about Merckx to the outside world. He was 25, his face still fresh and unlined, but it had somehow transmuted out of its previous innocence into a colourless, frigid mask. The more the high-brow magazines searched, the more they sent their best and most intuitive interviewers to stare and forage deep inside his soul, the more mystified they became. The now defunct
L’Aurore
newspaper had taken the bold and unusual step of dispatching one of its top female writers, Odélie Grand, into what must have been – and remains – one of the more male-dominated and lecherous environments in professional sport. The interview requests rained down, not from Grand in the direction of the riders, but the other way around. When she met
Merckx,
however, Grand was confronted with an opaqueness that she had only previously encountered, she said, in the film star Ryan O’Neal. ‘Most of the time I did feel that the attitude of my subject was influenced by the fact that I was a female reporter,’ Grand told Roger Bastide. ‘I’m used to it, whether it’s an actor, a politician, a finance magnate or a writer that I’m talking to. It’s only ever a kind of mockery or scorn, at least a kind of humour that’s not particularly charitable. But in front of Eddy Merckx…nothing! His gaze gets lost somewhere over your shoulder and erases you from the picture. It’s a black-out. You no longer exist. He replies with a yes or a no, but he’s thousands of kilometres away, on his own inaccessible planet.’

Grand could rest assured that she wasn’t the only one. Another ‘name’ writer on the 1970 Tour, Lucien Bodard, had built his reputation on one of the toughest beats in journalism, reporting on the rise of Communism in China, but even he couldn’t get to grips with Merckx. Of his stage win in Grenoble, Bodard remarked, ‘Merckx, a super-winner in unprecedented fashion, scurries away looking a tiny bit bored, with nothing to say, not even a word of satisfaction… It comes as the biggest surprise to discover that Merckx isn’t a robot constructed by engineers. He turned himself into a robot. With him there is no sense of aspiration, no sense of predestination, no flame. Just the realisation that he was unique, different from the rest, and he had to take advantage of that. And so he turned himself into a machine with extraordinary attention to detail and permanent application. He is the human bicycle.’

Bodard’s portrait was well observed, but from Merckx’s vantage point, on the inside looking out, it was pointless for these people to want or demand answers or a charisma as transcendental as his talent. The issue, indeed, was their expectations as much as his inarticulacy, the smile that his mother had told him ‘wasn’t commercial’ all those
years
ago in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, or his profound awareness of his own limitations. He told Marc Jeuniau, ‘I spend a third of my life on the bike, another third on the massage table or at the wheel of my car, and I need another third to sleep. In five years, when I’m not racing any more, then I’ll have time to read, to go to the cinema and the theatre, or go to conferences, and I imagine that I’ll enjoy it very much.’

If former teammates recall that one of his pet hates was poring over tactics at the end of races, wouldn’t it also hold true that he had little appetite for discussing them with journalists? On all other matters, one of the pressmen who perhaps genuinely understood and sympathised with Merckx, Gianpaolo Ormezzano, perhaps sums it up when he says, ‘To me Merckx was just a superior person, in his head and his legs, but I mean by a sportsman’s standards. Maybe if you had put him in charge of a nuclear physics laboratory he would have blown up planet Earth. I don’t know… What I’m saying is that he was smart but his gift was for riding his bike.’

Merckx had demonstrated it again to win the Tour de France by nearly ten minutes. Thirty positions on general classification and one hour, six minutes and 59 seconds was the size of the abyss between him and Luis Ocaña.

deplumed

‘For the first time, I was dictated to by a stronger rider than me. Now I think it’s all over.’
E
DDY
M
ERCKX

FOR THE SECOND
time in little over two years, Eddy Merckx lay in a foetal position on a hotel bed, his bottom lip quivering. The role fulfilled in turns in Savona by Vincenzo Giacotto, Italo Zilioli and Martin Van Den Bossche now fell to the Dutchman Rini Wagtmans.

‘It’s over. This Tour, me as a rider…it’s all finished,’ Merckx sobbed.

