Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (39 page)

At the time, Janssen and a few others other apart, most of his peers sympathised, just as they do now. Rumours still flourish about former teammates knowing ‘the real truth of what occurred in Savona’, but those individuals, like his roommate in Italy Martin Van Den Bossche, feign ignorance or refuse to answer when pressed. The same warped solidarity, the
omertà
or law of silence which only now is fracturing in the modern peloton, still reigns among riders whose last race was in the 1970s or even ’60s. ‘A couple of years ago, I did a fantastic four-way interview with Godefroot, Herman Van Springel, Merckx and Sercu, the generation of 1965, but as soon as I broached the subject of doping, they started coughing and looking at the floor,’ says Walter Pauli, the former
De Morgen
cycling writer.

Pauli says that his predecessors in the Belgian media had a similar attitude to doping as Merckx and the riders with whom they shared hotels, dinners and often friendships. Their feelings were encapsulated
in
a euphemism which became de rigueur in the reporting of positive tests in the Flemish press: the rider had taken some ‘forbidden candy’. In fairness, it was hard to take doping seriously when the authorities clearly did not, at least if the sanctions were any gauge. A meagre time penalty of 10 or 15 minutes, a one-month ban or sometimes just disqualification were the judicial equivalent of a slap on the wrist. Whether the sentence was intended to fit the perceived crime or unfair advantages, including financial, that substances like stimulants were supposed to bring – or whether the authorities just felt that they had to do
something
, implement even meagre deterrents, with substance abuse becoming ever more rampant and dangerous – only the men in power could really know. Either way, the tests were too little, too late to uproot a culture of indifference and complicity which far pre-dated Merckx and would persist when his career ended.

It bears repeating: it was hard for riders in Merckx’s era to take doping seriously, or even get upset about one rider being more medically ‘enhanced’ than another, when officialdom did not. It is often erroneously stated that attitudes to doping changed only after Merckx’s heyday, when syringes, so-called ‘heavy doping’, took the place of tablets similar in appearance if not composition to what professional riders had been ingesting since the first Tours de France. Thus, ‘forbidden candy’ and its purveyors were overtaken by evil needles and shady Svengalis who could alter not only the outcome of races but also upend the hierarchy of the sport. Only then did drugs in cycling become such a moral hot potato, and with good reason. This interpretation, though, is flawed: as discussed in an earlier chapter, Gastone Nencini was injecting hormones and morphine even before Merckx turned professional. It would also be disingenuous to suggest that stimulants ‘wouldn’t have permitted you to win Paris–Roubaix’, as Merckx has said about Stimul. If there was no benefit,
who
would have subjected himself to the sleepless nights that Merckx claimed were the drug’s most potent effect? Merckx took many of his 525 wins by kilometres rather than centimetres, but he of all people knew that the most meagre advantage could be the difference between victory and second place. Even Jacques Anquetil, who never concealed his opposition to dope tests, admitted that ‘doping can turn a mule into a thoroughbred race horse’. No, both then and now, the Merckx generation’s ambivalence about doping is mainly a result of the fact that they were never truly held to account, never received punishments proportionate to sometimes game-changing misdeeds, and had been steeped in a culture too old and established to revolutionise its view of doping just because it had become actionable.

Where Merckx would be correct is in thinking that almost no one, either then or now, would argue that his superiority was the product of the laboratory. By 1973, he had been subjected to over 500 dope tests and by 1977 had lived and won consistently through 12 seasons and two big breakthroughs in testing technology – Debackere’s development of a test for pipedrines in 1974 and pemoline in 1977. In theory, Merckx could have been taking pemoline with impunity for years, but if that was the case, no, it wasn’t unreasonable to assume that 90 per cent had been doing the same, at least since pipedrines became detectable in 1974. Over half of the riders (52 per cent) who started the 1977 Tour de France had, after all, tested positive or would at some point in their career, despite the fact that only frequent winners were regularly summoned to give samples. By doing so they had proved that most would take any advantage that they could get – and certainly that using banned substances posed them no great moral dilemma.

