Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (16 page)

On 3 June, the University of Liège carried out a sociological study measuring the impact of the scandal on the Belgian public. Its conclusion was that, of recent ‘world events’, only the assassination of President John F. Kennedy six years earlier had been of a similar magnitude.

As a pure soap opera, a true Italian
telenovela
, it was utterly gripping, and by the hour the tales were becoming more and more outlandish and tantalising. Some stories were old, like talk of an ancient and undetectable Oriental plant that had been fuelling Merckx and Faema for months, while others briefly spiked curiosity before losing the interest of even those who had peddled them in the first place. One went that Merckx’s urine had been borderline positive after his time trial win in Montecatini Terme on Stage 4. The sample that Faema had taken themselves in Savona and sent to the Istituto di Medicina Legale di Milano, meanwhile, had come back negative. The experts said this couldn’t be explained by the normal degradation
of
the fencamfamine in the original sample, as its concentration had been so high that the Milan tests should also have been positive. The second opinion, though, had been mandated only by Merckx and Faema and had no official value.

One minute Merckx was comparing his case to that of the Bologna football team, four of whose players had tested positive in 1964 then later been absolved. The next he was recalling that he had filled a test-tube labelled with the number 6 in Savona, and wondering whether it hadn’t been mistaken for a 9. He was then distracted by talk of a traitor within his team, whom Van Bug had supposedly identified. The culprit, said some, was a masseur due to leave Faema at the end of the season. Others, including
La Gazzetta dello Sport
, referred to but didn’t name a Faema rider who had already won several Classics himself, and had privately announced in the days leading up to Savona that he would ‘wage war against Merckx in the future’. The only man who fitted that description was Guido Reybrouck. Merckx claimed that he had ‘specific suspicions’ and was considering legal action against one individual, but wouldn’t reveal who this was.

The juiciest morsel of all came from a priest. He had watched Merckx arrive for mass at the Duomo in Parma on the morning of his positive test and park his bike outside. Noticing that the bottle cage on Merckx’s bike was empty, the priest assumed that Merckx had taken his drink inside with him, safe from would-be saboteurs. The next time he looked, he was startled: a bottle had appeared, yet Merckx hadn’t stepped outside the cathedral. Some form of skulduggery – and not, for instance, an innocent member of the Faema staff going about his normal duties – could be the only explanation.

It was all enough to give anyone a headache, and indeed the maelstrom in Merckx’s mind wasn’t abating. Peace could elude him even
in
the midst of success beyond other riders’ wildest imagination; in times of crisis, his brain became an infestation of dark thoughts and anxieties. Van Buggenhout said that he was ‘almost a broken man’. On Thursday 5 June, after three infernal nights at the Hotel Royal in Milan, he and Claudine finally began the car journey back to Brussels with the intention of arriving in Tervuren almost ‘incognito’ the following day. There was little chance of that: 24 hours later, on the first sunny day of the week in Belgium, the white Mercedes was cheered as it pulled into the Merckxes’ driveway.
La Gazzetta
called it a reception ‘worthy of a cosmonaut’. ‘He needs more rest than if he’d finished the Giro,’ Claudine told journalists as she wrestled him through the herd and through the front door.

At around the same time, Felice Gimondi was applying the finishing touches to his second Giro d’Italia victory in the mountains above Trento. The last week of the race had been ridden in a wretched ambiance, with the riders climbing off their bikes on the stage to the Marmolada and effectively forcing its cancellation due to bad weather. This led to their own directeurs sportifs branding them ‘whingers’ and much worse, and others claiming that this had been a belated gesture of protest after an ultimately limp reaction in Savona.

‘I don’t care who wins the Giro,’ Merckx had said – and neither, it seemed, did anyone else.

