Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (28 page)

In 1971, the Tour de France wasn’t yet finishing on the Champs Elysées, the cyclist’s Elysium, as it does today. Even if this had been the case, however, Luis Ocaña couldn’t end the Tour in Paris and access paradise – for he had been consigned to hell a week earlier on the Col de Menté.

That morning in Revel Eddy Merckx had warned or tipped off his friend from Belgian radio Luc Varenne: stick with me today, I’m going to batter Ocaña until one of us breaks, him or me. The first 140 kilometres passed off largely without incident before Merckx began his bombardment on the Col du Portet d’Aspet. One attack, two, both quashed by Ocaña. Merckx now settled calmly back into his saddle, ready to double the dose on the Col de Menté.

His legs felt good going uphill for the first time in the Tour. Ocaña’s, by the look of things, did not. The Col de Menté rears steeply out of Ger de Boutx before settling into a steady 7 per cent gradient as it tacks from east to west across the Bois Epais or ‘Thick Wood’. Halfway up the climb, Merckx resumed his assault and Ocaña again responded, but black clouds were now gathering like portents of disaster. ‘I notice that Ocaña’s progress isn’t as smooth as it was and, above all, that he hasn’t been able to eat. Could he be on the brink of collapse?’ Merckx wondered in his
Carnets de Route
. As the storm began pummelling their backs, Rini Wagtmans glanced across at Merckx and at first mistook the rainwater for tears. Then he too turned to observe Ocaña and saw the premonition he’d had in Marseille materialising before his eyes. Thunder clapped and lightning flashed. The so-called ‘White Blaze’, Wagtmans, recalls that it was ‘like World War II – or like the Devil was playing with us’.

Ocaña’s own lieutenants, Johny Schleck and Bernard Labourdette, could see trouble not in the skies but in the way their captain insisted on answering every Merckx attack. ‘Luis, calm down!’ they told him.

Minutes later Merckx and Ocaña, in that order, were aquaplaning off the road on the other side of the pass within milliseconds of each other. In weather that has been variously described as ‘cataclysmic’ and ‘apocalyptic’, Ocaña overshot a left-hand hairpin and rag-dolled into a tiny brook. He was remounting within seconds
when
another rider also careered off the tarmac and into his midriff. Merckx was back on his bike immediately, while Ocaña made it momentarily to his feet before a second knock-down. He and his yellow jersey lay sodden in the flood, as the French author Pierre Carrey put it, like something painted by El Greco or sculpted by Rodin. This time he would not attempt to continue.

Joop Zoetemelk claimed the next day – and the annals have recorded ever since – that he was the rider who struck Ocaña. Oddly, however, what jerky footage exists of the crash suggests that Zoetemelk may have only glanced Ocaña and that it was the Portuguese rider Joaquim Agostinho who ploughed into him. This version has been confirmed in the past by Lucien Van Impe, who witnessed the accident from the inside of the bend. It is also backed up by Johny Schleck. Agostinho, alas like Ocaña, can now never have the final word: he also died tragically, almost ten years to the day before the Spaniard, when he hit a dog and crashed while leading the Tour of the Algarve.

Before the debates and conjecture could begin, Merckx pressed on, oblivious to the drama unfolding higher up the mountain. On one hairpin, he saw Wagtmans appear over his shoulder, fly off the road and 300 metres into a field in an ‘unbelievable position – lying horizontally on his saddle, legs akimbo’. ‘Both wheels of his bike were broken but he never fell! We were the puppets of a monstrous fury,’ Merckx shuddered.

‘I was trying to stop the back wheel with my feet! You have to think like a skier in those conditions,’ Wagtmans cackles now. At the time, the Mercier directeur Louis Caput struggled to see the funny side. ‘Wagtmans diced with death today,’ Caput said that evening.

The result of the Tour, at least, was suddenly beyond doubt. Merckx had looked the strongest rider in the race ever since the Alps,
and
he took no further risks en route to second place in Luchon and what had turned from a seven-minute deficit on general classification to a two-minute lead over Zoetemelk. José Manuel Fuente, one of the KAS riders rescued from the wrong side of the time limit in Marseille, had escaped early in the stage and held on to win by over six minutes in Luchon.

While Merckx glumly allowed himself to be draped but not properly clothed in the yellow jersey, Ocaña was evacuated by helicopter to a clinic in Saint Gaudens. Initial reaction to his fall had been hysterical. Some of the first on the scene feared that he had broken his spine. After briefly losing consciousness in the helicopter, Ocaña was given painkillers, an X-ray and a much less serious diagnosis once he reached Saint Gaudens. ‘The current diagnosis, providing there are no more complications, is thoracic contusions and a pronounced state of shock,’ said a doctor’s communiqué.

