Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (13 page)

Such perfectionism, again so alien to the carefree
sprezzatura
that geniuses were supposed to exhibit, but on closer inspection never did, was easy to confuse with ruthlessness. Decades later, Lance Armstrong would describe a Tour de France peloton thus: ‘It is completely ghetto. Everybody looks at the other person and thinks that they’re either trying to fuck them over or they’re getting fucked.’ On a practical level, despite all the mutual back-scratching, the politics and machinations of international cycling were such that the same conclusion was even harder to avoid in Merckx’s era. He and his team not only had the strength to condemn any attack, and consequently a season or career; no one was accusing Merckx of being vindictive, certainly not yet, but he and Van Buggenhout could, in theory, dictate to any organiser of any of the lucrative, aforementioned criteriums. Upsetting Merckx or Van Bug raised the threat if not the real consequence of missing valuable paydays. The position of ‘
patron
’ or boss of the peloton was a de facto one, and for Merckx it was involuntary. But it was his nonetheless.

‘He wasn’t a bully…but he was a Mafioso in one sense,’ says Patrick Sercu. ‘If Eddy said the first hundred kilometres had to be easy, they’d be easy. But you can only do this if you are the best. The strongest. The chiefs are always the strongest.’

At the end of his career, Merckx would bequeath his mantle to the Frenchman Bernard Hinault. The two had very different interpretations of the role of ‘
patron
’, says Walter Godefroot.

‘Hinault would turn up to criteriums and say, “Right, I win today.” He was so intimidating that no one questioned it. Whereas Merckx wants to fight, he wants to beat everyone. Hinault is not interested in small races. But Merckx wants to win everything, for himself, for the public, for the organiser.’

It was no wonder that Merckx seemed to have mutated before everyone’s eyes. The young fawn who had started the ’68 Giro had grown horns – big spiky, ferocious-looking antlers – that he was now using to preserve the natural order. Whether he liked, wanted, knew it or not, he
was
a kind of Mafioso. He was the Godfather who in 1969 had come to life in Mario Puzo’s novel. Merckx was Don Vito Corleone. It was no wonder, either, that his teammates had undergone the same transformation. Looking at photos of the anvil-jawed, sombre-eyed Joseph Spruyt, journalist Walter Pauli is now reminded of Don Vito’s top killer Luca Brasi. ‘Spruyt was the big henchman that Merckx would send to do his dirty work…’ Pauli observes with a grin.

The other question that needed addressing was why Merckx’s opponents were not inspired to emulate him, unlike his Faema teammates. The answer to that, too, was simple: since the summer of ’68, that enemy of motivation, fatalism, had started to grip. They now all knew and had their seatbelts fastened for what would be a long and morale-sapping ride. Even Gimondi who, according to his teammate Ferretti ‘never gave in, always fought’, was eyeing up the path of least resistance. His loss to Merckx at the ’68 Volta a Catalunya had been a bitter pill, but also one which had kick-started the process of letting go. It was painful but also, in a certain sense, liberating.

‘It had been like banging my head against a wall,’ Gimondi says. ‘I did that for months, no, two years before I figured it out. Then the penny dropped. I put my ego to bed and started to become realistic.
I
realised that I needed to adapt. I needed to change the way I rode. The first golden rule was – try not to take a beating, then maybe attack at the end. Whatever you did, you could never attack first, because he’d come looking for you, drop you and make you look like a fool.’

Gimondi shrugs.

‘It was the hardest phase of my career – no longer thinking I could beat him at his own game, and realising that I had to adapt, beat him with my head, because it was no use trying with my legs. I had to change my style of racing completely, all because of Merckx.’

Others, too, seemed to have realised that the game was up. Walter Godefroot had turned pro with all guns blazing, determined to fight Merckx’s fire with his own, but now the pair were increasingly friendly.

Another Belgian, Herman Van Springel, had finished second in the ’68 Tour and the Worlds. He had also beaten Merckx in the Tour of Lombardy and the season-long SuperPrestige Pernod rankings. But not even Van Springel’s
annus mirabilis
had raised his hopes.

His biographer Mark Uytterhoeven agrees. For Van Springel just like everyone else, the summer of 1968 had an air of
fin d’époque
. It had felt like an ending, not of their careers but of their excuses, yearnings and illusions – of everything, in short, that represented their youth. There was no need to kid anyone any more. Not themselves, not each other and not Merckx.

