Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (30 page)

Merckx didn’t yet know it, but this would turn into a key theme throughout 1972, for all that it had promised to be his hardest season. More than in 1968, year zero of Merckx’s first mandate as the absolute ruler of professional cycling, as 1972 wore on, a belief started to take hold that a second generation was failing in its ‘duty’ to furnish worthy challengers. At the time it sounded condescending, but Merckx had been right about De Vlaeminck and his ‘one big win a year’. The Gypsy skipped Liège–Bastogne–Liège to ride a lucrative circuit race in Italy, leaving Merckx to romp to his third victory in La Doyenne. When Merckx won even more impressively at Flèche Wallonne three days later, De Vlaeminck was in a football stadium watching Club Bruges play Antwerp. Merckx had found out at the 1971 Tour how much an opponent’s absence could devalue his success. It was no surprise that he ‘would have preferred it if De Vlaeminck had been racing at Flèche’.

De Vlaeminck and Ocaña’s pluck had set them immediately apart from the rest, but even between them and Merckx the discrepancy
was
huge, in the head more than the legs. The ’72 Giro d’Italia would be by some distance De Vlaeminck’s best performance in a major tour to date – yet he was still ‘only’ seventh. ‘Three weeks was a long time for me,’ De Vlaeminck puffs in his kitchen in Kaprijke. ‘Physically I was good enough to win a major tour, but I didn’t have the right mentality or support. I only realised after ten days of the 1971 Tour that maybe you couldn’t sprint for every bonus, follow Merckx every time he attacked and get the green jersey. By the time we got to Orcières-Merlette, I was stick-thin. I couldn’t go on. Even when I wasn’t physically tired, mentally I found it exhausting. Drinking still water every day, watching everything you ate for three weeks? After ten days I was gagging for a Coca-Cola.’

Another would-be scourge rocked Merckx at the Giro, but he combined every vulnerability of the other contenders with not all of their strengths. José Manuel Fuente was shoulder-high to Merckx, a brilliant climber and the only true winner in the stage to Luchon, which had been fatal to his compatriot Ocaña in the 1971 Tour. Fuente had also just won the latest edition of his national Tour, the Vuelta a España. As the Spaniards who had ridden the Vuelta often were, Fuente was in superlative form for the Giro and intended to prove it on Stage 17 finishing atop the highest road pass in Italy, the Passo dello Stelvio. On the Stelvio, Fuente declared, he would not only beat Merckx but put him outside the time limit.

If only Fuente’s tactics or professionalism equalled his chutzpah. Walter Godefroot says that by this point in his career, Merckx had come across three riders with potential to trouble him in major tours, ‘but in all of them there’s something missing’. ‘One is Pingeon who is a big talent but is a bit crazy, or at least not very professional,’ Godefroot explains. ‘Then you have Ocaña who must have a great physical gift to do what he does but is always in the disco after criteriums. The
third
is Fuente, who is brilliant at climbing but also at smoking heavy cigarettes and drinking cognac.’

Franco ‘Crazy Heart’ Bitossi was even less impressed with Fuente. ‘He rode very badly,’ Bitossi says. ‘He used to get to a climb, put his head down and bolt off the front whether it was the right place to go or not.’

This was fine on stages consisting of just a single ascent like the one to Superbagnères in the 1971 Tour, or the one up the Blockhaus climb on day four of the ’72 Giro. Merckx hated this kind of exercise. He therefore wasn’t surprised that Fuente had taken the pink jersey, or to have trailed him by 2’30” at the summit. Dino Zandegù, incidentally, still blamed Merckx’s ferocious pace at the foot of the climb, not Fuente, for dumping him outside the time limit and out of what turned out to be his last ever Giro. ‘The saddest thing that ever happened to me, and all Merckx’s fault! The saddest day of my life!’ Zandegaù says.

Four more stages, though, were all it took for Fuente to show his limitations and for Merckx to reclaim the race lead. Fuente had speculated after a blisteringly hot sixth stage that ‘if there had been a big climb today, Merckx would have lost five minutes’. The next morning in Cosenza, though, he had his KAS teammates slurp ice-cream while Merckx assembled his teammates for 40 breathless uphill kilometres to warm-up. At the top of the first climb of the day, the Valico di Monte Scuro, the difference in their methods of preparation equated to a few metres of asphalt. By the time they reached Catanzaro 125 kilometres later, after a Merckx masterclass in descending and riding on the flat, Fuente was over four minutes back and Merckx had reclaimed the pink jersey.