From a strictly practical point of view, the situation as Merckx returned to Belgium was that he was banned from all races and awaiting the outcome of UCI president Adriano Rodoni’s ‘personal’ investigation. Once Rodoni had admitted, in an interview with the
Corriere dello Sport
, that the now infamous mobile laboratory laid on before the Giro by Hewlett Packard did not conform to UCI regulations, the die appeared to be cast. In France, a group of riders
led
by Jean Stabilinski had already announced that they would go on strike if Merckx received preferential treatment. While in Belgium, Georges Vanconingsloo and Emile Bodart, among others, demanded to know why there had been no fuss about their apparently very similar cases. Jan Janssen in Holland said much the same thing. Merckx was in an ‘alarming state of depression’, ‘even lower than in Savona and Milan’ according to Van Bug. But intuition – as well as Rodoni’s embrace in Milan, plus the incongruous fact that he was the president both of the UCI and the Italian Cycling Federation who had officially imposed the sanction – proved the best guide. On 14 June, after a meeting with the Belgian cycling federation, the members of the UCI’s board of directors announced in a communiqué that they:

• Accepted the results of the tests carried out by the Italian doctors.
  
• Granted that the Italian Federation had the right to suspend the rider Eddy Merckx according to the results of their tests.
  
• Considered the irreproachable record of the incriminated rider and the negative results of tens of tests that he had undergone in the past.
  
• Doubted that Merckx had wanted to dope voluntarily.
  
• Gave him the benefit of the doubt and immediately lifted the suspension of which he was currently the object.
  

And so on and so on…

In Tervuren, Merckx read the statement and felt a surge of relief. Then he looked again, digested, and the anxieties returned in torrents.

Benefit of the doubt?!
He knew which three words the public and his peers would retain, and what was their implication: Merckx had been ‘let off’ because he was Merckx. Not because the test had no validity, and should never even have been carried out in conditions like the ones in Savona. Not because he had never cheated. His instinct was correct, and at the Tour of Luxembourg, the peloton manifested its discontent in a mini-strike, while the defending Tour de France champion Janssen vented his frustration at the Tour of Switzerland. ‘I have nothing against Merckx. I actually have a lot of admiration for him. But this decision is an injustice towards Adorni, Motta, Lucien Aimar, myself and lots of little riders who were punished without being able to defend themselves,’ Janssen argued. Today, incidentally, Janssen’s summation is more succinct. ‘He cried like a baby so they let him off,’ the Dutchman says.

Merckx was wounded but, as Walter Godefroot had already noted, he was never more dangerous than when he was down. ‘When everyone else is hurting, they slow down. When Merckx is in trouble…he attacks,’ Godefroot says. With the Tour de France just a fortnight away, and his pride throbbing, Merckx now pummelled his bike like rarely before. He had recommenced training on 10 June, four days before his ban was officially overturned, and now alternated 220-kilometre training sessions behind Guillaume Michiels’s scooter with criteriums in Caen in France and Bruges. At both, the cheers outnumbered the jeers. He then finished a weary 32nd in the Belgian National Championships won by the new prodigy Roger de Vlaeminck, having bashed his left knee on a gear lever. The next day, he rode a 110-kilometre criterium in the afternoon and a track-meet in the evening; on Tuesday, he reported for the start of another criterium but caused such an onrush of autograph hunters that he missed the start and had to withdraw; on Wednesday, he rode
160
kilometres with teammates; on Thursday, Merckx covered 270 kilometres alone; Friday was speed work behind Michiels’s scooter, cut short to 50 kilometres by a torrential rainstorm; and on Saturday, he rode ‘
à bloc
’ for 40 kilometres in the morning, ‘
tranquille
’ for another 40 in the afternoon, then readied himself for what would be his third outing of the day in the evening: the Tour de France prologue time trial in Roubaix.

first man on the moon

‘That bloke needs to be…handicapped. They should stick a 25 kilogram weight under his saddle.’
G
ILBERT
B
ELLONE

ONE OF THE
first to notice the change was the new Giro champion Felice Gimondi. ‘
Oooo, ciao Eddy, ciao!
’ Gimondi had called to his old
bête noire
from the other end of the lobby where both of their teams were staying ahead of the Tour de France prologue time trial in Roubaix. Merckx had looked over, smiled sheepishly, then carried on walking.

