Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (7 page)

Ninety-one summers young, in his home in Tours on the banks of the Loire, Gaston Plaud can still reel off names of the cyclists he helped guide to superstardom – Simpson, Pingeon, Charly Gaul, Ferdinand Bracke, Merckx and more. Plaud and his memory only show their age when he’s asked how,
why
, for heaven’s sake, he allowed a gem like Eddy Merckx to escape through his fingers at the end of 1967.

‘But, but, Pingeon was a good rider. He had won the Tour…’ Plaud starts to stammer.

But, but it’s not good enough.

*

There was more one big opportunity to stake a claim, as well as the rainbow jersey of the World Champion to win. The rendezvous was at Herleen, a grimy mining town in the south of Holland, on 3 September 1967. The sandy-haired, smooth-talking, short-sighted Jan Janssen had won the Vuelta a España in the spring. He would be the home fans’ talisman and one of the favourites. So too would Eddy Merckx and Gianni Motta.

Contrary to what had been written at the time, San Remo in March had not been Motta’s ‘funeral’. It was true that the left leg run over by a car at the 1965 Tour of Romandy had been hampering his form and his morale since the start of the year, but there was no doubt that he was taking his shot at redemption in Holland very seriously indeed. Since around the time of the Giro, he had been working closely with a Milanese doctor, a 38-year-old surgeon and biochemist by the name of Gianni Aldo de Donato. From what little was known of him, de Donato seemed an extraordinary character. In 1959 at the age of 30, he had reportedly discovered the world’s first antiviral medicine. That had earned him a full-page homage in the
New York Times
. Since then, he had gone back to more mundane matters, and was carrying out one of his routine visits in May 1967 when he noticed ‘a strange agitation’ in one of his patients. Further investigation revealed the cause of the man’s ills: he couldn’t fathom why Gianni Motta wasn’t riding better at the Giro d’Italia. Suddenly curious, de Donato had reached for a pen and paper and written a long letter. Motta had replied courteously, and quickly, because before the end of the Giro de Donato was filling another envelope with a handful of yellow capsules and a note about suggested dosage. The pills were perfectly legal, de Donato maintained. Sold under the commercial name LILLY, they contained ‘a catalyst of the 13 biochemical reactions which take place in the muscle’. De Donato was certain
that,
had Motta taken them throughout the Giro, and had Gimondi not been able to count on the ‘
santa alleanza degli italiani
’, Motta would have won the Giro. Not only that, but he reckoned that 24-year-old Motta had the body of a 21-year-old. He would ‘explode’ over the coming seasons.

‘He’s a squirrel, Mother Nature’s been good to Gianni,’ was the doctor’s bizarre assessment. It got weirder: ‘Put a squirrel and a mole at the bottom of a tree and the squirrel will climb up, while the mole will stay down below. He’s a squirrel, he’s been lucky. He can succeed in everything, he has to succeed in everything.’

Their collaboration had continued and intensified over the summer, to the point where de Donato was now commonly depicted as some kind of mystical shaman who had Motta ‘in his thrall’. Everywhere the doctor went, suspicion stalked him. In the Italian team camp in Valkenberg near Herleen, that had then turned to outright hostility when Motta insisted on both training and eating apart from the other Italian team members, with only de Donato for company. The details of those training sessions defied conventional wisdom about how to prepare for a world championships as well as belief; on both the Wednesday and Friday before Sunday’s World Championship race, Motta had covered 290 kilometres at 40 kilometres per hour. Wild speculation about exactly what de Donato was giving or doing to him spread through the foreign riders and press. Some claimed that de Donato was a ‘neuropsychiatrist’. Others reported that, in the runup to Herleen, Motta had followed the regimen of a NASA cosmonaut. Elsewhere, there were clear inferences that de Donato was feeding Motta much more sinister substances than the meat and vegetable milkshakes which had become his main sustenance.

‘I’ve realised that drugs rule cycling. Doping is the riders’ daily bread. The riders love it because it reduces their suffering. But in my
opinion
it has put the brakes on the technical development of this sport,’ de Donato tried to argue, clearly to little avail.

The misgivings turned to astonishment on the day of the race when the start-gun sounded and Motta shot out of the bunch. Only de Donato nodded his approval; Gianni was sticking to their plan. In the confusion, five riders had jumped across with him: the Englishman Ronald Addy, the Spaniard Ramon Saez, Janssen’s compatriot Jos van der Vleuten and Eddy Merckx. Nineteen laps and over 250 kilometres remained.

