Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (34 page)

‘It’s mainly a psychological thing,’ he wrote. ‘A young rider taking on the mountains for the first time goes about it with a ferocious appetite. In the 1967 Giro d’Italia I was climbing big mountains for the first time in my life. What I did on the Blockhaus that year was the performance of a new champion who was getting to know not just the mountains but top-level cycling. The most unlikely challenges appealed to me… In 1969, my irrational exploit on the stage to Mourenx was the performance of a man riding his first Tour and needing, for the reasons you know about, to leave a fabulous mark.

‘If I found myself alone 100 kilometres from the finish in a Tour de France, now I would ease up,’ he continued. ‘I’d think about what lay ahead, the efforts I’d still have to make before the finish line. Five or six years ago, I’d have put my head down and plied on without thinking.’

The problem that maybe Merckx did or didn’t acknowledge was that his ‘irrational exploits’ were central to what had made him Merckx. As Walter Godefroot remarks, what had demoralised his competitors early in his career were not his victories but the manner in which they were achieved. ‘Merckx wasn’t just winning, he was winning with panache, attacking from a long way out, dropping
everyone.
He was the only one who could do that. It made him seem like a different species.’ As time went on, however, his wins were looking more and more like those of a mere mortal – a superior man to the others but a man nonetheless. Previously they hadn’t been just triumphs but traumas for those on the receiving end.

Make no mistake, it was going to be a slow process. The old tyrant still stirred. He could still dole out gifts and punishments like the cycling Almighty he remained. At the Tour of Switzerland a few weeks after the Giro, Franco Bitossi seemed doomed for an agonising near-miss when his old friend caught him 400 metres from the line in Lausanne, only for Merckx to wink in his direction and let him win.

Alas, there was no such charity for Barry Hoban in the first week of the 1974 Tour de France.

‘I’d done well in the prologue, which Eddy had won, and that put me in a good position to get the yellow jersey because there were eight stages before the mountains and lots of bonus seconds on offer,’ Hoban recalls. ‘There were three hot-spot sprints on every stage with thirty seconds going to the winner of each one. So, yes, being a fast sprinter, I thought I had a good chance of getting yellow. Anyway, on the first stage in Brittany, we’re going though this village, round a corner and towards this hot-spot sprint when who should appear under my arm and beat me but Merckx. I say “Eddy, what are you doing? You’re going to win the Tour by fifteen minutes. You can give the yellow jersey away for a day or two.” He just looked across and said, in that low voice, “Yes, Barry, but it’s
my
yellow jersey…”’

So Merckx was still Merckx…for the moment. Hoban and his mates still feared the worst when he was quiet in the morning before stage starts. ‘You could tell when he was on a good day. You picked
up
on the nuances after a while,’ the Englishman says. ‘Some mornings you’d see him at the start and say, “All right, Eddy?” and he’d be happy to chit chat. “Good ride yesterday, Barry” – stuff like that. But on another day, you’d say “All right, Eddy?” and get a grunt at most. That’s when you’d say to yourself, “Uh oh, it’s going to hurt today.”’

They would still, also, tell and laugh at the same jokes.

‘We’d always say, “Let’s hope there are no roadworks today.” In France there used to be these little robots waving flags to warn you before you got to roadworks. The joke being that Eddy would attack as soon as any flag went down.’

Hoban, though, knew that Merckx wasn’t kidding when, with the mountains behind them and victory already assured, he rode straight out of the peloton 12 kilometres from Orléans and the end of Stage 21a. ‘I’d never seen anything like it. He went right up the middle of the road. I said to my mate Gerben Karstens, “He’s not playing around.” He just rode away from the whole peloton and won by a minute and a half.’

The same attack gave the journalist Walter Pauli one of his abiding childhood memories. ‘My dad and I always used to eat French fries for lunch on Saturday, and I can remember eating my fries and calling to my dad in the kitchen, “Merckx has won the stage!” He said, “What? How? In a sprint?” No one could believe it. But all that had happened was that someone had said he’d won the Tour with no panache, and he’d got angry. That was the real Merckx.’

