Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (40 page)

This is all to show that, contrary to what some would have us believe, Merckx was not dominating at a time when the only doping methods on offer were either unsophisticated or ineffective. After the blood, Fucs would soon be giving Zoetemelk nandrolone, which like all other anabolic steroids was only outlawed in 1978 and first tested for the following year…when Zoetemelk was caught at the Tour de France. There is documentary evidence that at least some members of Thévenet’s Peugeot team were also being prescribed anabolic steroids, as well as cortisone, in 1976. Steroids, it was known, had been at least used since the Mexico Olympics in 1968. Altogether, these products and methods constitute a chemical arsenal almost identical to what Floyd Landis admitted using in the 2006 Tour de France, where he was disqualified and professional cycling perhaps sunk to its lowest, most sordid ebb.

In the absence of any conclusive proof either for or against Merckx, we therefore find ourselves clutching at straws, or at least relying on best estimates and common sense. The answer also depends on the question: if we want to know whether he ever consumed banned substances, we have three ready-made answers in his three positive tests. If, however, the issue at hand is to decide whether his drug-use was systematic and a serious threat to our view of Merckx as the finest rider of his generation, one question leads to another. Were there any huge spikes in his performances that coincided with the advent of new products or methods? No. Could he have lasted as long at the top if he had continuously plied himself with cortisone? If three years were enough to destroy Thévenet, then probably not. Could he conceivably have fudged some tests like other riders from his era have admitted doing? Conceivably, yes. But around
700
of them? Of course he couldn’t. Did he ever say anything to indicate that he was in the medical vanguard like Anquetil? Depends if you count the acupuncture he tried for his sciatica in 1974, or purportedly giving up all conventional medicine to ‘go homoeopathic’ in the summer of 1977, with ‘staggering results’ (not that we saw them). Was Merckx so loved, so fawned over by the fans, the authorities and the media that nothing would have come to light, even if he was doping more often and with more potent substances than anyone else? Well, that’s just it – not everyone did fawn over him, and among the opponents there were people with enough nous, influence and motivation to expose a flagrant cheat if they knew one.

If it comes as any reassurance, some of the men who rode with and against Merckx share our uncertainties. ‘He was way better than anyone else, but we mustn’t shut our eyes either: there was doping in the peloton,’ says Christian Raymond, Merckx’s teammate in 1966 and ’67. ‘Did he have some product that others didn’t have access to? That’s the eternal question. You’d have to ask his masseur, Gust Naessens…’

Little chance of that, because as Freddy Maertens has told us, Naessens is dead.

‘Now, of course, everyone would look at some of his performances and immediately ask questions, because of all the scandals in cycling over the past few years, but then it didn’t even enter our minds,’ says Bernard Thévenet. ‘You look at what Ocaña did at Orcières-Merlette, out-riding a whole peloton on a mountain stage by nine minutes, and you say to yourself “Wow!” But at the time, neither the press nor the other riders said, “Blimey, what’s Ocaña been taking?” It didn’t even cross anyone’s mind. Everyone said, “Oohlalala, he’s strong, that was an amazing ride” but we weren’t suspicious like
people
are now. We asked fewer questions back then. Plus, the products also weren’t as effective.’

That, we have established, may be a misconception, but it is certainly true to say that both riders and their doctors had less expertise and experience of using and correctly dosing performance-enhancing drugs than they do today. An investigation authored by the cycling journalist Pierre Chany and published in
Paris Match
in 1978 listed 17 active or recently retired riders who had died of heart attacks between 1974 and 1977. ‘They are the victims of amphetamines and cortisone,’ said Jean-Pierre de Mondenard, who worked as a doctor on the Tour de France between 1973 and 1975.

If the deaths thankfully slowed in the early 1980s, only to resume under the impulse of the new poison EPO in the late 1980s and early ’90s, Merckx’s stance continued to perplex and sometimes disappoint. His son Axel became a professional cyclist in 1993 and in 1994 was offered advice by the Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari. A year later, Ferrari said in an interview with the website
Cyclingnews.com
in 2004, Eddy Merckx introduced the doctor to Axel’s then Motorola teammate Lance Armstrong. Armstrong said under oath in 2005 that he couldn’t remember whether it was Merckx who had connected him and Ferrari, but confirmed both that Merckx was his ‘close friend’ and that Ferrari had become his training adviser. Armstrong had been called to testify before an arbitration panel when the ‘prize insurance’ company SCA Promotions became concerned, on learning of Armstrong’s relationship with Ferrari, that he had used banned drugs to win the Tour de France and trigger resulting bonus payouts from SCA. Ferrari is now banned from working with cyclists in Italy. An appeal judge ruled in 2006 that the statute of limitations on a doping-related sentence against him in 2004 had run out, but also said in his
summing
up that there was a ‘persuasive set of clues’ to indicate that Ferrari couldn’t be considered ‘clearly innocent’.

