Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (37 page)

‘I think we all have a certain pool of energy and resilience, but there’s only so much ball-breaking you can tolerate. You explode.’
F
ELICE
G
IMONDI

‘DON’T FEAR FOR
one second that you’ll see me on the decline, served up on a plate to a vengeful peloton, like some shipwrecked, stranded sailor clinging to the buoy of his former glory. At the first signs that I’m weakening, and maybe a bit before, I’ll bid farewell…’

These were the words that Merckx had written in 1974. He knew that sportsmen always pledged to go out at the top and rarely did, but was adamant that he would be the exception. Théo Mathy told him that he had known a lot of cyclists, many who had made the same promise, and none who had kept it. ‘I’ll be different,’ Merckx assured him.

Merckx, it proved, wasn’t always as good as his word, contrary to what Walter Godefroot says today. He turned 30 a month before the 1975 Tour de France and, according to the timetable that he had outlined in multiple interviews, ought to have been riding the Grande Boucle for the final time. Instead he left Paris with revenge and not retirement at the top of his 1976 agenda.

It was hard for Merckx to acknowledge the start of his decline, partly because no one else would. Like Thévenet in the last week of
the
Tour, everyone feared a bluff or at least a backlash. He had been written off before. Illness and injury had also, undeniably, constrained him at the Tour. As Thévenet says, ‘Some of his aura had gone, and that was half of the battle, but he had still been the second best rider in the Tour, better than Van Impe and Zoetemelk and a lot of other riders who were supposedly among the best in the world.’

More of the Merckx mystique, however, would dissolve a month after the Tour at the World Championships in Yvoir. Perhaps conscious that more was at stake than just the rainbow jersey he had won a year earlier in Montreal, Merckx was determined to pre-empt the in-fighting that had previously dogged Belgian teams, and so took the bold step of inviting the entire national squad to his house the week before the race. Only Freddy Maertens and his Flandria teammate Michel Pollentier declined. Their excuse? Kraainem was too far to travel from their homes near the North Sea coast. Maertens did, admittedly, give a different explanation in his autobiography years later: ‘There was no point [in going]… Whenever Merckx, who was always given enough personal helpers by the Federation, spoke, it was always for his own benefit.’ Roger De Vlaeminck, meanwhile, not only attended but was said to have slept over. Cynics in the press later speculated that the highlight of the evening might have been not Claudine’s hospitality or culinary skills – but the point at which Merckx started writing cheques to ensure the collaboration of his guests in Yvoir. As usual, the pre-Worlds hype was matched only by the wild speculation.

The final, ritual meeting to determine tactics and incentives then took place on the night before the race. A fee of 50,000 Belgian francs, to be paid by the winner to his teammates in case of victory, was agreed. When the president of the national federation, the Royale Ligue Vélocipédique Belge, then interrupted dinner to open
discussions
about how their bonus would be divided among the 11 men, De Vlaeminck raised an arm and his voice.

‘He was talking about the eleven men, and I piped up, “You mean ten and a half?” and pointed at Van Impe. It was a joke about his height, but Van Impe didn’t think it was funny. He told me later that it cost me his help in the race and maybe the World Championships.’

If ‘The Gypsy’ couldn’t count on Van Impe, he was shocked and thrilled when Merckx volunteered his assistance early in the race. On the sixth lap, Merckx had crashed into an overzealous fan who had spilled on to the course, hurting his left hip. Having rejoined the peloton, he immediately found De Vlaeminck and announced that he would now be his domestique for a day. His commitment was so whole-hearted, Merckx claimed later, and the sight of him helping his old foe so incongruous, that the Dutchman Gerrie Knetemann seemed unnerved on his behalf. ‘How can you, Eddy Merckx, be helping another rider at the World Championships? Have you gone mad?’ Knetemann asked him. Merckx later admitted that it had been a mistake; old habits died hard for De Vlaeminck, and when the Dutchman Hennie Kuiper attacked on the last lap, De Vlaeminck seemed suddenly to doubt Merckx’s motives and was more preoccupied with following his teammate than their Dutch opponent. Had De Vlaeminck lurked in the chase group, Kuiper might well have desisted under pressure from Merckx. De Vlaeminck would then have been left to take the sprint. Instead he had to settle for second.