A question that at this point no one dared to ask, preoccupied as they were with another big ‘if’, would stalk Ocaña to and beyond the grave. Given that he was discharged from the clinic in Saint Gaudens at noon the next day, were his injuries so severe that he couldn’t have soldiered on? Most at least respectfully let a decade or two pass before uttering the unspeakable. Thus Merckx’s friend, the television journalist, Théo Mathy, left it until 1999 to confess that, in his opinion, Ocaña was physically capable of continuing but had been broken psychologically. The storm and the Tour doctor’s panicked conclusions had done the rest. ‘I ask myself whether Ocaña didn’t abandon a bit quickly; it was his second abandonment in three Tours,’ Mathy speculated. Another journalist, Walter Pauli, endorses and supplements the same view with another premise: ‘I’m pretty sure that Merckx would have carried on, in Ocaña’s shoes. Pretty sure. When you look at what pain Merckx endured in later Tours… Physically,
there
was no way that Merckx could beat him but you had to know Ocaña. The psychological destabilisation was enough.’

Whether they do or don’t believe that Ocaña could have at least tried to ride on, most generally agree that the ‘Merckx factor’ played at least some part in his downfall. Lucien Van Impe says that Ocaña was ‘the first rider who wasn’t afraid of Merckx’, but no one can know to what extent it was all bluster, and how much bravery genuinely remained now that Merckx was homing in. There were certainly signs that Johny Schleck had been right about his teammate’s vulnerability to pressure. As much as Bernard Labourdette, for one, told Ocaña to forget about Merckx, he seemed determined to ape his former
bête noire
. That meant responding when Merckx attacked and even sending his teammates with Merckx’s Molteni men whenever they broke clear. Hence, early on the stage, the Bic pair Désiré Letort and Alain Vasseur went to mark Roger Swerts and Herman Van Springel. ‘He wanted to ride like Merckx and Merckx’s team, but there was no need,’ says Merckx’s wing-man in the mountains, Joseph Bruyère. ‘By doing so, he wore out men who could have been there with him and given him some security on the Col de Menté. Maybe he wouldn’t have taken those risks then…’

Bruyère’s next observation would make uncomfortable reading if Ocaña were still alive. ‘It’s too easy to say that Merckx would have won the Tour anyway…but Ocaña preferred to leave us guessing by abandoning.’

Thus Bruyère pre-empts the debate that has outlived Ocaña and will outlive Merckx, namely who would have won if fate hadn’t intervened. In almost all other circumstances, in any other Tour, the arguments would all have been fatuous. Contrary to the widely held, nigh-on fundamentalist misconception that the Tour winner had to be the strongest man in the race, it was actually about negotiating
the
course, manoeuvring around fortune – and these were talents on a par with the ability to pedal. Merckx would win not ‘
à la pédale
’ but fair and square nonetheless. In 1971, though, at stake was a bigger and more prestigious prize than just the
maillot jaune
: Merckx’s scalp and by extension the title, like a boxer’s gold belt, of world’s strongest cyclist.

It is to Merckx’s credit not only that he refused to don the yellow jersey on Stage 15, but also that he has largely refrained from hypothesising in the 40 years since. The closest he came at the time was admitting in his
Carnets de Route
, ‘before the accident the conviction was growing in me that I was going to beat Ocaña’. That evening in the Lycée des Garçons de Bagnères where Molteni were staying, and even the following morning, Merckx was utterly demoralised and threatened to abandon. Jacques Anquetil pleaded with him to keep going, but even more compelling was Lomme Driessens’s reminder that the wheel-sucking Zoetemelk or Van Impe stood to triumph if Merckx left. Merckx agreed but already sensed that his third Tour victory would be perceived as a hollow one. That hunch was corroborated by the French press after the next day’s stage to Superbagnères. ‘It’s obvious that Merckx, dragging the ubiquitous Zoetemelk in his wheel, wouldn’t have been able to make up even a fraction of his handicap on the radiant Luis,’ wrote Jacques Goddet in
L’Equipe
. In the same paper, Pierre Chany decreed, ‘without any danger of getting it wrong, and on the faith of the dramas we saw yesterday, that Luis Ocaña would have condemned everyone else to the role of bit-part players if he’d been in the race today’.

Zoetemelk is one of those who maintains today that Ocaña would have held on. Johny Schleck, as you might expect, is another. Seven stages remained between Luchon and Paris when the Tour was ‘decapitated’. They included the bizarre 19.6-kilometre mini-stage
straight
out of Luchon and up to the ski resort of Superbagnères, a 145-kilometre leg-breaker taking in the cols of the Peyresourde, Aspin, Tourmalet and Aubisque the next day, four stages for opportunists then the traditional time trial, traditionally won by Merckx, to the Cipale velodrome on the final day. As it turned out, Merckx had also hurt himself on the Col de Menté, specifically his right knee, and ended up riding economically in the remaining two Pyrenean stages. Sure enough, he then finished two minutes ahead of everyone in the 53-kilometre time trial to La Cipale in Paris. Against Ocaña, he would no doubt have summoned even more strength, not to mention motivation.

