Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (32 page)

Merckx knew all about Maertens even before the youngster finished second in the Flanders of 1973, and Merckx was only third. That day Lomme Driessens, now in charge at Rokado, shamelessly assigned the journeyman Willy De Geest to stick like superglue to Merckx’s rear wheel for almost the entire race. Merckx went back to Kraainem that night and vented his spleen to Claudine about opponents being more interested in hindering him than winning themselves. Maertens’s performance, though, was hardly a shock. ‘I heard that Merckx had been keeping tabs on me when I was still riding as an amateur,’ Maertens says now. ‘I think he already knew or imagined then that I’d become a rival for him.’

‘When I turned pro, it was both easy and difficult. All you had to do in races was follow Eddy or get as close to him as possible, which
of
course wasn’t easy. That was the problem. The other one was that, while it was the smartest thing to do most of the time, by focusing on him and trying to stop him winning, you could also lose races. I saw that a lot with riders at the start of my career.’

Including, presumably, De Geest in that Tour of Flanders…

‘Eddy wasn’t the kind to be jealous, though,’ Maertens continues. ‘He didn’t need to be. There’s no room for jealousy. Just for battle. It was like a big cake – when I turned pro, Eddy had a huge portion of the cake, a few others had their own slice, and the rest fed off scraps. When I came along, I just took another slice and Eddy’s got maybe a tiny bit smaller. That said, our rivalry was starting to build in the spring of 1973. We were talking to each other outside of the races, but in them it was starting to heat up nicely.’

Maertens says that, contrary to what Merckx has always maintained and history seems to affirm, it was Merckx who ‘practically picked the Belgian team’ ahead of the 1973 World Championships in Barcelona. That wasn’t the case but logic suggested that it almost should have been; Merckx had, after all, enjoyed possibly his best ever Classics campaign and won two major tours before the end of the ’73 spring. Forced by illness to skip Milan–San Remo and still rusty at the Tour of Flanders, he tore through what was left of the Classics to win Gent–Wevelgem for the third time, Amstel Gold in Holland for the first, Paris–Roubaix for the third and Liège–Bastogne–Liège for the fourth. Four days after Liège, he started his first Vuelta a España. A 17-stage race, whose highest mountain was the 1,145-metre Coll Formic, proved easy pickings against Luis Ocaña, and he duly prevailed over the Spaniard by just under four minutes. A four-day breather, then it was on to the Giro d’Italia and another first: Merckx wore the pink jersey of the race leader from the start of the
race
in Belgium to the final podium in Trieste. Five days in, he had already snaffled three stage wins and sent this ominous missive for anyone awaiting his decline: ‘To use an Italian expression, “
L’appetito vien mangiando
” – appetite comes with eating. I’d be lying if I said that mine was sated.’

On the road to a seven-minute, 42-second overall victory ahead of Felice Gimondi, there was just one unexpected twist: for the first time in five years, at Forte dei Marmi, Gimondi had beaten Merckx in a time trial. ‘Five years! Five long years!’ Gimondi moans today. ‘Five years!’ Gimondi’s directeur sportif at the time, Giancarlo Ferretti, echoes him. ‘And Gimondi wasn’t a pantomime horse! But he couldn’t beat this monster,’ Ferretti adds.

It wouldn’t be Merckx and Gimondi’s last battle of the 1973 season. Whether it was Merckx or the Belgian cycling federation, Royale Ligue Vélocipédique Belge, who really picked the national team, results in 1973 made Merckx an automatic choice for the Worlds in September – and that also applied to Maertens. Along with Roger De Vlaeminck and the former milkman (nickname: ‘The Flying Milkman’) Frans Verbeeck, and together with his Flandria teammate Walter Godefroot, Maertens had already pulled up a chair at the top table of Belgian cycling. ‘Maertens is fast, he’s good on the flat, on the climbs…we’re all a bit scared of Maertens in 1973,’ says Roger De Vlaeminck.

In Spain, Merckx could at least count on three of his most trusted and able teammates, the three Josephs: Huysmans, De Schoenmaecker and Bruyère. That and a course weaving up and around the Montjuïc park that Merckx had discovered at Catalan week in March and left him licking his lips. Having sat out the Tour de France, he was also in brilliant form. So brilliant that a time of six minutes and ten seconds in a one-off five-kilometre pursuit match against Joop Zoetemelk on
the
track in Amsterdam, in cruise control, had him briefly contemplating a tilt at the world track championships.