‘Come on, don’t be ridiculous,’ Wagtmans told him, paraphrasing the words expressed in manifold ways, in manifold languages, in the thousand or so telegrams that the Tour postman had just delivered to Merckx’s bedroom. ‘Remember what I told you under the podium this afternoon. Remember what I saw. I tell you, it’s not over…’

Almost a year to the day earlier, during the 1970 Tour, Merckx had sent Jean Van Buggenhout to meet Wagtmans in a hotel car park in Pau and offer him a ride with Merckx’s new Molteni team the following year. Wagtmans had immediately given Van Bug his word and his signature – if he remembers correctly, ‘on the back of
La Dépêche du Midi
newspaper’. The idea had been for Wagtmans to enter the fold of Merckx’s disciples, but until a few days ago he felt that, alas, Merckx had given him a lot more help than the other way
around.
A fast-talking, even faster-descending livewire of a rider, Wagtmans was also something of a maverick. His nickname, the ‘
Witte Bles
’ or ‘White Blaze’ referred both to the shock of white which struck his hairline like a lightning bolt and to his speed going downhill, but there was also something luminous and volatile about his whole approach to riding his bike. At a time when Merckx spent much of the winter competing in Six Days and racking up thousands of kilometres in training, Wagtmans consigned his bike to the garage in October then barely touched it again until March. Usually, within weeks, the sparks would be flying from his pedals, and Wagtmans would have fireworks prepared for the only race that mattered to him: the Tour. But not this year. Still desperately short of fitness in May, he had become so demoralised and downbeat about his prospects of making the Molteni Tour team, that it had taken a phone call and a stern pep talk from Merckx to bring him around. ‘Rini, you can’t train a thousand kilometres in three months and expect to be good. You wonder why I’m so good, but I ride more than two hundred kilometres most
days
…’

Previously, Wagtmans had thought that Merckx ‘trained like a foolish man’. As the Tour approached and he finally discovered his sparkle, Wagtmans realised that there was logic in the lunacy.

Now, though, in Marseille, he watched Merckx writhe, listened to his moans and briefly reverted to his old assessment. If Merckx thought that he was finished, that the 1971 Tour de France was over and Luis Ocaña had won, ‘foolish’ really was the only word.

As for what had happened between Orcières Merlette and Marseille a few hours earlier, well, says Wagtmans today, that was simply ‘the greatest Tour de France stage of all time’.

There had been signs, just a lot of little things and one or two big ones all spring. The previous season had ended not with a whimper
but
no real rousing finale, either, as the next phenomenon off the Belgian cycling production line, Jean-Pierre ‘Jempi’ Monseré,
¹
overshadowed Merckx by winning the World Championships in Leicester. The following week, Rik Van Looy headed out for a training ride, saw Vic Schil and Jos Huysmans on the road from Herentals to Grobbendonk, and told them no, he couldn’t think of anything worse than riding with them all the way to Namur. The old ‘Emperor’ then turned around, pedalled back to his house and hung up his bike for good. Thirty years later, Van Looy would dedicate just three sentences to Eddy Merckx in his autobiography. After initially agreeing to an interview for this book, one of the first he would have done for half a decade, Van Looy changed his mind midway through the first question about the 1965 Paris–Luxembourg, wished me well, and put down the phone.

If it had been goodbye and good riddance from Merckx in 1970 too, Merckx’s farewell to the Valente brothers and Faema was tinged with regret both at Giacotto’s passing and the way their relationship had deteriorated since the spring. Merckx’s new team would be Molteni, the cold meat manufacturer, whose gold and navy-blue jerseys had previously been sported by Gianni Motta and Michele Dancelli. Merckx finally signed a two-year contract four days after a Tour of Lombardy in which Motta had stifled his every attack, and Franco ‘Crazy Heart’ Bitossi had won in a sprint. In their meeting at Molteni’s headquarters in Arcore near Milan, team manager Giorgio Albani agreed that Merckx could bring ‘with him’ ten Belgians and one Dutchman, Wagtmans, but insisted that there was no room for
Marino
Vigna as a third directeur sportif alongside Lomme Driessens and Molteni’s current Italian coach Marino Fontana.

Two months later, in mid-December, Merckx and Claudine accepted Italo Zilioli’s invitation to join him and his family at their alpine retreat in Limone Piemonte, close to the French border but hundreds of kilometres from the maelstrom of scrutiny and intrusion which life had become in Belgium.

In a matter of hours the Turin-based newspapers were getting tip-offs; not only was Merckx at Limone, but he had shouted some profanity, in Flemish, at a drunk female who had heckled him in a bar. The next day, a photographer was waiting when he stepped out with Zilioli for a walk in the woods. Merckx made angrily towards him and grabbed the camera. ‘Now I’m going to break it,’ he growled, this time in Italian. ‘No photos, no interviews, not even a word,’ he then muttered, before disappearing over a fence and into the forest with Zilioli.

