Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (5 page)

Patrick Sercu could vouch for the comfortable surroundings in which Merckx was raised. He first teamed up with Merckx in track races when they were both teenagers. Sercu then became a regular visitor at the Merckx household when he was stationed in military barracks near Brussels during his national service in 1963. He remembers Merckx’s ‘very lovely mother’ Jenny, her delicious cooking, Eddy’s ‘very disciplined father who didn’t speak much’ and thinking that they had ‘maybe a bit more money than normal people, but had to work very, very hard for it’.

Sercu didn’t need these glimpses of domestic serenity to convince him that his friend had a lust for cycling and for winning that went beyond the usual zest and bravado of youth. It was a fire burning deep, deep within. ‘To tell the truth, Eddy has a very big advantage over all of us: he has remained a true amateur,’ Sercu declared at the time.

Sercu meant that his Madison partner’s was a pure, unfettered, unquestioned passion for cycling – one of an amateur in the word’s original sense, ‘lover’. People would later marvel at his professionalism, when really it was Merckx’s amateurism that was unique. The lady who would become his wife at the end of 1967 knew it well. ‘The problem with Eddy is that he was vaccinated with a bicycle spoke,’ Claudine would joke. So viscerally did his love of racing translate into aggression that Claudine admitted to being frightened when she watched her husband hammering away on the front of a peloton.

Over subsequent years, those who knew the couple would describe their marriage as the final piece in the Merckx jigsaw, the solid ground from which he could plot the final ascent of cycling’s Everest. Merckx once said that his days consisted of three things – ‘cycling, recovering and sleeping’. It was not a complaint, more the honest admission of a person to whom life had given one immense blessing: not a talent but a calling. Anquetil had utilised one to cultivate the other; with Merckx,
it
was the vocation that came first. His talent was the flower that grew from that stem.

In his compelling study of how excellence develops,
The Talent Code
, Daniel Coyle cites several examples to illustrate how outstanding motivation underlies all outstanding progress and achievement. One of Coyle’s most striking case studies involved 157 children as they prepared to start learning a musical instrument. Before their first lesson, the children were asked how long they envisaged playing the instrument – a year or under, to the end of primary school, to the end of high school or for the rest of their lives. The musicians’ abilities were then plotted against their hours of weekly practice after nine months. The man who conducted the study, Gary McPherson, said the results were ‘staggering’: ‘With the same amount of practice, the long-term commitment group outperformed the short-term commitment group by four hundred per cent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-terms who practised for an hour and a half.’

McPherson’s conclusion was this: ‘It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallising experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says
I am a musician
. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.’

Or, in Coyle’s words, ‘What ignited the progress wasn’t any skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energised and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.’

Early in 1967, it was perhaps premature to speculate about what had ‘ignited’ Eddy Merckx, but the match under his natural ability, that searing desire which terrified Claudine, was there for all to see and envy. No wonder Nino Defilippis, witnessing it for the first time, spoke of an ‘electrocution’.

Merckx himself still didn’t know how far it would all take him, and neither, at this point, did rivals with their own designs on world domination. Merckx’s 1966 season had been an improvement on 1965, with 20 wins including that first and to date only true pearl, Milan–San Remo, but most, including Merckx, would wait somewhat longer than Defilippis for their eureka moment.

And, yet, even a fortnight before lightning shook the Matterhorn, it had struck for the second time in two years 300 kilometres to the south on the Ligurian coast.

2

something in the water

‘We were too immersed in our own careers to see what was going on. To an extent, we only realised what had happened when it was too late…’
W
ALTER
G
ODEFROOT

SAN REMO’S VIA
Roma is one of those places in sport where real mystery and imagined mystique intertwine almost to the point where they become one and the same thing. Augusta National’s 12th tee has its swirling wind, Lord’s its slope, and the Via Roma its own matrix of wiles. Real or imagined, they confuse and beguile. Failing that, they provide explanations for the otherwise inexplicable, excuses for the otherwise inexcusable.