Kuiper’s teammate Joop Zoetemelk had been taunted throughout the race by Belgian fans wielding giant lollipops – a snarky reference to his ‘wheel-sucking’ during the Tour de France – but that pair and Knetemann had had the last laugh. None of this trio was a superman yet their combined might had been easily enough to overcome Merckx, De Vlaeminck and Van Impe in the lead group on the final
lap.
As had been the case in July, on the hills, Merckx looked powerful but also uncharacteristically one-paced. As he crossed the line, Kuiper appeared almost to be beckoning with his right arm as he turned to look back down the finishing straight, as if to say, ‘Come on! What’s keeping you?’ Over the next two years, Kuiper’s Dutch Ti Raleigh team would be at the forefront of a generation that began to make Merckx and his teammates look like yesterday’s men. Ti Raleigh’s manager, Peter Post, jettisoned the all-for-one Italian model of which both Rik Van Looy and Merckx had been benefactors in teams sponsored by Faema in favour of a modern, multi-pronged and highly dynamic approach which over the next four years would bring Ti Raleigh a staggering 28 Tour de France stage victories. ‘The tactical meetings would go on for hours,’ says one Ti Raleigh rider from that era, the Briton David Lloyd. ‘Post had been forced to come up with something new, because when the team started Merckx was so strong. He was like ten men on his own, plus he had another ten brilliant riders to help him!’

Thus, necessity had been the mother of invention, giving rise to teams, individuals and a peloton which, when the moment came, had prepared and knew exactly how to seize on and perhaps hasten his decline. As the formerly oppressed scented blood, they also sharpened their fangs and their performances. It was hard to know whether De Vlaeminck and Maertens had won nearly 60 races between them in 1975 more because they had improved or because Merckx had decayed. ‘He was perhaps deteriorating, but not much in 1975,’ reckons De Vlaeminck. ‘It was easy to say that he wasn’t as strong any more, but he was still finishing second if not first. It also coincided with my best year. I won over fifty races that season and was first or second in eighty. A bit later, Merckx became like a wounded lion: it was normal that everyone gathered around to tear off their strip of flesh.’

As far as Maertens is concerned, ‘he didn’t really weaken in one-day races until 1977’ and indeed even Maertens at his best couldn’t prevent Merckx from winning his seventh Milan–San Remo in March 1976. ‘It was Maertens who was strong that day, but he somehow contrived to get everyone riding against him, for various reasons, whether it was stuff that he’d said in the press or that Driessens had said,’ recalls Walter Godefroot. ‘We are all looking at each other, De Vlaeminck’s there, and just before the Poggio, Merckx attacks, but we can see it’s not the best Merckx. We certainly don’t think that he’s going to win.’

Usually, it was Godefroot warning people not to discount Merckx. But having been joined on the Poggio by a 20-year-old compatriot, Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke, Merckx proceeded to wriggle clear on the descent and solo to his seventh victory in ‘La Classicissma’, one more than Costante Girardengo. ‘It was the beginning of the end,’ Merckx admitted later. It was also to be his last major victory.

The win in San Remo fooled everyone for a while. At the Setmana Catalana a week later, there were even glimpses of a vintage Merckx until a empty lunch-bag got caught in his wheel and caused a crash with consequences nearly as grave for Merckx’s season as Joseph Bruyère’s in the same race a year earlier. Merckx’s ‘luck’ was definitely, revealingly, running out. Despite the resulting injury to his left arm, copious amounts of painkillers and sleepless nights that lasted almost throughout the Classics, he continued to threaten and scored top ten finishes at Gent–Wevelgem, Paris–Roubaix, Flèche Wallonne and in Liège–Bastogne–Liège. It was enough to convince some that he was still the favourite to win a sixth Giro d’Italia, and their faith was intact after ten days of racing. A cyst like the one that had hampered him at the 1974 Tour de France, however, now combined with more ordinary physical degeneration to send him plunging down the general classification.

What he was losing in power, agility and reputation, Merckx at least maintained in resilience and dignity. While he toiled at the Giro, another Belgian, Johan De Muynck, looked to be closing in on victory, but De Muynck’s teammate Roger De Vlaeminck was preparing for an ignominious, ignoble exit. After one stage in Italy, Merckx saw De Vlaeminck walking past his door in the hotel that their teams were sharing and called him inside. ‘My God, I had even more respect for him after that,’ De Vlaeminck says. ‘He showed me this wound that he had in his groin. It was as thick and deep as a finger. I couldn’t understand why he was carrying on.’

