Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (10 page)

V
AN
L
OOY
: [pauses for five long seconds] In ’68…yes that was the case, yes.

Racing in the same Belgian team and national colours as Merckx, not even Van Looy would have the audacity to attempt the same trick at the world championships in Imola in central Italy, on 1 September 1968. What he could do instead was attack with Adorni, of all people, with 58 kilometres gone and 219 remaining. Did Van Looy really think he could win, or was this just his latest ploy to cripple Merckx? The second explanation looked plausible when, having collaborated with the Italian and seven others to take the group out of the peloton and Merckx’s reach, Van Looy wilted with 85 kilometres remaining. From there, Adorni rode unchallenged to win by over 10 minutes, with his Faema teammate and the defending champion, Merckx, resigned or at least happy to repay Adorni for his help at the Giro d’Italia by not chasing. Even having sacrificed his own chances, Merckx still finished eighth.

‘I’d told Eddy in the run-up to the race – the Worlds were in my home region and I couldn’t and wouldn’t help him there,’ Adorni recalls. ‘Van Looy and I >went away with a few others but the race had barely started. I said, “Rik, what do we do now? We’ve two hundred kilometres to go. We’re going to die out here in this heat.” Rik just looked at me. “Are you scared of dying? You and me are old anyway.” So on we went. To be honest, I wasn’t afraid that I wouldn’t be able to drop Van Looy, which is what I did. I wasn’t worried about
Merckx
or what it meant to him that I was away with his big rival, either. I heard later that he hadn’t really made any effort to catch me. I never asked him why. I didn’t want to know.’

Adorni may have preferred blithe ignorance, but the Italian press the next day had more than an inkling that the two riders’ association with a certain Italian coffee-machine maker, Faema, night explain Merckx’s passive approach.

The
Gazzetta dello Sport
’s headline: ‘A coffee aroma in Adorni’s world title’.

4

eddy, ciao

‘He came at us from every angle, slaughtered every one of us, like some rabid wild man, some barbarian.’
D
INO
Z
ANDEGÙ

IT’S AMAZING WHAT
you can learn about the lie of the land in international cycling towards the end of 1968 on an afternoon at the Giro d’Italia…in 2011.

From one mythical mountain to another. From the Matterhorn, lightning rod for Nino Defilippis’s ‘electrocution’, to the Cima Grande of Lavaredo and now the Monte Rosa. The Rosa’s eastern face, the highest in the Alps, appears so enormous from its base in Macugnaga that the summit may as well be an extension of the sky. Even when the clouds roll down the mountain and into the valley, as they do today, it’s not hard to see why the first president of the Alpine Club, John Ball, declared this valley the most beautiful mountain canvas on the planet.

The rain has finally stopped. In its place is a man-made percussion not unique to the Giro but maybe more disorderly and cacophonous here than at other races. A surprise winner, the Sicilian Paolo Tiralongo, will cross the line in under two hours, yet banners and barriers still have to be erected, cars still need to be parked, the corporate crowd still has to be fed and fans entertained. In every
direction,
there are
carabinieri
, volunteers or men and women in fleeces emblazoned with the race organisers’ logos, pointing, shouting, gesticulating flamboyantly.

Three or four hours ago, at the stage start in Bergamo, Giancarlo Ferretti had taken shelter from the approaching storm under a gazebo in the hospitality village. The once fearsome ‘Iron Sergeant’ of team managers, ‘Ferron’ has lost some of his aura, as well as his job, since an internet scammer tricked him into thinking that emails from a Hotmail address were promises of a multi-million-euro sponsorship deal from Sony-Ericsson in 2005. His five foot nine frame is still as lean, his posture just as proud as when he rode with Gimondi at Salvarani in the 1960s, but some of the old gunslinger’s steel has faded from his eyes.

At times, like now, it is replaced by a misty nostalgia.

‘The Tre Cime di Lavaredo was just one of the first of endless exploits,’ he says. ‘After that, Merckx just got faster and faster. He would be riding on the bunch, taking it easy, or so he thought, and the group would start breaking apart behind him. Or he’d attack 120 kilometres from the finish and we’d think he’d gone insane, then the next time we’d see him would be at the finish. There were things which the general public didn’t see and no one remembers but which gave us all nightmares. He went tack tack tack and swept through professional cycling like a forest fire, burning everyone and everything in his path. He made us suffer, he beat us, he humiliated us, yet we still had an inestimable admiration for him. More than for his strength; for his courage, his
fantasia
, that imagination to dream up things that no one else believed possible…’

Ferretti draws breath.