The laps ticked by, the gap grew. At the end of each one, Motta scanned the huge crowds for his guru. De Donato responded with a ‘Forza, Gianni!’ or a clenched fist. Merckx, meanwhile, looked for the brown, shoulder-length hair of his mother, Jenny. Once or twice he took a can of Coca-Cola from her outstretched hand.

Back in the peloton, the local boy Janssen’s worry and frustration grew. To use one of Janssen’s favourite French expressions, he ‘
pédalait dans le beurre
’ – literally, he was pedalling through butter. In other words, it was effortless. After eight laps, he could wait no longer. Towards the top of the only real hill on the course, Janssen accelerated and gained 50 metres. Two laps later, at the midway point of the race, he joined Merckx, Motta, Saez and van der Vleuten.

With two laps to go, Janssen drew close to Merckx. The pair of them had shared a ride the previous year when Merckx’s car had broken down on the way to a race. Merckx now turned to him. ‘So, between you and me, who wins? We need to be careful of the Spaniard Saez, because he’s fast in a sprint, that guy. And Motta will be quick as well…’

‘If we get to the finish all together, I’m going to ask van der Vleuten to lead out the sprint from a long way, a kilometre out. That OK?’ Janssen replied.

‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,’ Merckx agreed.

Janssen knew that, in his eagerness, Merckx would want to squeeze between the two Dutchmen and come under the kilometre-to-go flag on van der Vleuten’s wheel. The latter would fade 400 metres from the line, whereupon Merckx would launch his sprint and himself begin to slow in the last 100 metres. Janssen’s superior speed, as a three-time former winner of the Tour de France’s green jersey, would then guarantee him victory.

That was the theory, but not quite how it turned out: when the quintet reached the final bend, 500 metres out, van der Vleuten had still not kicked. By the time that he did, then jagged to the right at the 200-metre banner, Merckx was closing in on victory and Janssen had lost vital speed as he swung left to avoid his teammate. Janssen was clearly quicker but Merckx held on…by 30 centimetres. Exhausted by his last-ditch attack on the final lap, Gianni Motta came home in fourth place and collapsed into Doctor de Donato’s arms.

The aftermath was dominated by recriminations – Janssen’s aimed at van der Vleuten for not respecting orders in the final kilometre, Motta’s at the entire Italian team for not marking Janssen, and theirs at him for attacking so early. Amid the brouhaha, the most important outcome was the one that too many still seemed determined to overlook: at age 22, Eddy Merckx would end the 1967 season as the champion, nay the king of the cycling world.

‘We hadn’t seen anything special,’ protests Jan Janssen. ‘He was like anyone else. We never thought for a second he’d be a really great rider. He was like Willy Planckaert, Godefroot and lots of others.’

He says this then pauses – a long, dramatic, meaningful pause. ‘The first time I saw him do something really remarkable,’ Janssen goes on, ‘was at Heerlen. There I realised that, to beat that guy, you had to put your foot to the floor and them some.’

‘I was the strongest that day, Eddy knew I was the strongest, but, yeah, I’ll admit it, you could see at the end of ’67 that Eddy was something else,’ says Gianni Motta. ‘Pingeon had won the Tour but, with Pingeon, you knew an hour earlier when he was going to attack. Merckx, by comparison to Pingeon and the rest of us, was Superman.’

Maybe, finally, someone was opening their eyes.

3

fire and ice

‘I can still see Eddy on the climbs before the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, in the snow…He can’t contain himself. He has magic in his legs.’
M
ARINO
V
IGNA

IN THE HOURS
leading up to what would be Eddy Merckx’s second Giro and only his second major tour, he had fizzed with nervous energy in Faema’s pre-race HQ in Gavirate. Eighteen months earlier, the same callow exuberance had led to a falling out with the Italian Vittorio Adorni in the sprint to the line at the 1966 Tour of Lombardy, won by Adorni’s then Salvarani teammate Gimondi. Now, by some coincidence or serendipity, Adorni was lying on a twin bed in Merckx’s hotel room,
their
hotel room, observing his young teammate through half-amused, half-admonishing eyes.

