Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by William Fotheringham

  List of Illustrations

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction

  PART ONE: The 1960S

  Father And Son

  Arriva Merckx

  World Domination In Five Phases

  Oui Or Ya?

  Savona

  Revolutionary Merckxism

  PART TWO: The 1970S

  Descent Of A God

  Scorched By The Sun King

  Accidental Attacks Of An Anarchist

  Annus Mirabilis

  La Course En Tête

  Serving The Cannibal

  Twilight Of The God

  All Passion Spent

  Eddy Merckx’s Major Victories

  Picture Section

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  What makes a man the greatest of all time?

  Eddy Merckx is to cycling what Muhammad Ali is to boxing or Pelé to football: quite simply, the best there has ever been. Throughout his professional career Merckx amassed an astonishing 445 victories. Lance Armstrong, by comparison, managed fewer than 100.

  Merckx was a machine. It wasn’t just the number of victories; it was his remorseless domination that created the legend. In 1969 while already comfortably leading the Tour de France, Merckx hammered a further eight-and-a-half minutes out of his nearest rivals during an 85-mile solo break in the Pyrenees. He didn’t just beat his opponents, he crushed them.

  But his triumphs only tell half a story that includes horrific injury, a doping controversy and tragedy. He was nicknamed ‘The Cannibal’ for his insatiable appetite for victory, but the moniker did scant justice to a man who was handsome, sensitive and surprisingly anxious.

  For Britain’s leading cycling writer, William Fotheringham, the burning question remains, why? What made Eddy Merckx so invincible? In Half Man, Half Bike, Fotheringham goes back to speak to those who were there at the time and those who knew Merckx best. The result is this extraordinary and definitive story of a man whose fear of failure would drive him to reach the highest pinnacles before ultimately destroying him.

  About the Author

  William Fotheringham writes for the Guardian and Observer on cycling and rugby. A racing cyclist and launch editor of procycling and Cycle Sport magazines, he has reported on over twenty Tours de France. He is the critically lauded author of Fallen Angel, Roule Britannia and Put Me Back on My Bike, which Vélo magazine called ‘the best cycling biography ever written’.

  ALSO BY WILLIAM FOTHERINGHAM

  Put Me Back on My Bike: In Search of Tom Simpson

  Roule Britannia: A History of Britons in the Tour de France

  Fallen Angel: The Passion of Fausto Coppi

  Cyclopedia: It’s All About the Bike

  A Century of Cycling

  Fotheringham’s Sporting Trivia

  Fotheringham’s Sporting Trivia: The Greatest Sporting Trivia Book Ever II

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  All photos courtesy of Offside, unless stated.

  1. Great white hope: the young Merckx wears the maillot blanc of race leader in the 1967 Paris–Nice ‘race to the sun’.

  2. A crash on a cobbled road in 1966 as Merckx’s apprenticeship in the spring Classics begins (courtesy of Getty Images).

  3. A year later, Merckx attacks in Paris–Roubaix as the field struggle to hang on. It was a scene that would be repeated time and again, race after race.

  4. The feat that shook cycling: Merckx climbs through a snowstorm to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo and takes control of the 1968 Giro d’Italia (courtesy of Getty Images); at the finish, helpers wrap him in blankets.

  5. ‘Merckx you are the greatest’: the Italians fete the new champion after victory in the 1969 Milan–San Remo.

  6. Two sides of the summer of 1969: a devastated Merckx learns that he is to be thrown off the Giro d’Italia after a positive drugs test that would later be over-ruled (courtesy of Getty Images).

  7. A month later, the opposition are powerless as he makes yet another attack in the mountains of the Tour de France (courtesy of Getty Images).

  8. The crash that shook cycling: Merckx lies unconscious, his bike a wreck after the fatal pile-up in the Derny race at Blois in September 1969. It left the Derny driver, Fernand Wambst, dead and Merckx with lasting back problems (courtesy of Getty Images).