‘I was Gimondi’s domestique until 1970 then three years later I became his directeur sportif. Felice fought, he battled, he pretended,
but
finally even he got despondent. At the Volta a Catalunya in September 1968, a week after Adorni won the World Championships, it hit him. Merckx and Felice were going at each other every day, the leader’s jersey was going from one to the other, then we got to the time trial. I had already finished and was watching on TV back in the hotel. Felice is a born time triallist, but Merckx made him look like a pantomime horse. Half an hour after the race, I hear the door creak open and see Felice standing there, shaking his head. He peels off his gloves and throws them on the bed, cursing. “
Porco cane!
” he says. “How the hell am I going to beat this guy? I have to beat him. If it’s the last thing I do before I give up, I have to beat him in a time trial!”

‘Well,’ Ferretti says with a chuckle. ‘It took him five years…’

Up the road in Macugnaga, a moment of serendipity.

In a VIP enclosure overlooking the finish line, Felice Gimondi reminisces about the same afternoon in the same Volta a Catalunya in 1968. A small crowd has formed at a respectful distance from our table. From its midst, a smartly dressed, strapping man in his 60s steps towards us. He takes the chair next to Gimondi.

It is Eddy Merckx.

‘Merckx was so strong,’ Gimondi has just been saying, ‘that you had to take it in turns to follow his wheel!’

Gimondi now turns away from the recorder and towards Merckx, who gives the impression of wanting whatever is about to be said to remain a private conversation, without necessarily wishing to change the subject. When he looks at his old mate, his old rival, Gimondi, he smiles. When he looks in our direction, with head and body at 45 degrees, Merckx is nigh on expressionless.

‘Eddy, when was it that we first met? Bruxelles–Anselberg in 1963, when we were still amateurs?’

‘You beat me. You made me suffer like a beast.’

‘It was the only race he let me win! All the others, you won after that…’

They both laugh. Gimondi shakes his head.

‘That time trial in the Volta a Catalunya still burns. I still think about it now. At midnight, I was still down on the beach, the Playa de Rosas – walking up and down, up and down – trying to figure out how I’d lost. Because it was the first time that you’d beaten me in a time trial…’

‘I’d broken my wheel. I broke two spokes. I had to change a wheel.’

‘You? In that one, too?
Merda
, I didn’t know that…Anyway, it took me two years to swallow what happened that day and finally understand why he’d beaten me.’ Gimondi stops and points to Merckx. ‘He just was stronger.’

‘But do you remember the war we had in that Volta a Catalunya?’ Gimondi continues. ‘This huge battle, knives out in every stage. One day, I had a problem after five or six kilometres, and on they all went, into battle. The next day, you had a problem, and off we all went. The jersey went back and forth two or three times that week. And then, in the end, as always, you won.’

And with that, Merckx gets up from his chair, without warning or a word, walks away and the interview continues with its main subject matter no longer present.

‘
Dino! Dino!
’

Another former Salvarani rider, Dino Zandegù, is shuffling down the mountain and towards us wearing a dark blue raincoat and a smirk. It’s now gone four in the afternoon; by his own estimates, that means 90 per cent of what he’s about to tell us is going to be true.

*

Dino, Dino, tell us about Merckx. When you finally realised what you were up against, I mean after 1967, what was it like, racing against him?

‘He came at us from every angle, slaughtered every one of us, like some rabid wild man, some barbarian. He could have been the greatest footballer, the greatest skier, the greatest boxer of all time, only he chose cycling. But Merckx also had this great drama in his life: he couldn’t stand, couldn’t tolerate losing. And it was a real drama for him.’

And a drama for you and the rest of ’em, eh, Dino?

‘Oh, he used to drive me nuts. When he was racing, you knew that he could put you out of the time limit any time. It was a constant, breathless chase. You’d see Merckx’s team on the front ready to make the race 150 kilometres from the finish, Van Den Bossche, Van Den this, Van Ben that – they all surged to the front – and he’d be pawing the ground like this big tiger. He couldn’t wait for the moment, kilometre X, when he would attack and smash us all to pieces. I used to tell him to go stuff himself. When you’re hurting, you turn nasty. I’d be shouting from the back of the bunch, “
Vaffanculo
, Merckx!
Bastardo!
” Half of the peloton detested him despite thinking that he was an OK bloke.’

