Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (36 page)

That, then, was precisely what they would do.

Merckx, meanwhile, had been eyeing up the descent of the Allos. By his own admission, Thévenet was a poor descender. The Allos, therefore, would be the perfect place for Merckx to show him who was boss.

Neither man, it was true, felt at his best as the peloton headed out along the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. Thévenet’s legs ached but he tried to reassure himself: Pra Loup was 217 kilometres away. Merckx, meanwhile, changed bikes three times as the race now pointed north from the Med and into the Mercantour Alps, huge grey lumps of mountain which today smouldered like coals in an oven. By the time they reached the Col des Champs, Thévenet’s legs felt reinvigorated and he began implementing the plan. One, two, three attacks; Merckx responded every time but felt spasms in his stomach as he did. Rather than alert Thévenet, he sent teammate Edouard Janssens back to race doctor Miserez’s car for some painkillers. Thévenet tried three more times and three more times Merckx followed. Janssens and De Schoenmaecker – as well as Van Impe, Zoetemelk and Gimondi – strained to ensure their front-row seats for the next act on the Col d’Allos.

To take full advantage of the Allos descent, Merckx knew that the best policy would be to attack shortly before the summit. This was classic Merckx – a tactic he had used time and again since ironing out the kinks in his descending technique under Vittorio Adorni’s tutelage in 1968. His surge, a kilometre from the top, was too quick for Thévenet. The Frenchman, though, couldn’t have picked a better time to feel the dreaded hunger knock, ‘
la fringale
’, and all power drained from his legs. Forced to eat, he also composed himself in readiness for the next 17 kilometres of twisting, turning, downhill horror, which Felice Gimondi’s directeur sportif Giancarlo Ferretti, for one, would not forget; having plunged 50 metres into a ravine in his Bianchi team vehicle, Ferretti was lucky that the car landed and stopped on a small patch of scrub, and lucky to be alive.

‘Plan B was to attack on the Col d’Allos, but I just didn’t feel good enough,’ Thévenet picks up. ‘Then when Merckx attacked he got a hundred metres and I just stayed there, dangling, a hundred metres away. I could feel this
fringale
coming and I said to myself that I wouldn’t make it to the finish if I didn’t eat and take my foot off the gas. The way down was horrible, though. The Allos might be the nastiest, most dangerous descent in France. I got to the bottom of Pra Loup one minute, maybe one minute ten down. At that moment, I thought I was stuffed. After all the effort I’d made, everything I’d tried that day, I was still going to lose a minute to Merckx.’

For a few months now, you could have represented the balance of power in professional cycling with two converging lines on a graph. Descending, not as steeply as the Allos, but losing altitude nonetheless, was the line corresponding to Merckx. Rising in the other direction, slowly but surely gaining height like the 6.5-kilometre climb to Pra Loup, was the progress curve of Bernard Thévenet and the rest of the peloton.

The two lines had not yet intersected. They would do so, then begin to diverge again, just above the floor of the Ubaye valley.

After a kilometre-and-a-half of climbing, Merckx still led by well over a minute. His head bobbed as it always had, the earth and not just his bike seemed to jar when he bludgeoned the pedals, and his jersey was of a familiar hue. More than just an era, the sport’s first and only ideology – Merckxism – was droning to an end as suddenly as it had begun in 1968 on the Tre Cime di Lavaredo.

When Felice Gimondi, oblivious to what had befallen Ferretti, caught then edged in front of Merckx, cycling had come full circle. Ten years earlier Gimondi had won the Tour. Now the man responsible for a decade-long eclipse in his career begged Gimondi to slow down. ‘He told me to keep the pace steady because he was struggling. Well, he’d never said that before. There, already, something very different was happening,’ Gimondi remembers.

Behind, Thévenet rode clear of the parasitical partners, Van Impe and Zoetemelk, but had no idea what was happening further up the climb. If he could just claw back 10 seconds, maybe half a minute, in 24 hours he would go for broke on the Col d’Izoard. There were no time checks coming from the official race vehicles and none from De Muer, so he relied on the crowd. ‘I kept hearing the spectators who were giving me the time gaps, and from what they were saying, it seemed as though I was coming back to Merckx. I was right on my limit, but my morale was soaring every time someone shouted that I’d gained more seconds. I started thinking I was going to finish with him. Then, the next thing I started hearing was, “
Il est là, il est là
,! He’s there!” but I could neither see him nor believe what they were saying. It was unthinkable that Merckx could have a collapse. Unthinkable that I could have gained a minute on him in less than five kilometres.’