Fuente threatened for a second time a week later on the Alpine stage finishing up the Monte Jafferau, but was again undone by his
naivety.
His attack on the penultimate Sestriere climb came much too early, and he was almost at a standstill when Merckx arrived like the grim reaper to scythe him down a kilometre from the finish line. Fuente consoled himself with a stage win on the Stelvio, although Merckx was well inside the time cut and now three days away from his third Giro title. His final winning margin would be five and a half minutes. Fuente had at least earned second place and a compliment which perhaps said more about Merckx’s antipathy for Ocaña than his admiration for Fuente: ‘Fuente is a great champion – there’s an abyss between him and Ocaña, no comparison.’

This, ventured the detractors, was but the insecure voice of a man who had kept close tabs on Ocaña during the Giro, and who knew to what extent the Spaniard had dominated the Dauphiné Libéré. Jacques Goddet concluded ahead of the Tour whose route he called the most mountainous in history that, ‘Ocaña should be clearly superior to Merckx over the climbs.’ Another Jacques, Jacques Anquetil, supported that view by noting, completely erroneously, that Merckx hadn’t dropped an important rider on a climb for two years.

Alas, they were all dupes to their desperate longing for variations on a theme that had been playing on repeat since the 1968 Giro. The greatest tribute to Merckx and the worst slight on his competitors was that his victories were now losing their identity in an uninterrupted blur of brilliance. His Molteni team manager Girogio Albani had summed it up at Milan–San Remo in the spring, when Merckx had crossed the line alone then asked Albani, ‘Were you surprised to see me?’ ‘With you, nothing surprises me any more,’ Albani replied. The bigwigs at Italian state broadcaster RAI felt the same. They announced that they would drop live coverage of the Giro in 1973 – akin to the BBC doing the same to Wimbledon – and show only half an hour of daily highlights.

If the Giro win had provoked yawns, similarly, Merckx produced a fourth Tour win which differed from the previous three only in that the attacks came later in stages, with slightly less zing, a bit more calculator and a bit less accelerator. The first seven stages were at least enlivened by his tug-of-war for the yellow jersey with Cyrille Guimard. After that, Merckx won the first stage in the Pyrenees, regained the lead and proceeded to outride Luis Ocaña on every mountain stage. Ocaña’s excuse, at least in the first instance, was that his puncture on the Col du Soulor on Stage 8 had prompted an unsporting acceleration by Merckx. This was followed minutes later by Ocaña’s second crash on a rain-sodden Pyrenean descent in two years. A week later, he fell ill in the Alps and had to abandon.

Merckx, meanwhile, won consecutive stages ascending two of the Tour’s hallowed Alpine summits, the Galibier and Izoard, as well the final-day time trial. His final margin of victory was a little under 11 minutes over Felice Gimondi.

Merckx’s commentary on Ocaña’s race was so telling and accurate that it requires nothing further.

‘What do I think of Luis Ocaña? He’s a good rider. He made a big impression on me in the first week of the Tour, but he doesn’t cope well with repeated efforts… It’s not my place to cast judgement on Ocaña’s qualities and his future but I’m convinced that by basing their route and their publicity on the state of grace that he was in last year, exactly when I was in poor form, the organisers have done him a disservice. And to end this debate once and for all, I’ll ask all those who maintain that the war of supremacy between Ocaña and Merckx isn’t over to examine our palmarès, and to remember that he’s started four Tours and abandoned in three of them.’

As the 1972 Tour ended, that – Merckx’s palmarès – now appeared to be the sole source of interest. Every adversary, two generations of
them,
had been devoured. All that was left were hypothetical comparisons with past luminaries and their achievements. In the spring, an Italian newspaper had already postulated that Merckx’s victories eclipsed the combined record of Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali. Alfredo Binda had won five Giri d’Italia, two more than Merckx, but at 27 Merckx still had ample time to reach and surpass him. In the Tour, Merckx could draw level with Jacques Anquetil with five wins as early as 1973. That, though, looked unlikely, as the Giro and Vuelta a España bosses were lobbying much harder to have Merckx at their race in 1973 than their counterparts from the Tour. The hostility he now encountered from the fans in France, plus the fact that he now considered his duel with Ocaña over, were further reasons to give the Tour the break from him that it seemed to crave.

What was Merckx to do in other races except keep winning? There was no danger of boredom affecting him. His great secret, as well as his deadpan enthusiasm, was his anxiety, which proved the perfect antidote to complacency. Merckx once spoke of the ‘screaming uncertainty within me’ which came from ‘never [being] totally sure what I was capable of’. Even in his total domination at the Tour, he had agonised endlessly over his equipment, his health and his position on the bike. ‘He was constantly calling Bruyère,’ says Raymond Poulidor. ‘It’d be “Joseph, where’s my allen key? Do I look too low? Or too high?” At first you thought he must be suffering but, then, from the way he rode, you realised that it was all in his head.’