The same riders would surely have no qualms whatsoever about products and methods that weren’t yet forbidden – unless that is they
posed
dangers to their health. Merckx told Rik Vanwalleghem in 1993 ‘the conventional medical supervision you received in cycling scared me off a little’ and Ormezzano in 1982 that he ‘always had a terrible fear of certain products, a fear greater than the temptation to try them’. Presumably this applied to cortisone. That is, if Merckx was aware, on starting his career, of the ruinous long-term effects that surely outweighed the hormone’s pain-numbing advantages. Evidence of cortisone use on the Tour de France was first uncovered in 1960 by the assistant race doctor Robert Boncour, but it wasn’t until 1978 that the International Cycling Union added it to their banned list, and not until 1999 that a detection method was finally ratified. Perhaps the real landmark moment, though, also came in 1978 when Bernard Thévenet, none other than the ‘
tombeur de Merckx
’, admitted in
France Vélo
that three years of cortisone abuse had wrecked his health to the point where he was ‘no longer capable of getting on a bicycle’. The treatments dispensed by Peugeot doctor François Bellocq had helped Thévenet to win two Tours de France, but also ravaged his adrenal glands. Of course there was no question of Thévenet losing his Tour titles because at the time cortisone use was legal.

Speculation about Merckx and the same substance had appeared years before Thévenet’s mea culpa, but was seemingly based on flimsy evidence. One of the known side-effects of prolonged cortisone use is severe bloating and weight gain, and Merckx’s expanding waistline (Ormezzano in 1982: ‘Eddy Merckx has put on weight. He’s in danger of ending up like a football’) in his post-retirement years led some to conclude that he had used the drug, despite all Merckx’s claims to the contrary. This is precisely what former director Jacques Goddet was getting at in an interview with the
Sport ’90
magazine in 1992. ‘I remember that Merckx put on a couple of kilos in weight
when
he retired,’ Goddet said. ‘Not that cortisone was a banned substance in those days, it’s just that the famous always have trouble coping with the first signs of decline. It is a very difficult time for many athletes, and it explains why so many of them look for artificial ways of seeing them through their problems.’

Merckx told Rik Vanwalleghem that the comments betrayed Goddet’s long-standing prejudice against him. ‘When I won the Tour for the fourth time in a row I can remember the way the Tour organisers celebrated it with a forced sense of merriment. They had had enough of me, they were afraid that I might ruin everything for them. I think it is very small-minded of Goddet to attack me in such a way so many years later.’

If Merckx could claim that personal animosity was driving Goddet, he would certainly say the same about Freddy Maertens. Maertens admitted in an interview with Eric De Falleur of
Vélomédia
in 1987 that he had used cortisone during his career ‘but only on medical advice’. He then added, ‘From time to time you need that kind of thing, otherwise why would it exist?’ This was all a prelude to Maertens claiming that he was ‘far from the only one’.

In the past Maertens has also, incidentally, made accusations against two prominent members of Merckx’s entourage, Guillaume Michiels and Gust Naessens. Maertens alleges in his autobiography that Belgian drugs police searched Michiels’s home in 1984 and found amphetamines. In the same book, he writes that at the World Championships in Montreal in 1974, Merckx’s masseur Naessens spiked his water bottle with a substance that brought Maertens’s challenge to an abrupt and painful end. ‘The culprit admitted it… His name was Gust Naessens; he was the physio for Eddy Merckx at the time and later became my personal soigneur. He can’t confirm the story himself any more as he died a couple of years ago, but he did admit to me that he
had
put something into my bottle that day to enable Merckx to win the rainbow jersey for a third time without any problems.’

When talking about himself, if the robustness of the
omertà
was in any doubt, Maertens is capable of rebuffing even claims of doping that have come from his own mouth. Asked now to confirm what he said in an interview with
La Dernière Heure
a few years ago about having taken amphetamines in ‘small races’ throughout his career, Maertens purses his ample lips and asserts, ‘The press made that up. I never said that. I never took amphetamines.’

There is, it’s true, one prominent contemporary of Eddy Merckx who seems delighted when anyone mentions dope tests. In his kitchen in Kaprijke, Roger De Vlaeminck grins as proudly when you remark that he was one of the few active riders in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s never to have failed a drug test as if you had just told him that a democratic vote of everyone who ever saw The Gypsy and Eddy Merckx on a football field had unanimously confirmed that, yes, he was by far the better player.