‘All things being equal, he would have still beaten Merckx, but, you always have to put something in brackets: Merckx was Merckx, and Luis had never beaten him before in a grand Tour. Merckx would have attacked him all the way to Paris,’ Schleck says.

This, indeed, is everyone’s doubt: to what extent was Merckx going to ‘harass’ Ocaña on the road from the Pyrenees to Paris as he had promised, and how much resilience did Ocaña have left? Raymond Riotte says that Merckx had not left Ocaña in peace for ‘a single second since Orcières-Merlette’ and would not until he had the jersey. Riotte is also one of those who considered Merckx, and not bad luck or bad weather, to be the architect of Ocaña’s demise. ‘It was only a matter of time before he exploded,’ he says. ‘Even on the Col de Menté, Eddy had attacked him and made him chase. I don’t care what anyone says: Eddy provoked that crash. Eddy lit the bomb. OK, so there was the storm, but that wasn’t what did for Luis. I was convinced, and still am, that Eddy was going to win that Tour. He would just have carried on bombarding Luis.’

In other words, if Ocaña’s fragile body wasn’t going to desert him, it somehow seemed inevitable that his nerve and ability to make
lucid
decisions eventually would. It was and is the hallmark of all great self-saboteurs – or, as they are now commonly known in sport, ‘chokers’. For some, like Italo Zilioli before Ocaña, the pressure was never greater and the magnetism of failure never stronger than in the antechamber of glory. But did Ocaña deserve the label? Had he choked on the Col de Menté? The future would provide some indication. Awaiting that there was tragedy, not irony, in the notion that Ocaña had been obsessed with crossing the Portillon, where his father had entered France two decades earlier, ahead of Merckx if not at the front of the race.

‘Luis wanted to lead the Tour into Spain after the Col de Menté – that’s why he desperately wanted to follow Merckx. If it had been someone else besides Merckx, he would have done the same thing,’ says Bernard Thévenet, who would finish fourth in the ’71 Tour. ‘It’s certain, though, that the duel between Ocaña and Merckx was top-notch stuff. Luis was someone who was really hyper-motivated with an opponent in front of him. Maybe, in front of Merckx, his motivation was even greater and became excessive. He really wanted to beat Merckx, but then Luis wanted to beat everyone in the mountains. That warm blood perhaps just boiled a bit hotter against Merckx…’

Luis Ocaña and Eddy Merckx were both 26 at the time of their 1971 showdown. Merckx’s orchestrated visit to Ocaña’s newly built, ‘tastefully decorated’ (Merckx’s words) villa in Bretagne-de-Marsan on the morning of Stage 17, the champagne Ocaña gave to him, Merckx’s invitation to ‘come back and win next year’, and their handshake at the end carried with them the promise of further, more bellicose encounters. Battles which, alas, would never materialise, as Ocaña failed to ever reproduce the heroics of 1971, except when Merckx was absent from the Tour in 1973. That year, liberated from his
nemesis,
Ocaña rode and dominated in a manner worthy and reminiscent of Merckx. Then the ogre returned in 1974, the hex resumed, and Ocaña scuttled for cover.

In other races, for a short time, he seemed unaffected by what had happened. The pair squared up again a few weeks after the Tour at the 1971 World Championships in Mendrisio. Ocaña looked in imperious form before committing a mistake that was too easy to dismiss as bad luck – drifting backwards to get a drink in Merckx’s line of sight. Merckx’s attack was instantaneous, a second professional rainbow jersey was on its way, and Ocaña was furious. ‘I’ll never forgive myself,’ he said.

He still won big races, notably the Dauphiné in 1972 and of course the 1973 Tour, but also went out on a low note with a positive dope test at the 1977 Tour. The last few years of his career had been a regret-tinged diminuendo. In 1973, he had already begun planning for the future, buying an old Armagnac distillery and its 20 hectares of vines. The Armagnac trade, though, was an expensive and volatile one to enter – certainly a dangerous environment for someone with moods as fickle as Ocaña’s. ‘I don’t think 1971 ruined his career – he still went on to win the Tour in 1973,’ says Johny Schleck. ‘Anyway, Luis wasn’t going to carry on racing for the rest of his life. He wanted to put away enough money to get the vineyard up and running. That was his big passion, his land. But Armagnac’s not an easy product. I think he’d maybe invested too much and got a bit short of cash. He could have sold his land, but he was very emotive about the whole thing and what someone else would do with it. He’d say, “My land’s for making Armagnac, and making it the way I want it made.” That’s how Luis was. He’d made a big investment, emotional and financial… I don’t know if it was because of that, but he became very stressed, then ill, and what happened happened. In any case, stress was in his life every day.’