But you got on well with him too, eh, Dino? He had a sense of humour. You used to sing for him…

‘“O Dolce Paese”, that was his favourite. We used to talk, you know, at the criterium races. We’d get there and eat three hours before, then the crit would start at eight and at ten we’d all be together in a restaurant again. After one of these crits, we’d maybe had a drink or two and Eddy started telling me to sing him this song he’d heard in Friuli one time, which he’d loved, this “O Dolce Paese”. I sang it that night, and every time I saw him after that, it was “
Dino, Dino
, sing me that song, that ‘O Dolce Paese’!”. I said, “Merckx, who do you think I am? Father Christmas?” But because he was even more important than that, because he was Merckx, I always sang.’

5

new world order

‘He wasn’t a bully…but he was a Mafioso in one sense.’
P
ATRICK
S
ERCU

TWO DAYS BEFORE
the 2011 Giro stage to Macugnaga, another mountain-top finish, this one at the Nevegal ski resort near Belluno, throws up another brief encounter with shrill echoes of 1968.

After all these years,
Il Processo alla Tappa
, the post-stage review show enlivened by Dino Zandegù’s singing in the sixties, is still going strong, and this year acquires extra gravitas thanks to Merckx. Every day for a week he sits on the stage, drowning in blandishments from the female presenter and dispensing his nuggets of insight and anecdotes. At Nevegal, though, he isn’t the only guest and former rider introduced as a ‘Belgian legend’. The other man is leaner, darker and noticeably younger. His facial features are smaller and neater. He also speaks good Italian. He is also smartly dressed. His young, blonde, gazelle-like wife, perhaps in her late 30s, and their son Eddy, watch from offstage.

He is Roger de Vlaeminck.

One day in May 1968, Merckx headed out for a pre-Giro training ride with a few of his teammates, and decided to drop in on the amateur Tour of Belgium. His influence was already such that he and
manager
Jean Van Buggenhout had largely taken charge of the Faema team’s recruitment for the following season, and there was a young lad from West Flanders about whom Merckx was hearing great things. Spotting De Vlaeminck among the 18- and 19-year-olds making their last-minute adjustments and preparations before the start, Merckx climbed off his bike and ambled towards him. They shook hands. The conversation, as usual with Merckx, was brief and to the point: what would De Vlaeminck say to riding with Merckx at Faema the following season?

The response was instantaneous, unequivocal and unexpected.

‘No. I don’t want to ride with you. I want to ride against you.’

De Vlaeminck went on to win the race, and the significance of his words became apparent within a few months. The same would be true of the Merckx camp’s efforts to reinforce Faema with another headstrong personality ahead of the 1969 season. At the Giro, with Merckx irrepressible, Van Bug had begun discussions with Guillaume ‘Lomme’ Driessens about joining Faema as a directeur sportif the following year. On first impressions, they had much in common: both were in their 50s, they were imposing in words, actions and physique, and both were considered big beasts, two of the kings of the Belgian cycling jungle. ‘The difference between them,’ says Marino Vigna, the Italian Faema directeur who would soon be Driessens’s colleague, ‘was that one was underrated, the other overrated.’

Van Bug’s confidence in Driessens is interesting for what it says about how he regarded Merckx who, having turned 23 the week after the ’68 Giro, was now his prize asset. If, early in 1967, there was a raft of other riders with their sights on domination, it had been definitively capsized and any doubts forgotten. As the 1968 season ended, this left Merckx exactly where he wanted to be in his life and career, yet also exactly where he was at his most uncomfortable: with the
spotlight
of his homeland and, increasingly, the rest of Europe, stinging his eyes. In a sense, he straddled the worst of all worlds: he was a Belgian, but a Belgian from bilingual Brussels, and therefore the public property of both French-speaking Wallonia in the south and cycling-crazy, Dutch-speaking Flanders in the north; he was excelling in a sport whose popularity owed in part, and still owes today, to a physical
proximity
to its people, whether they were fans at the roadside or journalists at races. Team press officers didn’t yet exist, and this meant unbridled access, or intrusion, for reporters who would think nothing of knocking on his hotel-room door and demanding an interview. There was no top-secret compound in which to train, and the biggest star in Belgium could be witnessed at work on any morning when he wasn’t racing. All an assiduous fan had to do was camp outside the spacious but hardly palatial four-bedroom house that Merckx bought with Claudine after their wedding. On the stroke of nine, come rain or, more seldom in Belgium, shine, the garage door would tilt open and Merckx would emerge.