  9. Flair and flares on the Bald Mountain: Merckx climbs to the Ventoux observatory en route to victory in the 1970 Tour.

  10. The 1971 Tour is in the great man’s pocket a day from Paris. True to his character, he is still looking for chances to attack in the Chevreuse valley.

  11. Pictures of Merckx smiling were said to be rare: here he celebrates victory in the 1971 Milan–San Remo, his fourth win there in six years; in the following picture he relaxes at the dinner table with his team during the 1974 Tour (both courtesy of Getty Images).

  12. In 1973, Merckx landed his second victory in Paris– Roubaix. Here he is retrieved by the front group led by the Belgian Walter Planckaert before making his final move.

  13. Roger de Vlaeminck was Merckx’s great rival in the Classics: he is struggling to hold The Cannibal in the 1975 ‘The Hell of the North’, although at the finish the order would be reversed (courtesy of Getty Images).

  14. A typical masterstroke late in the 1974 Tour: the solo attack that sealed victory in the Vouvray to Orleans stage.

  15. Tour starts in the 1970s were low-key affairs: Merckx pedals away into the rain at Dieppe in the 1974 race (courtesy of Getty Images).

  16. The 1977 Tour, The Cannibal’s last: he is fighting against time – in both senses – in the mountain time trial from Morzine to Avoriaz (courtesy of Getty Images).

  17. Sick and exhausted, Merckx slumps over his bike at the Alpe d’Huez finish in the 1977 Tour. After this, retirement was only a matter of time (courtesy of Getty Images).

  This book is dedicated to the late Laurent Fignon, a man who loved la course en tête

  INTRODUCTION

  Eddy Merckx made his first attack as the five leaders went under the small triangle of red cloth hanging from a long string over the road that marked a kilometre to ride until the finish line at the Avoriaz ski station. Suddenly, he dived up the right-hand side of the narrow corridor of road between the crowds of cycling fans. After that there were only three of them: Merckx, riding in the rainbow jersey of world champion, the Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk in the blue of Gan-Mercier, and the stocky Frenchman Bernard Thévenet, the man in the yellow jersey, leader of the 1975 Tour de France. It was Thévenet who retrieved Merckx when he attempted to get away a second time, 250 metres from the line, but when the world champion went again immediately, having given the Frenchman no time to recover, Thévenet let him go. The three attacks gained Merckx third place behind the winner Vicente López Carril of Spain, and allowed him to finish two seconds ahead of Thévenet.

  Given that Merckx had won close to five hundred races, the third place was insignificant. Given that Thévenet enjoyed an advantage of nearly three minutes, the seconds looked meaningless. But for a man who had broken his jaw that morning the series of brutal accelerations and the minuscule time gain were truly remarkable. He should have been in hospital, or lying on a sofa nursing the double fracture that had left his face swollen and bruised. Instead, he had fought his way over three massive Alpine passes, through 225 kilometres in the blazing sun, he had led the way down the descent to Morzine, the resort at the foot of the final climb – Thév
enet was a clumsy descender, and it was worth pushing him to the limit – in a style that can only be described as heroic. It was futile. It was also self-destructive. It was glorious.

  At first sight, the crash could hardly have been more innocuous. They were not even racing at the time. At the start of the stage in the little Alpine town of Valloire, as the Tour de France peloton progressed slowly from the assembly point on to the lower slopes of the Col du Télégraphe, the Dane Ole Ritter moved suddenly to avoid colliding with another rider. The speed was slow, but Eddy Merckx, who was riding alongside, could not miss Ritter’s handlebars: they became entangled with his. He could no longer control the bike: down he went, forwards and sideways. It could have been rien de grave, as the Tour commentators usually say: but just this once, the impact was not absorbed by an outstretched arm or knee. Merckx fell on his face.

  Even when the race doctor Pierre Dumas arrived to treat him, the real extent of his injuries was not immediately apparent. His face over the left cheekbone swelled up as if he had received a right hook in a pub brawl. Dumas smeared painkilling ointment over his cheek, making it look as if a sickly white mould was growing there. He was dazed and probably concussed: he spoke in Flemish to a Spanish rider he knew well, hardly the behaviour of a lucid man. He was advised, urged, implored to quit the race, the chorus led by Dumas, echoed by his teammates and his manager, Bob Lelangue. He kept pedalling. Why? He still cannot put his finger on it.