Merckx’s support of Armstrong has remained steadfast in the face of mushrooming allegations against him, most recently from his old US Postal Service teammates. ‘If the reality was what they say it was, they should have spoken before, not after,’ Merckx said in an interview with his old friend Philippe Brunel in 2011. ‘That’s called spitting in the soup,’ he added.

This final remark reveals both Merckx’s unwavering love of his sport as he knew it and the belief that public airings of cycling’s dirty laundry equate to nothing but self-harm. It is a familiar and self-serving point of view from a former cyclist. It is also a questionable – or negligible – contribution to a clean-up operation which has accelerated since 2000 partly because more riders are opening up about their former misdeeds, Armstrong’s old teammates included. With not only his own reputation but that of cycling down the ages at stake, no one should be surprised now if Merckx neither endorses nor participates in the soul-cleansing.

reinvention and reappraisal

‘He’s not only the greatest rider of all time but the most important sportsman of all time, in any discipline.’
G
IANCARLO
F
GERRETTI

JOSEPH BRUYÈRE THINKS
that it may have been the first day of March 1978. He remembers because his son had been born on 27 February, two days earlier. After a winter which Bruyère says now had been ‘
fracassant
’, shattering, for his team-leader Eddy Merckx, Bruyère exited the highway before Brussels and drove through Kraainem thinking that, with Het Volk just three days away, it was time to look forward. He took his usual route on to the Snippenlaan, past immaculately tended hedges and wrought-iron gates, and turned into the driveway of the least ostentatious of the dozen properties on the street – the modern, low-slung, thatched-roofed villa belonging to the Merckxes. Within a few minutes, Bruyère had unpacked his bike and he and Merckx were out on the open road, heading east towards the cobbled
bergs
which at the weekend would determine whether Merckx could repeat his 1971 and 1973 victories in ‘Volk’ – or whether Bruyère could win again like he had in ’74 and ’75.

They had been riding for around two hours when, at the top of a small hill, Bruyère heard a familiar grunt.

‘Joseph!’

Bruyère turned around to see Merckx’s head sagging over the multicoloured bands of his C&A jersey’s collar.

‘Joseph, I’ve had enough. I feel terrible,’ Merckx said.

It is typical of Bruyère to insist now that Merckx hadn’t been dropped, and was just acting on a ‘
coup de tête
’. His head had gone, more than his legs. ‘Never for a second did it cross my mind that it was over,’ Bruyère stresses. ‘It could just have been one of those days. We all have them.’

Nevertheless, Bruyère was soon turning around and riding back to Kraainem with his disconsolate friend. In a way it was a lot like any other day, with Bruyère’s legs turning like the giant oars of a Viking longboat, and Merckx’s thudding beside him – only the speed was 10 or 15 kilometres an hour slower than usual. ‘We didn’t talk much,’ Bruyère says. ‘It was just a case of keeping him company, plus I was anxious to get back and see my son.’

For that reason, when they arrived at Kraainem, Bruyère was quickly back in his car and on his way towards Liège and home. Eddy’s own son, five-year-old Axel, was recovering from whooping cough but had passed it on to his eight-year-old sister Sabrina. Eddy would have enough to distract him and enough on his mind.

That night, in fact, Claudine would be the only one in the Merckx family who wasn’t ill. In the evening, Eddy had driven to a clinic in Brussels and would remain there for the next two nights. Tests revealed that had colitis, an inflammation of the colon. It had been aggravated if not caused by stress. Merckx may not have already been suffering from clinical depression, but he was heading in that direction.

Needless to say, he missed Het Volk and Milan–San Remo. If Roger De Vlaeminck’s victory on the Via Roma wasn’t a kick in the teeth, Freddy Maertens’s comments before the race had been. ‘Eddy’s finished,’ Maertens said, ‘and the only person who doesn’t realise it is him. He says that he wants revenge at the Tour de France, but if you ask me he’s not even going to start.’