The next day, in
L’Equipe
, Pierre Chany would write that by this point Merckx was travelling ‘at the speed of a countryside postman’. Thévenet, by contrast, was rampant, as he is when he relives a moment which the TV cameras missed but is engraved in his memory and cycling folklore.

‘Suddenly,’ he says switching to the present tense, ‘I see the Molteni car in front. But it doesn’t really register. I’m going so hard that I can’t really think straight. A moment later I’m with the car. Somehow, though, I’m still scared that he’ll see me coming, counter-attack and that’ll be the end of it. I get within striking distance on a bend with a strip of melted tarmac in the middle of the road, which he’s taken right on the inside, along the line of spectators. I tell myself that he’ll never dare to cross the melting tarmac – he’ll get stuck in it – so I go all the way to the other side, where I’m almost hidden in the spectators on the right side of the road. I try to pass and get clear of him as quickly as possible, so that he can’t respond. I see that he’s not following and somehow I’m not surprised. The euphoria drowns out every other feeling…’

Moments later, Thévenet passed Gimondi. ‘But ooohlalalala, it was hard,’ he says. ‘The last 500 metres were really steep. It just wouldn’t end. It seemed so, so long. I crossed the line, collapsed over my handlebars, and it was the mechanic who told me, “You’ve got the jersey! You’ve got the jersey!” I said, “Don’t mess around. I can’t have taken a minute back.”’

For a while it seemed that no one could quite comprehend. Amid chaotic scenes, two riders, Thévenet and Merckx, clambered on to the podium in their yellow jerseys. As though, having longed for revolution, the Tour was now dragging its feet out of the
ancien régime
.

The general classification was unambiguous: Thévenet first and Merckx second, 58 seconds behind.

‘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,’ Thévenet says. ‘I think most of the journalists that day had already written their story. But then everything had changed in those last few kilometres, and there was this hysterical stampede at the finish line. The podium was teeming, teeming with journalists. It was absolute pandemonium. I did the protocol, the interviews, then – there were no buses in those days – so I went back down the mountain and to the hotel on my bike. The hotel was almost exactly where I’d passed Merckx, about two kilometres from the finish line. It was crazy. The mountain was still full of people. Fortunately, everyone was going down by then, so they didn’t see me coming, and by the time I’d passed them it was too late for them to grab me. But it was complicated.

‘Maurice De Muer always used to buy champagne when we won, but we were only allowed a drop in the bottom of the glass. That night it was also a bit tiresome when the photographers started arriving and asking for pictures of me in the yellow jersey in every conceivable pose. It all felt a bit presumptuous to me. Everyone in the peloton knew that you were never safe with Merckx.’

Apparently, not even in your sleep. The following morning, Thévenet woke with a start and was relieved to see his yellow jersey draped over the chair where he had left it the previous night. In his dream, he and it had spent the night in Eddy Merckx’s bedroom.

Why had Merckx buckled so spectacularly, so suddenly? A hunger knock of his own seemed the most logical explanation, but Merckx ruled it out. Had that been the case, he would have been ravenous on arriving at his hotel shortly after the finish, and that had not been the case. He thought it more likely that the painkillers he had taken on the Col des Champs had worn off somewhere on the descent of
the
Allos, which might explain his fainting feeling on the climb to Pra Loup.

Later it would emerge and Merckx would confirm that he had also taken an anticoagulant medicine before the start in Nice. This puzzles Professor Michel Audran of the University of Montpellier’s Faculty of Medicine and the International Cycling Union’s biological passport review panel. ‘If you’d been punched, and were getting spasms in the lumbar muscles (as Merckx reportedly was), to my knowledge a doctor wouldn’t prescribe an anticoagulant. You’d give the patient muscle relaxants, painkillers or maybe an anti-inflammatory. There might be bleeding and bruising and prescribing an anticoagulant would be dangerous to my mind,’ Audran says.

