Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (26 page)

If ever, though, a victory had felt uncannily like a defeat, it was this one. Not to Merckx, who was delighted in spite of having suffered ‘like never before’, but to the journalists waiting for him to
recover
and explain himself under the podium. The following day, most at least found it in their heart to salute his bravery. In
Le Figaro
, for example, Louis Vincent invited readers to ‘bless the errors [with or without inverted commas] of a champion who still reacts like an amateur, after five years as a pro and a star’.

Merckx himself knew that he had been too bold, that he hadn’t fully recovered from the illness that had kept him out of Flèche Wallonne. He was also adamant that the troubles with his left leg were now behind him. That, however, would be a little presumptious, as would any notion that more who had watched Liège had been struck by his incredible resilience and lucidity than his collapse on the Mont Theux. Having opted for the Dauphiné Libéré rather than the Giro d’Italia in May, he was ‘sickened’ to discover that certain French journalists were trying to ‘demolish him’, seizing on and exaggerating the importance of his every mistake. On Stage 2 from Grenoble to Annecy, Ocaña was one of several riders to distance him on the Col du Granier. Merckx claimed that a problem with his gears had held him up; Ocaña countered that only the rain and the way that it had hardened his legs near the summit and on the descent had allowed Merckx to regain contact. The French journalists nodded. The pair were closely matched for the remainder of the race, but victory in the decisive final time trial and overall standings went to Merckx. The Spaniard was second. ‘He’s going very well. He’s getting better every season,’ Merckx granted – a resounding endorsement compared to what he had said at the Tour the previous year.

At his final warm-up race before the Tour, the Midi Libre, Merckx showed that his form and desire to silence the critics were tapering nicely by winning two stages and the overall classification. It was the first time that Claudine had travelled with him for the duration of a stage race. One French newspaper, preposterously,
reported
that she was now working for Molteni as a directeur sportif and masseuse.

So it was that the spring had ended, and the Tour began, with Merckx as confident as a two-time winner deserved to be and
Paris Match
asking on its front cover, ‘MERCKX – Is he going to kill the Tour de France?’ Jacques Anquetil, who had taken his critical faculties into retirement with him, appeared to answer that question on
here
. ‘If [in Coppi’s day, when everyone used to fight the best rider], Merckx had taken the risk of attacking 100 kilometres from the finish like he did in Divonne-Les-Bains last year or on the road to Mourenx in 1969, he would have finished outside the time limit. Last year he was vulnerable but his opponents lacked inspiration or audacity.’

Meanwhile, for a few days after the race set out from Mulhouse, Rini Wagtmans couldn’t shake the feeling that he was getting in somebody’s way. After Molteni’s victory and Merckx’s immediate confiscation of the yellow jersey in the 11-kilometre team prologue which opened proceedings, Wagtmans’s sense of unease peaked at around lunchtime the following day, after the first of a mind-boggling trio of stages to be ridden in the space of 12 hours had been won in a bunch sprint by Eric Leman. Merckx saw race co-director Félix Lévitan arriving in the tribune overlooking the finish line with the yellow jersey over his arm, pointed to the chair next to him, and told Lévitan to ‘just put it there’. Lévitan seemed to take great delight in raising and wagging a finger. ‘
Non non non
, monsieur Merckx,’ he said. ‘This isn’t for you. It’s for your teammate, monsieur Wagtmans. Your time on the overall standings is the same but he crossed the line ahead of you.’

‘
What?!!! What???!
’ Merckx fumed.

‘He was really mad, although he also calmed down really quickly and was really nice to me about it,’ Wagtmans recalls. ‘But I wasn’t comfortable. He was my boss; he should have the jersey. So I decided I’d get dropped on the next stage to Fribourg and give it straight back to him. I had great legs and would never have got dropped but I made up a story about my shoes being a size too small and rubbing, and I lost one minute. Of course, I posed no threat to Eddy for the Tour win, but Merckx wasn’t happy if he wasn’t winning.’

Merckx reacquainted himself with his favourite feeling the next day after a high-octane, high-risk sprint to pip De Vlaeminck in Strasbourg. Just three days in, with a 20-second advantage on general classification and the next week consisting entirely of flat terrain as the Tour looped anti-clockwise from east to west, north to south, Merckx afforded himself a rare luxury: he went a week without a single stage win.