One of the journalists sent to ‘doorstep’ him,
La Stampa
’s Maurizio Caravella, brought home what Merckx was now up against the following day. ‘Merckx is now advertising [Molteni’s] cold meats rather than [Faema’s] coffee, but he still doesn’t care about advertising himself. Is he really so strong that he can afford the risk of becoming unpopular? He’s obviously sure of it.’

Merckx’s foremost preoccupation, as always, was winning on his bike, and all seemed well on that score at the Molteni training camp in Tuscany in January. Where in previous years it had been Vittorio Adorni and Italo Zilioli, now the Italian neo-pro Giancarlo Bellini was blown away. Merckx was five kilos over his racing weight, but there was nothing particularly unusual or alarming about that at this time of the year; in the diaries or
Carnets de Route
which he was now keeping with the journalist Marc Jeuniau and would publish at the
end
of the year, Merckx archly claimed that Martin Van Den Bossche, with whom he had been reunited at Molteni, was carrying 15 kilos of excess baggage.

Paris–Nice in March was his first major encounter with Ocaña in 1971, and Merckx’s first victory by a score of three stage wins to nil and just over a minute on general classification. The next week, Milan–San Remo saw a repeat of the shameless spoiling tactics or
catenaccio
Motta had employed at the previous autumn’s Tour of Lombardy, but also an even stronger performance by Merckx and a victory – the best of his four to date in ‘La Classicissima’. No worries, no scares there. On to Het Volk on 25 March. Another win, after a pulsating duel with Roger De Vlaeminck. The next weekend, the same cast at the E3 Harelbeke, and success for De Vlaeminck. The first false note sounds, and the first whistles from the crowd. Next a win for Georges Pintens in Gent–Wevelgem, then at the Tour of Flanders another lapse, if that’s what you called being trapped in the peloton as your teammate Georges Van Coningsloo makes a hash of the finale to get smoked by Evert Dolman.

Paris–Roubaix is the next big one. Molteni have Merckx and Merckx-lite, Herman Van Springel, and both are poised in the key break when they hear Lomme Driessens’s engine snarling. They turn around to see their directeur sportif trying to run Walter Godefroot off the road. Seconds later, Godefroot has Driessens by the scruff of his neck, hanging halfway out of the driver’s seat window. Now it’s Godefroot, the usually docile ‘Flemish bulldog’, snarling: ‘Lomme, if you do that again, I’m going to pull you out of this car.’ When Godefroot rejoins the leaders, Merckx’s head is still shaking. ‘That was bad,’ he says, ‘but the worst of it is that it wasn’t even deliberate. He’s just a dreadful driver.’ That contretemps turns out to be the tip of the iceberg, or rather the sharp edge of one of the beastly cobblestones
that
cost Merckx five punctures and all chance of victory, which goes to the Belgian Roger Rosiers.

Next faux pas – Merckx is mobbed by fans at a trade fair in Milan, gets ill, and has to skip Flèche Wallonne. While the cat’s away…the Gypsy plays. Merckx pays him this back-handed compliment in his
Carnets de Route
: ‘So it was that [Roger] De Vlaeminck got his annual big win.’

Merckx could snipe, if indeed that was his intention, but going into his rematch with De Vlaeminck at Liège–Bastogne–Liège there was little to choose between their respective Classics campaigns. Merckx knew better than anyone that another failure in La Doyenne would cause hysteria among the Belgian media. The only solution was to pull out a win of the same
cru
as his 1969 Tour of Flanders or Liège processions. This meant resisting the temptation to turn and wait when he found himself alone 90 kilometres from the line, briefly joining Joseph Spruyt, the Luca Brasi to Merckx’s Godfather, then ditching Spruyt and riding all the way to Liège in the freezing rain. This was the familiar script, but Merckx had forgotten his lines: as Pintens gave chase from behind, Merckx imploded on the Mont Theux and his advantage sank from five minutes to just over one minute. He was barely advancing. He thought first about abandoning, then hallucinated that Pintens was already upon and past him, before finally regaining his composure. Merckx decided to allow himself to be caught around four kilometres from the Rocourt velodrome, whereupon Pintens would counter-attack immediately and commit hara-kiri. His brain, clearly, was working just fine even if his legs were not. Plan B worked perfectly and Merckx duly took the sprint.