Most likely, in addition to other factors, Merckx had overestimated his stamina, rather like at Liège–Bastogne–Liège in 1971. Would it have been different with Bruyère in the Molteni team? Merckx’s friend, the Belgian TV journalist Théo Mathy, for one, thought so. Bruyère feels inclined to agree with him. It is certainly hard to imagine that Thévenet would have been allowed or able to attack six times on the Col des Champs had Bruyère been setting the pace. The old Merckx could have soaked up this and probably whatever effects still lingered from the punch on Puy de Dôme. Felice Gimondi overtaking Merckx, however, was the equivalent of Ali finally overwhelming Smokin’ Joe Frazier in Manila.

The next day, the fight was effectively over, even though Merckx would keep on swinging. His attack on the descent of the Col de Vars took him a minute clear of Thévenet, but again Zoetemelk wouldn’t help him, and the Guil gorge leading to the foot of the Izoard was too long for Merckx on his own. Merckx was reabsorbed, Thévenet counter-attacked and the Bastille Day crowds rejoiced. ‘The best memory of my career,’ Thévenet calls it. He carried on to win by over
two
minutes in Serre Chevalier and extend his overall lead to three minutes and 20 seconds.

Perpetual harassment had worked against Ocaña in 1971 and was Merckx’s only option now. This, at least, was until what looked at first like a banal tangle with Ole Ritter in the roll-out of Valloire at the start of Stage 17 sent him sprawling. X-rays after the Tour would confirm that he had broken his upper jawbone in two places and trapped a nerve. After consulting the Tour doctor Miserez and ignoring his advice to abandon, Merckx immediately attacked Thévenet, first on the descent of the Col de la Madeleine then on the way down the Col de la Colombière. Both times, he opened up significant daylight but both times he was also caught.

An hour after the next afternoon’s mountain time trial to Châtel in which Merckx had finished third and recouped 16 seconds on Thévenet, Théo Mathy found him curled up in his hotel bed, as he had been in Savona and in Marseille in 1971. It took Merckx an hour to get up and stumble to the bathroom. ‘Today I found out what real pain is,’ he said.

Merckx was still telling the press that he was the stronger man, and Thévenet the luckier one. In their face-to-face exchanges, he was more magnanimous. Not that losing gracefully was already a priority or even a possibility he entertained, but by staying in the race he also did his rival the immense favour of honouring his victory. Dr Miserez said that carrying on was ‘crazy’ and exposed Merckx to the ‘risk of a serious sinus infection’. A telegram from the Belgian prime minister Leo Tindemans, however, urged him to press on and reclaim yellow in or before Paris.

Alas, Merckx’s attacks on the Champs-Élysées turned out to be the desperate last lunges of a beaten, faded slugger. Gimondi reckoned that his aggression had cost him the Tour. But Merckx knew
no
other way; he had lived by the sword, died by the sword at Pra Loup, and now went down wielding it in Paris. His margin of defeat was two minutes and 27 seconds. ‘I’ll come back next year,’ he vowed. Thévenet, he admitted, had built his victory in the mountains despite being a ‘disaster going downhill’.

The backhanded compliments or criticisms made no odds to Thévenet. He had realised a dream. More important than that, as far as everyone else was concerned, he had written his name into cycling legend as the ‘
tombeur
de Merckx’ – the man who brought down Merckx, Merckxism and the curtain on an era.

‘I hadn’t let him out of my sight for the last four days and, oddly enough, that meant we ended up chatting more than we ever had,’ Thévenet recalls. ‘He was definitely in pain – one of the things we spoke about was how he could only eat liquid food, and in fact I gave him a bottle one day. Even then, though, I thought for a second that he might be bluffing. I still think that he was trying to win the Tour with those attacks on the Champs-Élysées.

‘He shook my hand at the end of the race and was very gracious. We went to the Hôtel de Ville, then the Elysée palace together. I think he was already plotting how he was going to beat me the next year. I realise now that I owe him a lot, for not having abandoned, because the image that I now have in France is “
Le tombeur de Merckx
”. Winning the Tour was more important to me, but I think what marked the French public was that a little Frenchman had beaten this monster who had had this hegemony over cycling. He could have had more Tours de France if he’d been more selective about his goals but that wasn’t his mindset. He was like a robot: “Race, win, race, win, race, win”. His life boiled down to that. We were all there to ride and win races…but him a bit more than everyone else.’

cannibalised