As much as his lack of panache, the critics accused Merckx of equalling Anquetil’s record of five Tour wins against a threadbare field. Ocaña, Gimondi, Fuente and Zoetemelk were all absent for assorted reasons. This left the 36-year-old Raymond Poulidor to
provide
the stiffest resistance and even drop Merckx by nearly two minutes on the summit finish at Pla D’Adet in the Pyrenees. ‘I dropped him every day in the mountains in that Tour,’ Poulidor says. ‘I’d never seen Merckx like that before. The truth is that he was already slowing down. On the Mont du Chat in the Alps, I left him for dead. Or so I thought. But he was still a fantastic descender, and he came back and beat us. That year he was already relying more on his head than his legs.’

In fairness to Merckx, if at the Giro he had started short of racing, at the Tour he was hampered throughout by the leftover wound from an operation to remove a cyst in his groin four days before the start. Most riders wouldn’t even have started the Tour. Merckx finished it and won, often enduring agony. His phenomenal resistance to pain would be one of the last pillars of excellence, maybe the last, to crumble.

The bottom line at the end of 1974 was that he was still number one. He proved it by winning a third World Championship road race on a brutally difficult circuit in Montreal, Canada. His celebration was as effusive as any in his career. Claudine watched on TV back home and told her husband on the phone that it had been the best day of her life. Even if, to others, Merckx winning still seemed routine, ‘the heaps of problems’ he had faced in 1974 meant that to him the taste of victory had never felt sweeter or more ephemeral.

knockout!

‘I mean, besides the fact that it was the shittiest podium presentation I’ve ever seen, it was such a shock, such an earthquake for cycling.’
B
ERNARD
T
HÉVENET

JOSEPH BRUYÈRE WAS
the kind of domestique who was worth his weight in gold, all 82 kilos of him. In the 1974 Tour a few people had questioned Merckx’s team, but no one was in any doubt about the value of the rider Merckx called simply ‘
mon Joseph
’. Self-effacing to a fault now like he was then, even Bruyère admits: ‘In 1974, I did a great Tour de France.’

It wasn’t just the fact that he had worn the yellow jersey on the Tour’s first ever trip across the English Channel, on the stage leaving and finishing in Plymouth. With Merckx’s limitations in the mountains becoming ever more apparent, it was vital that his teammates kept the racing in the Alps and Pyrenees under control, at a cruising pace safe for Merckx’s ageing diesel engine. Merckx had outlined the problem in his 1974
Carnets de Route
: ‘I’ve never been a true climber… Counter-attacking or even responding to a real climber’s attack is impossible for me. My strength in the mountains consists of keeping a very high pace to make it very difficult if not impossible for the real climbers to attack… My tactic is simple and known by
everyone:
I try to keep the pace very high going uphill to suffocate my rivals.’

Bruyère notwithstanding, if Merckx had struggled in the mountains in 1974, it was partly because his team was ageing with him. He had been challenged on this topic in an interview with
Miroir du Cyclisme
early in the season, and conceded, ‘It’s true that I’ve had a few disappointments with young riders and so I prefer to surround myself with experienced men.’ The question that some were asking when July and the Tour came around was whether, in the same way as Merckx, riders like Vic Van Schil, Jos Huysmans and Joseph Spruyt weren’t compensating for their waning strength with other ‘attributes’. Bullying and intimidation, for example. After days of complaints that Merckx and Molteni had installed a sporting dictatorship, refusing even the most innocuous rider any freedom of movement, Joseph Spruyt overstepped the mark on Stage 16 to Pla D’Adet. Unspoken ceasefires at certain points in certain stages of the Tour were nothing new; neither, as Merckx pointed out, was it unusual for a rider who broke them to feel the wrath of the peloton. What wasn’t acceptable was the venom in Spruyt’s tirade at Cyrille Guimard after the Frenchman’s early attack, and even less so Spruyt’s punches after Guimard’s second breakaway attempt. In the ensuing controversy, Guimard wasn’t blameless himself, but still received most if not all of the public’s sympathy. He, too, saw Spruyt as a Luca Brasi-type figure, the chief heavy in a team of mobsters. ‘Mafia’ was the word that Guimard actually used. Merckx was naturally cast as its boss. While condemning Spruyt’s assault, Merckx wanted people to understand that ‘Spruyt has rarely frequented the salons of Madame de Pompadour and his vocabulary isn’t quite as refined as [the famous Belgian journalist] Luc Beyer’s.’ In other words, yes, he had behaved like a thug but that was just Spruyt. Guimard was the real villain, said
Merckx.
Why had he gone telling tales to Jacques Goddet and then repeated his accusations on TV?