It’s the strange camber, say some. No, argue others, it’s the imperceptible rise in those final 400 metres. Another popular yet preposterous theory is that this otherwise unremarkable shopping street threading east–west through San Remo is beholden to its own micro-climate. The breeze doesn’t so much blow off the Mediterranean, just two streets to the south, it doesn’t so much swirl as cast a spell. Tonight there is talk of black magic. How else can the Italians account for their 14th consecutive Milan–San Remo without a home winner, after 42 wins in the first 50 editions? Or, for that matter, the second victory by a young Belgian in a Peugeot jersey in two years?

When Eddy Merckx came thrashing, bobbing, brutalising across the line, Italian heads dropped as though from a guillotine. On the road, three of them – Gianni Motta, Franco Bitossi and Felice Gimondi. Then, tens of thousands more behind the barriers on either side, and a hundred or so among the journalists waiting behind the line. All except
Tuttosport
’s Gianpaolo Ormezzano. Ormezzano had gone out on a limb at Paris–Nice the previous year to report that a young Belgian named Merckx was riding strongly in France and was an outsider for victory at San Remo. When Merckx vindicated his judgement a few days later, Ormezzano began to regard the 21-year-old as his own project, his protégé. In March 1967, for the second year in succession, the journalist studied the delighted figure in the black-and-white Peugeot colours as they muscled him towards the podium. If Merckx was handsome, Ormezzano thought to himself, it was in a very un-Italian way. Baldassare Castiglione had spoken for all Italians then and now in his sixteenth-century
Il Cortegiano
– the
Book of the Courtier –
when he decreed that a man must not only look good and speak well but also and above all possess a
sprezzatura
, a certain nonchalance. ‘He conceals art, and presents what is done and said as if it was done without effort and virtually without thought.’ For all his precocity and talents,
sprezzatura
was not a quality displayed by Merckx. His facial features, like his riding style, brought to mind industry, not artistry.

If there was a modern-day expression of the Castiglione prototype, a current ‘King of Cool’, it was the film star Steve McQueen, and Gianni Motta happened to be his spitting image. Right now, though, there was nothing cool about Motta’s reaction to defeat. In two years’ time, just up the coast in Savona, Merckx would curl up on a hotel bed, sobbing uncontrollably and vowing never to race again. That was Motta this evening. One by one, like mourners at a
funeral,
his Molteni teammates filed into his room to offer their support. Up the road in a different hotel, Motta’s sworn enemy Felice Gimondi also stewed.

The night would bring counsel, plus some perspective. Rather than by Merckx, the great Italian triumvirate of Gimondi, Motta and Bitossi had been undone by the Via Roma. That and a universal sporting truth: there are certain horses that excel on certain courses. And also such a thing as a one-trick pony.

Merckx’s sprint victory in the Gent Wevelgem semi-classic 11 days later would do little to change their mind; that picture of the finish line at San Remo, with three children of a golden generation fanned across the Via Roma, and Merckx just ahead of them, said unequivocally that the future looked sun-kissed for Italian cycling.

‘I mean, how were we supposed to know?’ asks Felice Gimondi today, almost pleading for understanding, compassion, maybe even forgiveness. ‘I had won the Tour de France in my first year as a pro, I was about to win another Giro. Everything was going well…Who knows how many more Giri d’Italia I’d have won if
he
hadn’t come along. But he did come along. And we didn’t realise for months, years.’

‘O sole mio

sta ‘nfronte a te!

‘O sole, ‘o sole mio
,

sta ‘nfronte a te!

It’s my own sun

that’s upon your face!

The sun, my own sun,

It’s upon your face!

Dino Zandegù says the urge to sing came spontaneously, the words just flowed. Well, not exactly: a large and vocal group of Italian migrants stationed close to the prize podium had watched him cross the line, his right arm thrust towards the angry skies, his face and hands black as theirs after a day in the mines of Charleroi and Marcinelle, and broken into their own chorus.

First an ironic, ‘
O sole mio!
’, then an invocation to join them: ‘
Canta, Dino, canta!
’: ‘Sing, Dino, sing!’ And so Dino had sung, to the delight of his countrymen and the tickled disbelief of cameramen and journalists from all over Europe.