Where fame could take most minds off the job, in Merckx’s case it seemed only to sharpen his concentration. ‘Merckx is never alone but he is always solitary,’ wrote the
Het Nieuwsblad
journalist Willem Van Wijnendaele. Such was his celebrity in Belgium that he now found it impossible to isolate himself. One day, a journalist had turned up unannounced at his house in Tervuren, and Guillaume
Michiels
had to smuggle Merckx and his bike out of the house in the boot of his car. When they were out of eyeshot and a safe distance away, Merckx hopped out and set off for training. Early in 1972, he and Claudine had moved a few kilometres to an unostentatious, new-build villa on the secluded Snippenlaan in Kraainem, another eastern suburb of Brussels. Die-hard fans quickly cottoned on. Claudine would occasionally catch them peering through windows, creeping through the back garden or even trying to pinch Merckx’s jerseys off the washing line. At the Giro in May, the Italians had perhaps grown weary of his victories, but they were still mesmerised in his presence. In Sicily, fans had blockaded Merckx inside his hotel, and it had taken all of Giorgio Albani’s negotiating skills and decoy tactics worthy of the secret service to smuggle him out. Before that, the 1971 Tour of Lombardy had been the first ever cycle race (excluding the Olympics) broadcast on live TV in the United States and Canada. Merckx was now a global star – a fact reflected again by the presence at the Classics of a journalist from
Sports Illustrated
. The resulting piece served up curious titbits on Merckx’s taste in music (Claudine: ‘He likes Louis Armstrong and Fats Domino’) his substandard garden maintenance (‘the millionaire’s grass was badly in need of cutting – a comforting sign of decay?’) and the guesstimate that his basic salary from Molteni was $60,000. It also heavily quoted Jean Van Buggenhout on Merckx’s relationship with Claudine. Was Merckx romantic? ‘Oh, no, not at all. He was romantic only with his bicycle. Claudine was the first girl. Claudine is very good for Eddy. Eddy has to worry only about the bicycles,’ said Van Bug.

There were endless, multiplying challenges off the bike, but a diminishing number that hadn’t already been met on it. He hadn’t yet won (or indeed ridden) the Vuelta a España, Amstel Gold or Paris–Tours, but otherwise little remained except records. One in
particular
fascinated him: the one people in cycling referred to just as ‘The Hour’.

With doubts persisting about whether Merckx was merely the best of a bad bunch, a generation of riders weaker than those faced by Anquetil and Coppi, here was one way to prove his value in its purest terms. The prize was so prestigious because the exercise was so simple: ride as far as possible, on a track, in an hour. Merckx called it the ‘the supreme test of cycling’. In 1876 Frank Dodds had set the first mark of 26.508 kilometres, and since then some of cycling’s most illustrious names, including Coppi and Anquetil, had clambered over each other to raise the bar. The record had last been broken in 1968 by the Dane Ole Ritter. It now stood at 48.653 kilometres. To maximise his chances, and minimise his drag through the air, Ritter had made his attempt at altitude, in the velodrome built for the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City. Having also considered the tracks in Munich, Milan and Rome, Merckx finally decided that he too would head to the Agustin Melgar velodrome in Mexico.

He was fortunate in that not since Blois had he felt as powerful, as agile and free of pain as in the autumn of 1972. The World Championships in Gap in France had been a failure due more to a flat course and the usual competing interests in the Belgian team than the winner Marino Basso’s brilliance or Merckx’s own mistakes. Over the following five weeks, Merckx had embarked on a winning spree that rekindled memories of 1969: in 33 starts, he won 22 times, very often with spectacular solo gallops like the one that brought him his second Tour of Lombardy.

Lombardy took place on 7 October. Exactly a fortnight later, Merckx was due to fly to Mexico. What his preparation lacked in time, he made up for in diligence and input from experts. The rarefied air at the velodrome, 2,285 metres above sea level, would be the main
problem,
as well as a potential advantage over everyone who had attempted or broken the record before Ritter. That, at least, was the opinion of Paolo Ceretelli of the Physiological Institute of Milan, who irritated Merckx by revealing several ‘secrets’ of the tests they had conducted on 12 October. ‘Eddy Merckx has a special gift for long, marathon-type efforts,’ Ceretelli said. ‘He’s in the top five out of the hundred elite athletes we’ve examined here. He can consume seventy-three cubic centimetres of oxygen per kilo per minute. Only a few Nordic skiers have gone as high as seventy-six cubic centimetres. His heart-rate is very slow, so his oxygen debt shouldn’t be too great in Mexico. He’ll lose five per cent in terms of physiological output because of the altitude, but he’ll gain around twenty-five per cent in terms of aerodynamic drag, so his average gain on what he could do at sea level will be between 12 and 15 per cent.’