Even Bruyère had been whistled the next day, but then he was used to it. The difference this time was that the abuse was coming from the fans and not members of the peloton. Everyone in the bunch knew that when Bruyère loped to the front to begin his demolition derby, pain in ample doses would follow close behind. They made their displeasure heard accordingly. Thus Bruyère became the unlikeliest, most unassuming of public enemies. Had he learned to be nastier, a bit more thick-skinned, he might have been another Merckx. ‘But Bruyère could never have been a leader,’ says Walter Godefroot, ‘because when Bruyère starts to hurt he drops back immediately, whereas Merckx attacks.’ It didn’t seem to matter, either, whether the distress was physical or psychological; at the 1974 Giro, Bruyère’s performances had supposedly suffered terribly because he missed his wife.

His lack of personal ambition made him the ideal lieutenant – albeit one with a porcelain morale. Merckx was naturally drawn to sensitive, quiet types, and Bruyère was also fiercely loyal. The man who had acted as middleman in his signing for Faemino in 1970, Jean Crahay, said that if you asked him the time, Bruyère would reply ‘Merckx!’

Some tough love from Merckx after the Giro seemed to have transformed Bruyère in the 1974 Tour, and he confirmed his new standing with a magnificent ride at the Worlds in Montreal. Even by his own modest admission, he and his team captain then made a ‘thunderous start’ to the 1975 season. Bruyère was in the form of his life and, against all odds, Merckx was about to put together his best ever Classics campaign in his 30th year.

Having claimed some rare slices of glory for himself at Het Volk and the Tour of the Med, Bruyère catapulted his leader to a sixth
Milan–San
Remo win on the Poggio. Ten days later, in the Amstel Gold Race in Holland, it was the same story. Merckx first, Bruyère third.

Merckx was just getting started. He would go on to win his third Tour of Flanders, having shaken off the last of the opposition five kilometres from the line. He then took his fifth Liège–Bastogne–Liège with a narrow victory over Bernard Thévenet.

But it was the Setmana Catalana, which had taken place in the last week of March, a few days before Flanders, that of all the spring races would have the biggest impact on Merckx’s summer. Joseph Bruyère had again underlined his supreme, early-season form by romping away to take Stage 1 ahead of Merckx, Gimondi, Zoetemelk, Thévenet and Ocaña. He had bequeathed his leader’s jersey to Merckx by Stage 4, when a civil war between the Spanish teams broke out on the road to San Bartolomé del Grau. Close to Campdevànol in the foothills of the Pyrenees, Vicente López Carril of the KAS team drew alongside him.

‘We used to have the little pieces of paper with route maps stuffed into our pocket, and López Carril asked to see mine,’ Bruyère says. ‘I reached into my back pocket, handed it over, then somehow lost concentration and hit the wheel in front. I crashed and knew straight away that it was bad. It turned out that I’d broken my femur.’

Bruyère knew that his participation in the 1975 Tour de France was in jeopardy. At the 1974 Tour de France, particularly on the Col du Télégraphe in the Alps, even Merckx had struggled to hold his wheel. He was irreplaceable – and indeed would not be replaced.

Bruyère’s injury apart, Merckx couldn’t have hoped for a better spring to mute the mounting uncertainty – his own and other people’s. But it ended badly, with another of those setbacks that were becoming increasingly frequent, when he fell ill with tonsilitis four
days
before the start of the Giro and was bed-ridden for several days. Merckx pulling out created a dilema not only for the Giro organiser Vincenzo Torriani but also for himself: only once had he started the Tour de France having not previously completed the Giro, and that was in the 1971 race where Luis Ocaña battered him for the first week-and-a-half while Merckx groped for his best form.

The best, indeed the only available alternative to the Giro, was combining the Dauphiné Libéré with the Tour of Switzerland – 18 days of racing in the high Alps. The Dauphiné proved a sobering measure of how much ground Merckx had to recoup; if Freddy Maertens winning the first six stages was hard to stomach, losing nearly 11 minutes to Bernard Thévenet in the Massif de la Chartreuse mountains that he seemed to despise represented the worst experience in the mountains of Merckx’s career. Matters improved at the Tour of Switzerland, but that too was dominated by a Belgian rival, Roger De Vlaeminck. Merckx still wasn’t himself in more ways than one: one day, he even asked De Vlaeminck if he would let him win a stage.