Contrary to what Maertens had said, Merckx was beginning to get the picture. The day after San Remo, before setting off for a race in Sint-Niklaas near Antwerp, he told his soigneur Pierrot De Wit, ‘I’ve got a feeling this is going to be the very last time I race.’ Later that afternoon De Wit was there waiting for him at the finish line, which Merckx had crossed in 12th place, 15 seconds behind the winner Frans Van Looy. ‘You see, it wasn’t bad at all!’ De Wit cajoled.

‘Believe me, it was the last one,’ Merckx told him.

But his moods still fluctuated and in April there were rumours of him having identified the problem – a virus caught at the ’77 Worlds in Venezuela – as well as talk of pathetic attempts to train. ‘Pathetic’ was also the word the Belgian national champion Michel Pollentier used to describe Merckx’s present state. ‘What does Eddy still want?’ asked De Vlaeminck. ‘Cycling has given him everything: money and glory. He has nothing to gain from getting back on his bike.’

For another few weeks Merckx would stand by what he said to De Wit one day, then persuade himself otherwise the next. Having pulled out of the Tour of Belgium at the last minute, he rounded up the family and headed to Crans-Montana in the Swiss Alps. The Merckxes were regulars there, and Eddy soon slotted into a routine of daily cross-country skiing
randonnées
with his old mate Alfred ‘Bouby’ Rombaldi, an ex-slalom racer. A few times, he spoke on the phone to Bruyère. In Merckx’s absence, his faithful old footman won Liège–Bastogne–Liège, and Bruyère called Crans-Montana that night to tell Merckx ‘that was for you’. ‘But generally, you couldn’t speak
to
him about cycling. You had to treat him like a normal man in the street, not the superhuman he had been before,’ Bruyère says. ‘Everyone on the team knew that he was suffering, and we felt that we had to give something back.’

Merckx was in Geneva at the time of the Tour of Romandy, but only to sign autographs in a C&A shop. The next day, 8 May, he went on his bike to the GP de Wallonie…but only as a spectator. Three days later, Jos Huysmans, who had already retired from riding and was now Merckx’s directeur sportif, met Merckx while he was training near Charleroi. ‘I still don’t feel good,’ Merckx told him. They said goodbye with Huysmans none the wiser about whether Merckx was still a racer or not. The same day, the organisers of the Tour of Switzerland announced that they could wait no longer to hear whether Merckx intended to enter their race. They had given C&A’s place to another team.

At eight minutes past four on Monday 18 May, Eddy Merckx entered the conference room of a Brussels hotel. He was dressed in a jacket and tie. He took the microphone, faced the large gathering of assembled journalists who had guessed what was coming, and he spoke.

‘I have taken the most painful decision of my career,’ Merckx said. ‘I have decided to stop competing. My doctors have said unequivocally that I can’t ride for the moment. As a result, it would be impossible for me to get ready for the Tour de France, my number-one goal of the season. I’ve had to come back down to earth but the decision I’ve taken, as cruel as it is, is the only reasonable one that’s available.’

It was reported in some places that Merckx cried, but he didn’t. The only tears were coming from the audience.

Paul Van Himst knew exactly how his friend Eddy Merckx felt. A year earlier, Van Himst had stared into ‘the black hole’ of retirement, as
he
calls it today, having also known what it was like to become a Belgian national icon purely because you were good at a sport. Once dubbed the ‘White Pélé’ by
L’Equipe
, Van Himst was the greatest Belgian footballer who ever lived. Van Himst and Merckx went back years. To the time, precisely, says Van Himst, ‘when I was already playing for Anderlecht but was also selling coffee part-time – one of the shops I sold to belonged to Eddy’s parents in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre’.

Van Himst had not seen Merckx on a regular basis during their careers, but right from their chance meeting as teenagers he had only ever known Eddy as the kid racing and winning on his bike. Now though, Merckx had only been retired a matter of weeks, and he already looked to Van Himst like a different person. While their wives, Claudine and Arlette, swapped news of the children, Van Himst looked across the living room at Merckx and saw the struggling 33-year-old man described to him a few days earlier by Guillaume Michiels.