A few paces away, making his way through the mêlée, Zandegù’s Salvarani teammate Felice Gimondi also smirked. He had watched ‘Il Dinosauro’ win from 200 metres back down the finishing straight in Gent. Thirteen seconds later, Gimondi had followed Eddy Merckx across the line. As the blubs flashed and Merckx lunged, Gimondi harked the anguished cry of a beaten man.

If Zandegù’s performance on the cobbled hills, the
bergs
of the Tour of Flanders on the second day of April was a revelation, his singing was not, at least not for the Italian public. Ever since his Giro d’Italia début three years earlier, the baker’s son from Padova had enlivened many an uneventful race with his impromptu balladry, often accompanying an impressive baritone with exuberant arm-waving. If a birthday needed celebrating, all eyes would be on Zandegù in the middle of the peloton: his mouth and an eyebrow would rise mischievously at one side, he might disappear for a minute or twenty, then reappear balancing a birthday cake in the palm of his right hand and conducting the chorus with his left. ‘
Buon compleanno a te!
Happy birthday to you…’

‘Typical’, says Zandegù today: those three or four bars of ‘
O sole mio!
’ became more famous than the victory they were meant to
celebrate.
More famous even than him beating Eddy Merckx on the Belgian’s own patch.

It was to be the story of Zandegù’s career. No, of his life. He was a talented cyclist but a better showman. And an utterly brilliant raconteur. These attributes now earn him an annual invitation to the Giro d’Italia from state broadcaster RAI. In their daily, pre-stage eyesore, exhibiting all the naffness that makes Italian television a national embarrassment, Zandegù is the performing seal in a circus commanded by the mustachioed ringmaster Marino Bartoletti. In 45 years, not much has changed; what Zandegù used to do within the bosom of the peloton, he now accomplishes in a makeshift studio in the Giro’s hospitality village. At Bartoletti’s unctuous behest, Dino sings, Dino dances, Dino jokes, Dino laughs.

Above all, Dino tells stories. On air and off it – to him it’s the same. No sooner have the credits rolled than ‘Il Dinosauro’ is shuffling off, his fingers are clasped like five thick salamis around a new listener’s, and he’s away. His tales are breathless, hysterical, crescendoing monologues delivered through a north-east Italian accent as gravelly as the unpaved
sterrato
roads which are often their setting. What’s more, says Zandegù, ‘ninety-five per cent of them are true’. Unless, that is, it’s the afternoon. Then, by Dino’s own admission, ‘the percentage falls to ninety’.

Dino, Dino, tell us about growing up…

‘Well, we didn’t have a lot but at least we weren’t hungry because we owned a bakery. You just about scraped by. The first batch of bread that Dad used to bake at 6.30, we kept to one side just in case the oven broke and we were left with nothing. There were 18 of us in the family: eight brothers, six sisters, Mum, Dad, Gran and Granddad. We all used to get together at four every afternoon to boil up the dry, stale
bread,
the
pan biscotto
, and put it into a kind of
panzanella
, a bread salad. It was
buonissima
! Better than what my wife makes now! Anyway, when I won races as an amateur, I’d come home, tell my mum and sisters, and my reward would be a cup of
caffè latte
and a corner of bread straight out of the oven. If I didn’t win, my mum pretended that she’d forgotten to cook and there was nothing you could do! Even my sisters were annoyed with me! Then if I got a bit friendly with a girl, they didn’t like that either! They’d tell me that I had to go and explain to her that I had to race my bike and mustn’t have any distractions. Thanks to them, I was practically a virgin at 26!’

Practically? Eh? Never mind…What about that Tour of Flanders in 1967? Beating Merckx, that must have been something…

‘Ah, yes, well my teammate Gimondi and I attacked with Merckx and came across to Barry Hoban, Noel Foré and Willy Monty, who had been in the break earlier on. After the Mur de Grammont climb, I attacked with Foré and Merckx was stuck, because Gimondi wasn’t going to help him. Foré was too tired after his earlier break to pose any threat in the sprint. I won easily. Then Merckx came over like this big, roaring lion, absolutely furious. I didn’t pay him too much attention. The Italian fans were shouting to me to sing, and it just came naturally.
“O sole mio…!”
.’