Adorni had arrived in Gavirate, dragged his suitcase through reception, up the staircase and through the door a couple of days earlier and found Merckx already fussing and fretting. ‘What are they?’ were Adorni’s first words, index finger outstretched accusingly towards the three large bags encumbering the space. ‘No, you don’t,’ he’d said without waiting for an answer. ‘Where do you think you’re going? On holiday? No, you’re not doing that. If we’re sharing the same space, it’s one suitcase each…’

Soon, it wouldn’t be luggage but an item of clothing that was bothering Adorni: the hallowed
maglia rosa
, the pink jersey awarded to the Giro leader. Two kilometres from the finish line of what should have been a non-eventful first, true stage of the 1968 Giro to Novara across the plains of Piedmont, Merckx had catapulted out from behind teammate Martin Van Den Bossche’s rear wheel and into the slipstream of a television motorbike. He had dwelled for a second, suspended mesmerically in front of the main peloton, before kicking again to finally cross the line six seconds ahead of the rest. He had then matter-of-factly made his way to the podium to exchange his world champion’s rainbow-striped jersey for the pale pink of the
maglia rosa
, the same pink jersey that was now draped over a chair in his and Adorni’s hotel room.

Before the lights went out that evening, thoughts and the conversation turned to the tactic they should now adopt over the next week, until what was predicted to be the first decisive stage of the race to Brescia.

‘
Non ti preoccupare
’ – don’t worry, Adorni told his young companion. ‘We’ll give the jersey to someone else and let their team control the race for a few days. That way you can be
tranquillo
…’

Adorni waited for an answer. Silence. He looked across to see Merckx’s lips pursed in defiance, his head shaking.

‘No no no no no.’

‘What do you mean, “No no no”?’

‘Why would we lose the jersey? The race finishes in Napoli, right? Right, well, I want to keep it until Napoli.’

A long-standing member of the International Cycling Union’s management committee, even now in his 70s, Vittorio Adorni is a frequent visitor to cycling’s major races. More often than not a sweater is draped over his high, broad shoulders and the creases ironed in his slacks are the only things sharper than his observations.

‘Eddy was adamant: he was going to lead the Giro from start to finish,’ he remembers with a smile. ‘I kept telling him,
tranquillo
.
Calmo
! But at first he wouldn’t have any of it. Then, eventually, he saw sense. He learned more in that Giro than most people learn in a career.’

For all that he would raise his voice to Merckx more than once during the ’68 Giro, Adorni was not generally known for his authoritarian style of leadership. ‘Diplomatic’, ‘gentlemanly’ or even ‘ambassadorial’ were more common descriptions. This, primarily, was why Vincenzo Giacotto had signed him a few months earlier. Giacotto wanted to ‘Italianicise’ Merckx and his racing, and Adorni had both the experience and the tact to impart a rigour that seemed to elude the Italians in everyday life, but for some reason imbued their approach to cycling. A former and possible future Giro winner in his own right, Adorni boasted another key selling point: he had spent three years in the same team as Gimondi and knew his every secret. He would therefore act not only as Merckx’s mentor, his chaperon and his domestique de luxe, but also as his informant.

Adorni was certainly under no illusions about Merckx’s potential. The previous year’s world championship road race at Herleen was, he agrees, ‘the moment when the penny dropped and we started to think “Oh dear”’. Fortunately by that time he already knew that he would be riding with and not against Merckx in 1968. After Nino Defilippis’s ‘electrocution’, Vincenzo Giacotto’s final meetings with Faema about budgets, and Merckx’s committal to a three-year deal worth 400,000 Belgian francs a year, Adorni had been identified and recruited as Faema’s in-race
éminence grise
. He was now 30 years old; it was time to think less about personal glory than putting ‘
fieno in cascina
’ – literally putting hay in the barn. Saving. Thinking about his future. Adorni’s father had been a bricklayer; Vittorio could
scarcely
have aspired to anything more glamorous before the day, aged 18, he and some mates rode from their homes in Parma out into the Apennines. A few hours and one ascent of the 1,041-metre Passo della Cisa later, he had been hooked.

He had been a pro for over seven years, but never had he seen anything quite like Merckx. At Faema’s first get together of the winter in Reggio Calabria, Merckx had astonished his new teammates first with his efforts to learn Italian, then with his attitude to training sessions. A spot of good-natured jousting wasn’t and indeed still isn’t unusual between teammates in this setting, and normally Adorni would relish the impromptu races which often crackled into life on the climbs. But not here. Not with Merckx. ‘He just wanted to race all the time,’ the Italian says, still sounding exasperated. Whenever the road angled skywards, Adorni would hear that deadly whirr at his back, then within seconds, Merckx would appear and vanish in the same flourish of flesh and metal. ‘There would be riders all over the road, absolute carnage,’ Adorni remembers. And the worst – or best – of it: ‘In spite of all the energy he seemed to be wasting on silly races in training, the kid was never, ever tired.’