Soon, indeed, De Vlaeminck would be leaving, apparently for no other reason than he couldn’t bear to see De Muynck win the Giro, and certainly wouldn’t contemplate helping him. According to another teammate, Ercole Gualazzini, somewhere near Calamento, halfway up the Passo Manghen, De Vlaeminck climbed off his bike then, inexplicably, ran straight into the dense forest lining the road and hid from his directeurs sportifs. They, De Muynck and Merckx were disgusted. On the penultimate day of the race, whether out of sympathy, patriotism or just plain decency, Merckx waited for and effectively saved De Muynck by pacing him back to the bunch after a fall on the descent from Zambla Alta into Bergamo. Sadly for De Muynck, it proved to be in vain as the 33-year-old Felice Gimondi narrowly overhauled him in the time trial deciding the outcome of the Giro the following morning.

Merckx’s eighth place represented his worst finish in a grand tour since the 1967 race but was a testament to his courage. True, Molteni had offered him financial incentives to stay in the race, but as at the Tour a year earlier it was Merckx’s stoicism that had kept him going. Whether riding through the pain had been sensible or not was another matter. When, a year or two earlier, his father Jules had suffered a
heart
attack, Merckx pleaded with him to heed the warning and scale back his hours in the family grocery store in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre. Jules had responded with a shrug; the urge to work was more powerful than he was. Merckx tried to protest but knew deep down that he felt exactly the same.

When he was in his twenties and his body’s ability to repair and regenerate was still miraculous, his appetite for racing and winning had been his greatest strength. Now the coin had flipped and it became a weakness, as the pressures remained the same or even increased while his resources diminished. His least favourite parts of the job had always been the ones demanding his attention off the bike, and since Jean Van Buggenhout’s death during the 1974 Giro Merckx had sometimes felt overwhelmed. Claudine took up some of the slack, but even she admitted that Van Bug’s passing ‘left a void’. Her husband may no longer have been the pedalling deity he once was, but he remained, for example, the man that journalists turned to for a reaction and teammates for a new home when Molteni left cycling in disgrace at the end of 1976. It would perhaps be too harsh to say the company owners’ arrests were in keeping with Merckx’s declining fortunes, but their exit certainly left a putrid taste. It wasn’t the first time that the Molteni brothers had been in trouble with the law; never before, though, had they been accused of exporting ‘sausages’ which were actually just plastic wrappers pumped with manure and dumped at sea in an elaborate smuggling ruse.

What Merckx was supposed to know about any of this, nobody stopped to ask. The fact was that the Molteni brothers’ fraudulent gains had been paying Merckx and his domestiques’ salary, and there was now no Van Bug to find a replacement. Merckx would end up signing for Raphaël Géminiani’s new FIAT-France team and taking old faithfuls like Joseph Bruyère, Jos Huysmans, Roger Swerts and Frans Mintjens
with
him. ‘He was still as motivated as ever,’ Bruyère affirms. ‘That was one thing that never changed. Even in 1977, he thought he could win every race he entered. Unfortunately he was like a car that had been pushed to breaking point, driven over the speed limit for more than ten years. The engine was completely worn out.’

Before the end of 1976, he had done another patriotic good turn by helping Maertens to win the world road race championship in Ostuni, Italy, despite their feud still festering. Merckx himself was fifth, and sporadic flashes like this added to his conviction that another Tour de France or at least ‘one more big one’ was within his grasp. Always the most straight-talking member of his entourage, Van Buggenhout might have nipped his self-deception in the bud. As it was there were plenty, like his father-in-law Lucien Acou, who would assure anyone prepared to listen that Merckx the Cannibal was on temporary not permanent leave. ‘Just you wait…’ Acou would say, and wait everyone including Merckx did, or at least tried to. Patience had never been his forte in races, and at times now he turned himself into a sad caricature of the rider he had been, precisely the ‘shipwrecked, stranded sailor clinging to the buoy of his former glory’ that he had vowed never to become.

At the ’77 Tour of Flanders, he seemed to want to teleport himself and his fans back to the summer of ’69, but instead all he did was make them wince. His slow suicide began the moment when he creaked clear of the peloton 140 kilometres from the finish and ended about an hour later when he was passed and left for dead by young tyros like Maertens and even older yet more successfully aged veterans like Godefroot. Friends in the peloton watched him and grimaced. ‘I would try to talk to him whenever I saw him in those last couple of years,’ says Franco Bitossi. ‘I’d say, “Eddy, you know, you were so much better than us before that maybe you didn’t have to make the
same
sacrifices as us. Perhaps you have to change some things. Race a bit differently. I don’t know…” He’d just blankly nod his head, but I never got the impression that he was really taking much notice.’