Belgium had the perfect captain on the perfect route in the perfect form. Nothing, though, was ever straightforward when riders who for the other 364 days of the year defended the interests of their trade teams were bundled together in the sky-blue, yellow, black and red Belgian national colours. One morning before the road race, the Belgian team at least put up a united front on a group-training ride on the Montjuïc circuit. In their Flandria trade team, Walter Godefroot had taken Maertens under his wing at the start of the season, and now the two rode side-by-side. When Godefroot saw and recognised Tullio Campagnolo in the Italian national team vehicle, he called out a jovial greeting.

The founder and owner of the biggest component manufacturer in cycling, Campagnolo was a powerful man. It hadn’t escaped his notice, either, that Godefroot rode for a team which, at the start of the year, had broken Campagnolo’s hegemony over the European peloton by signing a deal with the upstart Japanese Shimano. Godefroot’s win on a bike equipped with Shimano Dura Ace components at the Ruta del Sol in February had been the company’s first ever in a major European race.

Campagnolo could have borne a grudge, but he had always liked Godefroot.

‘
Ciao
, Walter! So, who’s going to win on Sunday?’ he shouted out of the car.

Godefroot pointed to Martens. ‘Him.’

‘Oh no, not him,’ Campagnolo replied. ‘He rides for Shimano.’

The car sped off with Godefroot smirking, and Maertens letting his teammate know that he hadn’t much appreciated Campagnolo’s ‘joke’. ‘What if he’s serious? What did he mean?’ Godefroot reassured
him
that it was nothing, just an off-the-cuff remark. Sure, maybe Campagnolo had put up a win bonus for riders using his firm’s gears and brakes on Sunday, but so what? Maertens frowned. That night, he would lie awake in bed replaying in his head what he believed had been a threat.

The Belgian team’s stars and water-carriers assembled again, off the bike, in their pre-race base camp at the Hotel El Rancho in Lloret de Mar the night before the race. These meetings were a ritual for most of the major nations, and served mainly to determine how financial gains would be divided in the event of success. The national federation would put up a substantial bonus, the winner’s trade team too, and there were factors to consider like the appearance fees a world champion could command in criteriums, and also the fact that in most cases the winner would have relied to some extent on the help or at least non-opposition of riders who were usually his rivals.

As every year in the Belgian camp, the discussion was loud and lively.

Roger De Vlaeminck remembers: ‘There are eleven or twelve of us in the room and we start talking about
tactics
. “
Tactics
”. I mean, how can you talk about “
tactics”
?’ Otherwise stated, one rule usually applied in Belgian national teams – the law of the jungle. ‘Anyway,’ De Vlaeminck continues, ‘Merckx is saying that he’ll give us a certain amount of money if we work for him [Maertens claimed that it was 100,000 Belgian francs], and Freddy and I say that, no, we’d rather work for ourselves. The only agreement we have is that if one of us attacks, none of the other Belgian riders can go after him unless he’s sure that he’s not dragging a rider from another national team with him. We all agree on that.’

This all became highly relevant when, the following afternoon, having already pruned the lead group to just six riders, Merckx
launched
his second big attack on the Castillo climb two laps from the end. What happened next was to be dissected and debated endlessly in the Hotel El Rancho that night and in the Belgian press for years to come, but the television pictures are irrefutable: Maertens is the first to chase Merckx from a starting position
behind
Felice Gimondi and Luis Ocaña and what
should
have been the best seat in the house. Had he stuck, Maertens, and certainly Belgium, couldn’t lose: either Gimondi and Ocaña would have tried to catch Merckx and frazzled in the heat, leaving a fresher Maertens to counter-attack alone later, or they would have succeeded and Maertens would have been both the best-rested and the fastest rider in the four-man group. In a third eventuality, Merckx would have ridden away to a third world title alone. But instead Maertens decided to twist. Within seconds Ocaña and Gimondi were snug in his slipstream and the trio joined Merckx.

All was not yet lost. Far from it. Merckx had never been beaten by either Gimondi or Ocaña in a meaningful sprint, not since the 1966 Tour of Lombardy where Gimondi had outfoxed rather than outkicked him. Maertens was even faster than Merckx. They both also looked across at Gimondi and Ocaña and saw signs that both men were tiring. Gimondi had few illusions about a sprint finish but even fewer alternatives. ‘I knew that I was going to lose the sprint, but I couldn’t not do it because the Italian national coach, Nino Defilippis, had left Gianni Motta at home to stake everything on me. I was obliged,’ Gimondi says. ‘It was a question of saving my balls.’