  He was made to talk to television after that stage finish as he shivered in his transparent Adidas race cape, the arm of the loud-shirted interviewer placed protectively around his shoulder. The words slurred together as he tried to limit the movement in his jaw, but the sentences still came out fluently, courteously. The interrogation lasted five minutes. Why had he continued? Why had he made the pace down the final descent? Might he abandon in the morning? Was the Merckx era over? Did he feel he had few friends in the peloton? Did he feel Bernard Thévenet would be a worthy winner of the Tour de France? And finally, as he walked away to nurse his wounds, he was called back. Look, here was Thévenet, could he talk about Merckx, and could Merckx talk about him? And could they shake hands, please, for the cameras? A lesser man would have thrown a blue screaming hissy fit, raged about the need to get medical treatment. The stoicism of the man who had dominated cycling for seven years is a wonder to behold.

  That evening X-rays showed he had broken his cheekbone – further tests after the race showed a double fracture, with a bone splinter floating near his sinuses. He had virtually no sensation in his jaw: he could only take fluids. Dumas and his medical team advised that if he continued the Tour, he did so at his own risk. The race was lost: before the crash, Thévenet had opened a gap of nearly three minutes which, even if Merckx had been in one piece, would have been impossible to close. ‘Almost any other rider would have accepted this abundant excuse and abandoned the Tour.’ Instead, Merckx continued. It was a Calvary, as the French call it, which lasted six days: out of the Alps through Châtel and Thonon-les-Bains, northwest to Chalon-sur-Saône after 256 kilometres, nine hours in the saddle and into Paris to the Champs-Elysées.

  Rather than nursing his injuries, Merckx contested the rest of the race with Thévenet as he had fought at the finish at Avoriaz. To that first brace of seconds, he added fifteen in the next day’s time trial at Châtel, and a further sixteen on the stage to Senlis when the Frenchman fell off near the finish. With Merckx fighting on in this way instead of opting for passive acquiescence, no one could question Thévenet’s right to win the race. No one could argue that the Frenchman had had an easy ride. ‘I didn’t believe I was going to win the Tour until two laps from the finish on the Champs-Elysées,’ Thévenet told me. ‘I felt I couldn’t leave the door open for him for a moment, he might jump. I didn’t have a peaceful time.’

  By staying in the race and contesting it to the finish, ‘Merckx granted Thévenet a total triumph,’ said one eyewitness. ‘Had he retired, that victory would have been questionable.’ Quite why he remained in that Tour Merckx himself could not say, although with hindsight he felt it was a foolish act that had hastened his eventual decline. One factor was the prize money that would make a massive difference to the incomes of the teammates who were dependent on him. His own explanation, to the television interviewer, was simple: ‘Getting off by the side of the road is not my way.’ The most simple explanation is this, however: the odds might have been heavily against him, but he still had a chance of winning. If he had gone home, and then Thévenet had fallen off in his turn or fallen ill, how would he have felt?

  For years fans and media had looked on as Merckx dominated the sport with inexorable power. His feats were so hard to convey, to understand, that it was more straightforward to dismiss him as an automaton, a superhuman figure, ‘the monster’, ‘the crocodile’, ‘the Cannibal’. Avoriaz and its aftermath showed facets of Merckx which had always been there, in spadefuls, but which had been overlooked. Professional conscience, all-consuming determination, unwillingness to submit to the dictates of fate, a sheer blind love for his métier, fear of doing something he would regret: he put all these things into public view in those six days. That explained why when he eventually reached Paris in second place – the first time in eight years he had finished a major Tour anywhere other than first – he was more popular than he had ever been. Half man, half bike, one writer had called him: after Avoriaz he was all too human.