Certain members of the French public clearly hoped that his barren run was destined to last. In amongst thousands of messages of support delivered by the Tour postie, and a sprinkling of hate mail, was this message sent from Paris on 2 July stapled to a photograph of Claudine and Sabrina:

Eddy Merckx
,

You’re nothing but a druggie and a good-for-nothing if you don’t leave the Tour and leave your jersey to someone else unhappiness will strike you you are too pretentious and a bastard. If you win the Tour de France see this photo you must know them yes well they will both have their throats cut with razors and it will be your merit and your prize for the Tour
.

You see what I mean?

Greetings

PS. This warning is no joke

*

Seen from Clermont Ferrand, the city at its base, the Puy de Dôme is not an impressive mountain, or rather, volcano. Television advertisements for the mineral water springing from this oasis of ‘
la France profonde
’ creates the false expectation of soaring craters beneath a lush green moquette, but that is not the view from Clermont. Only when one rides out of the city by bike, through Chamalières and on to the road corkscrewing up and around the volcano for 14 kilometres do things get interesting. Jacques Anquetil and Raymond Poulidor’s head-to-head, shoulder-to-shoulder battle on the Puy’s slopes in 1964 provided the defining images of their rivalry, an age, and the Puy’s mythos among cyclists.

Seven years later, in 1971, the Puy decided nothing but did throw up a few interesting pointers. Merckx had controlled the race throughout Stage 8, his men smothering every attack in readiness for what he hoped would be his booming explosion, but something on the spiral staircase up the Puy hadn’t quite clicked. It wasn’t one leg this time but both of them: Merckx felt somehow blocked, rusty. Four kilometres from the summit, Ocaña danced and quickly gained 40 seconds. Three kilometres later Joop Zoetemelk and Joaquim Agostinho also decided that Merckx was moving too slowly and left the yellow jersey behind. Summoning all of his guts and none of the style they preached in coaching manuals, Merckx clawed back 20 seconds in the last 500 metres but still trailed the stage winner, Ocaña, by 15 seconds at the finish line.

As it had been for Merckx on the Mont Ventoux 12 months earlier, Ocaña’s next stop was an ambulance. Again just ‘cinema’; Ocaña was fine and that night made an important announcement to his roommate Johny Schleck: ‘I’m going to do it. I’m going to beat Merckx, Johny.’

Schleck nodded in acknowledgements not agreement. At least not yet.

‘When Luis said that, I thought, OK, but there was a lot still to do because with Merckx you could never sleep easy,’ Schleck says. ‘Luis was also a bit obsessed with him. That wasn’t always his fault. Merckx was the only rider anyone talked about, and Luis wanted to break that, but I also have to say that it was often the media who would come to the hotel and say, “Luis, no one’s putting up any resistance to Merckx. Someone has to do something. Is it going to be you?”’

The anti-Merckx brigade had their answer and new hero in Grenoble. As they had in the Dauphiné, the Chartreuse mountains plagued Merckx. Ocaña’s attack on the Col de Porte took him and three others clear and to a one-minute, 36-second advantage by the time the stage was over and Bernard Thévenet had won. Merckx didn’t know whom or what to blame. ‘It’s maybe a mechanical thing. I’m going to try a new bike,’ he mumbled. Above jeers from the crowd, Merckx then conceded, ‘I haven’t lost confidence at all, but I can see that something’s amiss. I can’t get into top gear.’

The unvarnished fact was that Merckx had lost the yellow jersey to a rider who wasn’t his teammate for the first time in his career. Joop Zoetemelk led Ocaña by one second and Merckx by one minute. The next morning, in
L’Equipe
, the Tour’s co-director and resident bard Jacques Goddet trilled that, ‘Nothing will ever be the same again.’ ‘If the beautiful bird has been deplumed, he will probably still be eagle of this sport for some time. But he’s no longer out of reach,’ Goddet wrote. ‘He will no longer be able to dictate the outcome of races and the way they are won on his own, at the command of his omnipotence.’

There was and is no really satisfying way to describe what happened next. Maybe in an era when Merckx hadn’t already used up all the superlatives there may have been the odd adjective or metaphor still lying unclaimed. As it turned out, the day before what
Rini
Waytmans maintains was the ‘greatest Tour de France stage of all time’, perhaps there is no higher accolade for what Luis Ocaña achieved between Grenoble and Orcières-Merlette than this praise from the writer Philippe Brunel: ‘The one time when he’s not sick and he doesn’t fall, Ocaña produces an exploit which goes beyond Merckx’s exploits,
against
Merckx at Orcières-Merlette.