It was normal after what had happened, explained Lomme Driessens. Those words – ‘benefit of the doubt’ – still grated loudly and painfully in Merckx’s mind, along with the less-than-charitable statements of one or two colleagues over the past four weeks. There was no malice towards Gimondi in particular; Merckx had even used the column he was writing in
La Dernière Heure
to urge his fans on the first stages of the Tour in Belgium not to direct their anger about what had happened in Savona at the Giro winner. No, Merckx’s was simply the dazed air of a man who had woken one morning to a world different from the one he’d known for the previous 24 years, and who was still tip-toeing into his new reality.

Marino Vigna, the Faema directeur sportif, had not seen him since Savona. Vigna emerged from a contentious meeting about dope-testing procedures on the Thursday before the race with the news that there would be three tests after every stage at the Tour. Depending on the day and what the Tour doctor Pierre Dumas had written in a sealed envelope labelled with the number of that stage before the Tour, he would summon either the top three riders on general classification, the first three finishers that day, or three riders picked at random. Dumas had declined Merckx’s exceptional request to test his urine every day, no matter where he finished, but confirmed that the sanction for a first positive test would be just a 15-minute penalty rather than a disqualification and ban. ‘Well, that means you’d better win by over fifteen minutes, in case they stitch you up again, like in Italy,’ Vigna told Merckx.

‘I meant it as a joke, but I think it actually explained quite a bit about how he ended up riding in that Tour,’ Vigna says.

Thirteen teams of ten men had reported to Roubaix for the Grand Départ of the 56th Tour. As per tradition in prologue time trials, one man from each of the 13 teams would start their race in a predetermined order, before the roll-call was repeated for their second rider, their third and so on. Custom and conventional wisdom also dictated that teams would leave their leader until last, for reasons of theatre but also, above all, so that his teammates’ and the majority of the field’s finishing times could serve as reference points. The prior knowledge that most, if not all, teams would adopt the same policy also afforded a degree of security: if it happened to rain, a team leader could at least be sure that he was starting within a few minutes of his direct rivals for overall victory, in similar weather, and hence in much the same boat.

The Tour was cycling’s grandest stage, Merckx’s big moment and Belgium’s – but also an important three weeks for Lomme
Driessens.
Driessens had realised in the spring that Merckx’s brilliance was about the only thing in cycling that could eclipse or even efface his inflated impression of his own genius, and it was therefore paramount that he reaffirmed his value early at La Grande Boucle. As it turned out, this was one of Driessens’s better ideas: having picked the number one out of a hat to secure the first of the 13 starting positions for Faema, he selected Merckx as his team’s and the Tour’s first rider. That way, Driessens told Merckx, he could dodge the commotion of fans and journalists which would build throughout the day, return to his hotel in good time, eat early, then get a good night’s rest. So went the infallible logic: in the event, with Merckx poised on the start ramp at 16h48, the race commissaires noticed that there were publicity vehicles still on the course, panicked, and imposed a five-minute delay. A frown, a shake of the head, an emergency second warm-up and Merckx was finally en route. Thirteen minutes and seven seconds later he crossed the finish line. Only Rudi Altig would cover the ground faster, by seven seconds. Altig was the Tour’s first leader.

The second day was to be the first key rendezvous, not because anyone expected decisive racing on either of the two ‘split stages’, but because they were taking the race to Woluwe-Saint-Pierre on the outskirts of Brussels, where Merckx had grown up. This partly explained his nerves before both the flat 147-kilometre stage in the morning won by the Italian sprinter Marino Basso, and the 15.6-kilometre team time trial in the afternoon dominated by Faema, which had given Merckx the race lead. Even in the yellow jersey, and in his dream scenario of a triumphant homecoming, Merckx seemed edgy. ‘Only Gimondi is riding sportingly,’ he griped. ‘Most of the others seem to be in league against me. They’re marking me, watching me, sucking my wheel; when I chase down attacks that I think
are
dangerous, my main rivals refuse to do their share of the work. I feel like a train dragging along a bunch of heavy and useless carriages.’

The next morning, for once he seemed able to lose himself. Perhaps relieved by Claudine’s presence at his side, he posed smilingly for photographers in front of the Woluwe town hall, then rode ahead of the peloton to lap up the adulation of folk who were normally just neighbours in Tervuren. The route then pointed south-west into the forests and former battlefields of the Ardennes – and a savage combat.