‘At the Tour of Flanders that I won in 1977, the second and third riders were both positive. But if you don’t take anything you can’t be caught!’ De Vlaeminck says triumphantly.

In his first season as a professional, with the Flandria team, De Vlaeminck claims that he rode the Tour de France ‘without even a vitamin’. In that 1969 Tour De Vlaeminck says that he went ‘three days without even a bottle’ and ‘certainly had no team doctor’, unlike Merckx who was already under the care of Enrico Peracino with the rest of the Faema team. Things only seriously changed for De Vlaeminck, he says, when he also moved to an Italian team, Dreher, in 1972.

‘There we had Doctor [Piero] Modesti, and I used to take the vitamins that he used to give me,’ De Vlaeminck says. ‘There was also a masseur who said, “You have to take all this.” I looked and
his
hand was full of tablets. “This is for the heart, this is for the lungs…” but I said, “No, keep it all.” There was a lot of cortisone at the time, and amphetamines…but not in Italy. In Italy you were always tested. In Belgium there were a lot of amphetamines. At my time, in Italy, no one took anything. They spoke to me about blood transfusions. When I was riding for Francesco Moser [in 1984], they asked whether I wanted to give half a litre of blood to put in the fridge. I said no…’

De Vlaeminck has just dropped a small bombshell. Unfortunately he realises, and realises that we have realised. ‘Who asked you about blood transfusions? Moser?’

‘I can’t say. I didn’t see anything.’

‘Was it Moser who asked you?’

‘I didn’t see anything…’

The association of Moser with blood transfusions is actually not news. It is a well-known fact, admitted by Moser, that he used this then legal if highly dangerous and effective method of performance enhancement to break Merckx’s Hour record in 1984. The revelation here would be the Italian proposing the same ‘treatments’ to teammates like De Vlaeminck, at a time when few would have imagined that so-called ‘blood-doping’ could be any more than a few mavericks’ crazy experiment.

The truth of course is that blood transfusions were already being used to devastating effect in endurance sports in the early and mid-1970s, when Merckx was in his pomp. In the late ’60s, one of cycling’s great pharmaceutical pioneers, Jacques Anquetil, reportedly took to visiting what the journalist Roger Bastide said was a ‘luxury clinic’ every winter for an ‘exchange transfusion’. This consisted of replacing a large quantity of blood with an equal amount of compatible donor blood, supposedly to remove accumulated toxins. If in
theory
this technique had no significant effect on performance, the same could not be said of the transfusions used by Finnish distance runners in major athletics championships from the beginning of the 1970s, which
increased
the volume of red blood cells in the body and hence its ability to pump oxygen to the muscles.

The most famous exponent was the 1972 5,000- and 10,000-metre Olympic champion Lasse Viren, who admitted in a press conference in Münich that he had used transfusions. Seven weeks later, Merckx broke the Hour record having ‘categorically refused’ a blood transfusion according to the journalist Joël Godaert. Godaert did not specify the source of his information or whose offer Merckx had refused.

That blood transfusions were already part of the doping panoply was confirmed again in 1976, when Joop Zoetemelk confessed that he had benefited from the technique the previous year, presumably while leaching Merckx and Thévenet’s wheels en route to fourth place in Paris. Zoetemelk’s treatment had been advised and overseen by the French doctor, Henri Fucs. Since a bad crash in 1974, Zoetemelk had purportedly suffered from anaemia, and Fucs believed that multiple transfusions during the 1975 Tour would be the perfect remedy. Zoetemelk was satisfied with the results but still seemed uneasy about the public’s reaction, so much so that he declared on arrival at the 1976 Tour that he would not be repeating the experiment.

While the French Cycling Federation, with the blessing of the French Sports Ministry, was including a public warning against the dangers of transfusions in its official magazine in 1977, endorsements of the procedure in other sporting disciplines continued to multiply; hence, in the spring of 1977, at around the time when Merckx was taking the fateful dose of Stimul, the German World Cup-winning
footballer
Franz Beckenbauer told
Stern
magazine that he underwent exchange transfusions several times a month.