‘Luis lived his life at the extremes,’ Brunel goes on, ‘and that was why he became the only person to challenge Merckx, because you had to be extreme to take on Eddy Merckx.’

Whether it was or wasn’t better than what Merckx had produced at Mourenx in 1969, we can be sure that Ocaña’s ride was truly Merckx-esque and probably inspired by him. Just 13 kilometres from the stage start in Grenoble, on the Côte de Laffrey, which, says Merckx’s mountain lieutenant Joseph Bruyère, ‘wasn’t really a “Côte” or hill but a “terribly hard and long mountain pass”’, the Portuguese Agostinho bolted and Ocaña shot after him. Lucien Van Impe and Joop Zoetemelk, in his yellow jersey, followed. Merckx did not. By the time he and the rest of the peloton groaned over the summit, they trailed Ocaña by two minutes.

Ocaña claimed that it was all premeditated. He wanted the yellow jersey, of course, but also Merckx’s scalp and revenge for traumas wreaked in 1970 by the next mountain, the Col du Noyer. Johny Schleck suspected it had been more impulsive than that. ‘Luis wasn’t Merckx,’ he says. ‘He never calculated or thought about the long-term consequences. If he felt good, he’d attack, simple as that.’ Just how exceptional Ocaña felt on this particular day became clear when the four fugitives extended their lead in the long valley before the Col du Noyer, with Ocaña doing the majority of the work. Beneath that see-through skin described by his old teammate Philippe Crépel, muscles that perhaps even Ocaña had never seen before flexed and
contorted
like girders beneath the blow torch of the afternoon sun. If ever a man had looked in his element, it was Ocaña – specifically at the moment, between the two walls of a deserted canyon identified on maps as the crête des Baumes, when in a single smooth movement he leant forward again and pulled away from Agostinho, Van Impe and Zoetemelk.

The rocky gorge towering above them now took on the symbolism of a watershed. ‘From that point, the feeling I had was one of a winner,’ said Ocaña. ‘This truly was a spectacle. For Ocaña it was the start of a new life,’ Goddet wrote.

As he began the descent off the Col du Noyer, its ghosts all exorcised, Ocaña learned from a smiling Maurice De Muer in the Bic team car that Merckx was now over five minutes behind. What he couldn’t know was his old nemesis was on the brink of giving up and had said as much to the Belgian in-race radio reporter Georges Malfait. He had towed the peloton almost single-handedly for nearly 100 kilometres. On the final climb to Orcières-Merlette, Ocaña extended his advantage by a further four minutes. He had already spent two minutes resting in an ambulance next to the finish line, completed his post-race TV interview and pulled on the yellow jersey when Merckx appeared around the final bend. Merckx turned around to see Zoetemelk hovering in his slipstream as he had been for the last two hours and resolved to at least outsprint the Dutchman. Third place, behind Van Impe who had stayed away for second, turned out to be scant consolation. ‘For the first time, I was dictated to by a stronger rider than me. Now I think it’s all over. Ocaña has been dominating for three days… I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’m incapable of attacking,’ Merckx said.

Ocaña had beaten him by eight minutes and 42 seconds on the stage and now headed Zoetemelk by eight minutes and 43 seconds
on
general classification. Merckx was over a minute further back, in fifth place overall. ‘I don’t think he had recovered, after all the hot weather of the past few days. I had to hurt him while he was down,’ Ocaña had said in his now familiar Franco-Spanish patois at the finish line, its tone still somehow pregnant with foreboding.

Johny Schleck confirms that ‘ten minutes in those days wasn’t the end of the world’. He and Ocaña also knew that ‘Merckx would never accept defeat’. Disingenuously or diplomatically, Schleck calls Merckx ‘
Le Grand
’, when in 1971 for him and Ocaña it was ‘
Le Grand Con
’ or ‘Big Idiot’.
Le Grand
’s performance that day had been extraordinary. Everyone just sat on his wheel and let him chase all day. He just went on and on. Nonetheless, that night, Luis seemed confident. He said he’d take the yellow jersey all the way to Paris. We thought he would too.’

Merckx contemplated this eventuality from his bunk in the Club du Soleil, the resort resembling a prison where he and his shell-shocked Molteni tribe were due to spend the next two nights. He didn’t know it yet but his efforts in defeat would be the subject of gushing tributes in the next day’s papers. Jacques Goddet called it the most moving performance of his career. And yet, says Rini Wagtmans, Merckx was ‘completely depressed, saying silly things, like that he’d never beat Luis Ocaña again. We all tried to gee him up but he was having none of it.’