‘Everyone knew that it had been thirty years since the last Belgian win, Syvère Maes’s in 1939, and everyone knew that ’69 would be Merckx’s Tour, the Tour of the Belgian revenge,’ Uytterhoeven says. ‘Herman knew that ’68 was his only chance. Everyone knew it. Even I as an eleven-year-old and a Van Springel fan knew it. I was quite sure.’

There was only one man in Belgium, says Uytterhoeven, who hadn’t yet yielded to the evidence, and indeed never would. He was
the
man who had met Merckx at the amateur Tour of Belgium in 1968 and told him, albeit in more polite terms, to stick his offer of a contract for the following year somewhere even less sun-kissed than Flanders. He was the man who had been and still was a fervent supporter of Rik Van Looy. He was the man whose first professional race had been the coveted Omloop Het Volk in February 1969, and whose first win had been…the Omloop Het Volk in February 1969, with Merckx in 12th place. He was the man who would soon become the Belgian national champion, again well ahead of Merckx. He was the man we would see 42 years later on a mountaintop in Italy. He was Roger De Vlaeminck.

Before too long, another stubborn resistance fighter would step out of the cowering hordes. A Spanish
caballero
of hot blood, sultry visage and a smouldering, fanciful ambition: to beat Eddy Merckx.

For now, though, Merckx was on his own. And he would never feel more lonely than at the 1969 Giro d’Italia.

6

end of the world as we know it

‘I don’t understand anything. I didn’t take anything.’
E
DDY
M
ERCKX

OF ALL THE
, flowers there were gladioli in reception, the symbols of moral integrity. Someone from Faema had handed them to the receptionist in the Hotel Excelsior the previous evening, and now there they were, poking pathetically out of a faux crystal vase like leftover, burnt-out candles.

On the first floor, in room 11, big Martin Van Den Bossche looked at his empty bed, then to the one at its left, where Merckx lay, sobbing uncontrollably. Fed up with the constant knocks at the door and interruptions to their morning routine, he had joked just a few minutes earlier to Merckx that the next person who disturbed them was ‘going to get it’. When the Faema manager Vincenzo Giacotto pushed the door, Van Den Bossche had thrown a pillow that struck Giacotto in the face. The giggles had quickly subsided when Giacotto’s stony expression didn’t change.

What could Van Den Bossche say now? There was nothing. So he said almost nothing.

In any case, many more gifted linguists had now arrived in the room, like
La Gazzetta
’s Bruno Raschi, who had come with Giacotto. In a few hours, Raschi would pen one of his more unusual reports from a Giro stage. ‘I can believe that they’ve found Merckx drugged, but I’m sure that someone put the dope in his broth,’ will be his instinctive conclusion.

For now, Merckx himself is too upset to formulate a hypothesis. He can barely make out the silver microphone tended by RAI TV’s Sergio Zavoli a few inches from his nose through the tears and his long lashes, and barely blubber a few words of faltering Italian. ‘I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand anything. I’m sure I didn’t take anything. Sure.’

Then more sobs.

If the words don’t flow, the thoughts and memories must surely cascade. First, the previous day’s stage to Savona, when, with an innocuous breakaway down the road, for once he’d cruised along in the middle on the pack, chatting to his former teammate Vittorio Adorni. It had felt like old times, and for a minute they’d forgotten the trials of the previous fortnight: the banners that Adorni had seen in the south – ‘Adorni, think of Italy’ and ‘Adorni, become a Belgian citizen’ – and their clear implication that he was riding so poorly because he was still riding for Merckx; Merckx’s claim that he would have quit the race had a bottle thrown by a fan in Napoli on Stage 9 hit him and not missed by two centimetres; the grandstand that had collapsed in Terracina and crushed an 11-year-old boy who had gone to write about the Giro for a school project; the endless strikes and protests they had encountered on the route, about the cost of the race to hospitals, the state of the roads, wages in Napoli, and who knew what else. They had forgotten even about the fact that Merckx had won four stages and had the ’69 Giro sewn up five days before
the
first real mountains. Then, two kilometres from Savona, a motorbike had shunted the pink jersey from behind and all those nagging suspicions that someone or something was out to get him, that this Giro was cursed, had come rushing back.

Those images may then have segued into the last time he’d felt the world caving in, a few days after his World Championship win in Heerlen in 1967. Merckx had been in his parents’ grocery store, a family friend had mentioned something about two positive tests from the Worlds, then a few hours later his mother had interrogated him. ‘Come on, Mum! Don’t tell me you’re thinking that!’ he had snapped. He perhaps also thought back to the times when he’d assured Jenny Merckx that he would never go near the stimulants for which other riders were testing positive. He said it again before the Giro, and they had even talked about how accepting bottles from fans at the roadside was a bad idea.