  It was twenty years between the day Eddy Merckx first entered my world, and the day I finally met him. On 13 July 1977 I came out of school in Exeter to find my father waiting in the car listening to the Tour de France commentary from the Alps on French radio. It had, he told me, been an extraordinary day on the race: thirty backmarkers eliminated, Eddy Merckx dropped by the leaders and suffering like a dog to stay in contention. That had coincided with the gift of the paperback of Geoffrey Nicholson’s account of the 1976 Tour: The Great Bike Race, a book which I have read to pieces over the last thirty-five years. Nicholson painted an evocative picture of the greatest cyclist in the history of the sport. He described a distant man, with ‘the graven features of a totem pole’, who was so serious, so much of the time, that it had become a game among newspaper journalists to find pictures of him smiling. Merckx took his métier so seriously that no one was surprised at the chain of events that had kept him out of the 1976 race. An injury in the Giro d’Italia left Merckx to choose between his own desire to win six Tours, and professional obligation, which dictated he should continue the Giro even though he had no chance of winning. It was, said Nicholson, utterly typical that he chose the latter course.

  At the close of 1997, I travelled to Belgium to interview Merckx and was struck by two things I had not expected. He had taken the trouble to wait for me at Brussels airport for my delayed flight with no sign of impatience let alone annoyance. He could have let me find my own way, or delegated the task to a minion; but no: we had an appointment and he was going to keep it. If that was a surprise, so was his height. In the old photographs I had seen, he had always looked no bigger than average for a cyclist. They were the classic pictures: Merckx bent over his bike in Paris–Roubaix 1970, Merckx being picked up off his bike after breaking the Hour Record in 1972, Merckx seeming to punch the pedals as he attacked yet again for yet another win. There was nothing to prepare me for the sight of the greatest cyclist in the world towering over the majority of the crowd in the arrivals hall.

  Merckx’s surprising height is an apt metaphor for a man who bestrides his sport, and world sport. The man waiting – surprisingly unrecognised by the public – at Zaventem that day was one of the most prolific winners ever seen in any field. In cycling, he will remain unique for the quantity of his victories as well as their quality. For several years, he managed the seemingly impossible feat of making this most volatile of sports as close to being predictable as it could ever be. The rate at which he won races in his best years will never be equalled: 250 wins in 650 starts between 1969 and
1973. In some years he was close to winning one in two races that he started. The tally is colossal: five Tours de France, five Tours of Italy – three times the magic ‘double’ of both races in the same year – three world road race championships, the record for stage wins in the Tour de France and for the number of days spent wearing the prestigious yellow jersey, the prized Hour Record and over thirty wins in one-day Classic races. It is a scale of achievement that was completely stunning at the time, and which will never be matched.

  Merckx changed the standards by which cycling is judged, setting the bar impossibly high. He raced in a new way, always attacking, taking every race on from start to finish. His approach brooked no compromise, no matter where the race, what its context and no matter what the weather. He was the first rider to dominate the Tour, consistently, day by day, in the style followed later by Bernard Hinault, Miguel Indurain and Lance Armstrong. Their Tour triumphs are sometimes compared to Merckx or considered greater but the Merckx victories have to be seen in their context. Each was part of a kaleidoscope of domination of an entire season, just as each season was part of a bigger picture of seven years’ total ascendancy over his sport. In his status as the nonpareil of cycling, the eternal reference point, Merckx is the two-wheeled equivalent of Muhammad Ali, Pelé, Ayrton Senna.

  There are other sides to Merckx as well. Like Pelé, like George Best, like Ali, he is a visual icon as well as a man who dominated his sport. There are the unforgettable images – Merckx like a crucified Christ after being punched by a spectator in the 1974 Tour, Merckx with his head angled as his full body strength is used to push the pedals round, Merckx with his arms and shoulders covered with snow in the Tour of Belgium in 1970. But the film footage is also extensive: La Course en Tête, Stars and Watercarriers, The Greatest Show on Earth. If Fausto Coppi is the cyclist whose life was a novel, Merckx’s would be a film, but a documentary rather than a romance.