If Gimondi was flagging then so, it seemed, was Maertens. Merckx claimed later that Maertens had continually asked him to refrain from attacking on the last two laps in return for the promise of help should the race end in a sprint. Merckx had hesitated for a second, then accepted the quid pro quo.

Maertens was already leading when the quartet rounded the final bend, and Ocaña was already struggling. But as Maertens engaged his turbo with 200 metres to go, something very odd happened: Merckx’s legs turned to lead. It took Gimondi a few seconds to realise, during which time Maertens slowed to see where he had left his teammate. As Merckx’s thighs chopped, his shoulders rocked and his momentum drained, Gimondi glimpsed the chance of a lifetime, and Maertens had no choice but to forget about his compatriot. In the final 100 metres Gimondi swung right across Maertens, their shoulders met, then Gimondi veered back to his left and over the line centimetres ahead of Maertens. Now Maertens turned again. ‘Coward!’ he spat as Merckx passed on his left-hand side. Some also claimed to have heard him immediately accusing Merckx of selling the race to Gimondi, either because he was a friend or because that pair both used Campagnolo components.

More recriminations would come later, but for now Merckx was inconsolable. The ‘real drama in his life’ was playing out before the eyes and cameras of the world. In 1974, the French documentary
La Course en Tête
would capture the full asphyxiating anguish of these moments, as Merckx sat speechless in the Belgian pit area then in the passenger seat of a team vehicle. At one point an autograph hunter appears at the car window. Merckx’s instinct is to oblige him or at least apologise that he can’t. He tries to open his mouth but nothing comes out. He then does his best to hide his face. It is a brief but telling snapshot from the inside of the Merckx goldfish bowl.

An hour or two later, back at the El Rancho hotel, the arguments had begun and would rage into the night. At first Merckx didn’t want to see Maertens, but after dinner with Maertens at a nearby restaurant, Herman Van Springel and Rik Van Linden brought the pair
together.
Merckx’s main bugbear was the Maertens counter-attack, which had raised Gimondi and Ocaña from the dead and was a flagrant breach of their pre-race agreement. Maertens, in turn, was furious with Merckx for insisting on the last two laps that he would win the sprint as long as Maertens performed lead-out duties; one man had kept his half of the bargain, the other had not. Maertens believed that Merckx had been cooked, knackered, but too proud to admit it, as well as too happy for his friend Gimondi to become world champion at Maertens’s expense.

The single thing they both agreed on, not that it mattered, was that Gimondi should have been disqualified for changing his line in the final sprint. ‘We complained to the commissaires after the race but were told, “Disqualify Gimondi? We can’t do that to our friends at the Italian Federation,”’ Maertens says now, repeating the allegation he made at the time.

Both men went to bed still seething, and would have fooled not even the most inexperienced, incompetent body language expert when they appeared on a TV chat show together back in Belgium the following day.

‘There was a moment in the race when I didn’t feel very good, and Eddy came and said he was riding fantastically, and it was my duty to lead him out,’ Maertens told the host in a barely audible mumble.

‘I don’t think we’ll be enemies from now on, and I think that everyone will ride their own race. We should stay sporting, and I don’t think there’s any reason to ride against a certain rider,’ Merckx added, with equal lack of conviction.

Who had been right, who had been wrong, and what did it matter in the context of Merckx’s career?

Proceeding in order, there is little doubt that it had been a mistake for Maertens to follow Merckx when he attacked on the Castillo. Not only that, but, having denied it at the time, Maertens acknowledges now what others including Merckx, Godefroot and De Vlaeminck have all said about the way he blazed Merckx’s trail in the final 300 metres. ‘I started to lead out the sprint two kilometres from the finish,’ he concedes. ‘The problem was that it’s not easy to lead out a sprint when you’re a sprinter yourself. I perhaps didn’t do the best job. You can see that when I accelerate, I go too fast and put two bike lengths between Eddy and me.’

De Vlaeminck, incidentally, agrees but thinks the real issue lies elsewhere. ‘Why was Maertens leading out Merckx? I would never have done that.
Never
,’ he says.