He peered again through the tears in his eyes and saw his friend Italo Zilioli, then felt the Italian’s hand on his own. Zilioli was also crying. They both remembered when Zilioli had been in the same predicament a year earlier, and how Merckx had supported him. Zilioli looked around the room and saw genuine sympathy intermingling with crocodile tears.

Adorni, Bitossi and Gimondi had also entered the room. Gimondi had been here too, a year earlier, when he had taken the same substance that appeared to have triggered Merckx’s positive test: fencamfamine. The substance itself was not banned but had similar effects, and caused similar ‘spikes’ in urine analyses, to amphetamines. ‘I don’t understand anything. I didn’t take anything,’ Merckx repeated.

Who knows, maybe Merckx thought back to a few evenings earlier, when a rider from another team had appeared at his door clutching a
briefcase
full of money. What would Merckx say to letting this one, you know Eddy, nudge nudge, slide by? He’d left disappointed – Merckx had a reputation for never selling races, and had told the rider, ‘Just don’t tell me how much is in the suitcase. That way I won’t regret my decision later on.’ But there were no hard feelings.

Maybe Merckx was so distraught – and he seemed it – that he wondered whether it was all worth it. Not just the Giro, but cycling in general. He could have thought back to the days when, aged four, he tore around the leafy suburban streets of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre on his bike and people shouted out, ‘Are you riding the Tour de France, laddie?’ That – ‘Tour de France’ – had soon become his nickname in the neighbourhood. At age eight, he had been given his first secondhand racing bike. Guillaume Michiels, who later became Merckx’s masseur, and whose brother and mother used to help out in the Merckxes’ shop, told the young Eddy that his backside was too fat for him to be a cyclist. Years later, when Merckx was selected to take part in the Olympic Games road race in Tokyo, he reminded Michiels, ‘You said my backside was too fat…and now I’m going to the Olympic Games.’

That had been another injustice: Tokyo. The cramps in the last kilometre, Godefroot claiming that he would have won gold, not bronze if Merckx had helped him. But that all paled now. What would the newspapers write tomorrow? Would they interview Van Looy? What would he say? ‘If you’re really the greatest, you’ll be able to do it on your own’ – that was his favourite line in criteriums. Would tomorrow’s remark be an even snider variation? Something like ‘If he was the greatest, he could do it without drugs’?

The memories, the recriminations, the fears – were they all now swirling in vortexes, cogs spinning out of control in Merckx’s head?
Perhaps
he was praying, like he had at mass in the Duomo in Parma before yesterday’s stage. He had arrived on his bike, parked it outside, then headed off in the direction of the stage start as soon as the service was over. As he did every day, he had then crossed himself before the race began.

More replays – of the test, that strange mobile cabin in the main
piazza
in Savona where it was carried out, flashes of things and people seen over the past few days: a waiter skulking near the door of the hotel room that Merckx and Van Den Bossche shared; the minutes that Merckx had left his bike – and water bottle with it – outside the Duomo; the odd jeer from the crowds in Parma, the home town of Gimondi’s sponsor Salvarani; the fan who had leaped out of the crowd on Stage 11 to Scanno and grabbed his saddle – yet more evidence that he was
persona non grata
.

Maybe now the faces assembling in his imagination, as though in a jury box, were his family’s – the twins brother Michel and sister Micheline, born four years after Eddy, mother Jenny and father Jules. This was all eerily like being transported 15 or 20 years, to one of Jules’s tellings off. He always seemed to blame and vent his anger at Eddy, like the time when Michel threw a pair of scissors at his elder brother, and it was Eddy who got smacked. Once a suspicious-looking character had been spotted roaming the streets in Woluwe while Eddy was out with his friends, and when Eddy finally bundled through the door, Jules had given him such a row that a customer in the grocery store had complained. ‘Madam, it’s my family,’ Mr Merckx had told her. This was the Jules Merckx that Patrick Sercu would get to know when he visited the Merckxes years later. Sercu saw ‘a very strict man, like an army major, who never expected to say the same thing twice’. Michel thought that he could be like a tyrant. At least Jules practised
what
he preached: hard work and respect of the rules. Eddy had inherited his anxiousness, his rigour, his fairness and his introversion. Both were good with their hands – Jules at DIY, Eddy when it came to tinkering with bicycles. Jules had also played football and been a decent runner in his youth. Physically, there was little resemblance except for the eyes and the slim, athletic frame. The hair, the facial profile, they both came from Jenny.