Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (11 page)

As soon as pedals and wheels were turning, of course, Merckx was into his bubble. The faster he rode, the freer he felt. As the Italian Ferretti team’s directeur sportif at the time, Alfredo Martini, puts it, ‘This is the guy who said that, when he rode slowly, his legs hurt. The faster he rode, the better they felt.’

In front of cameras, microphones and notebooks, it was another story. These he didn’t have the talents or the training to outrun or outride. ‘He had no idea at all how he was supposed to conduct himself in the new situation,’ one of the journalists closest to Merckx at the time, the late Robert Janssens, told Rik Vanwalleghem in
Eddy Merckx – De Mens achter de Kannibaal
. ‘He was overwhelmed by it. He couldn’t understand quite why he needed to give answers to the more diverse questions. He would have liked to have a good chat,
but
simply couldn’t. His middle-class upbringing had taught him to do what was asked by his environment. But his nature was in direct conflict with his intent. He was not very well disposed verbally, he didn’t read much, and he used few words to express himself. Moreover, he didn’t really read the press.’

These were gripes, or observations, that would temper the media’s admiration for Merckx throughout his career. The impression he gave was of seeing interviews not as an annoyance but certainly a distraction from the main business of racing, training or at least thinking about one or both. The issue was exacerbated by the fact that he hated to offend; hence, while he would rarely refuse an interview, out of simple politeness, he was incapable of offering reporters the incendiary or even insightful quotes that could have made him their darling.

To all of this was added another problem: while hailing from Brussels guaranteed interest and claims of ownership from both the French and Flemish-speaking halves of Belgium, it also placed Merckx in a state of linguistic limbo. The Merckx family had moved to Woluwe-Saint-Pierre in the south-east of Brussels when Eddy was one, attracted, like many, by the increased opportunities for employment. As well as being a born introvert, Eddy’s father, Jules, didn’t speak a word of French, while his mother Jenny’s was competent if not quite fluent. The Merckxes were by no means the only predominantly Dutch-speaking family in the neighbourhood, but French was becoming more and more prevalent. The reason was that, since the Second World War during which many of the Flemish provinces had sided with the Nazis, speaking Dutch had been regarded if not as a badge of dishonour, then certainly as the least preferable option when language was a choice. French, on the other hand, could be an instant step up the social ladder.

Now, having grown up in a Dutch-speaking household, in a mostly French-speaking neighbourhood, and living with a Francophile wife, Merckx often just sounded confused. Even today, over forty years later, he admits that there are gaping holes in both of his vocabularies, French and Dutch.

Van Bug, then, was perhaps right to think that Merckx needed help. Where he had made a grave error was in enlisting Guillaume ‘Lomme’ Driessens to be a directeur sportif who was also a spin doctor – a brilliant motivator who all too often behaved like a hired thug.

Merckx disliked him instantly. At the 1967 Giro, Driessens had taken the trouble or liberty to point out his tactical errors on an almost daily basis, despite the fact that Merckx was riding for an opposing team. He had then told a journalist in private that the youngster would never measure up to Rik Van Looy. Driessens, of course, had quickly forgotten this when he finally joined Faema a year and a half later.

‘I wasn’t made to get on well for long with Guillaume Driessens,’ Merckx wrote in
Coureur Cycliste, Un Homme et Son Métier
in 1974. ‘His volubility and his sly way of talking just didn’t fit my character. I often wondered, for example, why he always tried to keep the journalists away from me, telling them I didn’t want to see them, when it was all coming exclusively from him. It was because of him that people started saying I was an unpleasant character. “Merckx is impossible – he couldn’t be any less cooperative,” the journalists who didn’t know me well used to say, and they were right.’

If they weren’t obvious before, Merckx’s true feelings about Driessens weren’t too difficult to decipher when his old directeur died at the age of 94 in 2006. ‘When I heard of his death, my first reflex was to wish everyone could live as long as he did…Without any ambiguity, I would say that we weren’t friends. He was forced
upon
me at an important time in my career. I tolerated him but we didn’t have the same vision of cycling.’

That vision, Merckx discovered quickly in 1969, was to his mind a toxic mix of bluster, bullying and deception, but also the charisma and motivational capacities that seemed, in Van Bug’s eyes, to make Driessens and Merckx a Belgian dream team. ‘Cycling’s Napoleon’, as some had christened Driessens, had traded for years on his supposedly close association with the Italian
campionissimo
Fausto Coppi, whom he had met when Coppi came to Belgium on a hunting expedition in the late 1940s. To listen to Driessens, one would have been forgiven for thinking that he was the man who discovered Coppi, made him a world-beater, and masterminded every one of his legendary exploits. Boasts like these made it easy to see how he had earned another, even less flattering moniker : ‘
Guillaume le menteur
’ or ‘William the Liar’.

One rider Driessens had certainly been close to was Van Looy. Their partnership, though, had ended badly at the end of 1953, whereupon Driessens joined the rival Romeo-Smiths team and quickly exhibited another unsavoury characteristic – his quenchless thirst for revenge. ‘Let’s see what Van Looy’s worth without me,’ had been Driessens’s sniffy parting shot from Van Looy’s GBC team. For the next three or four years, as if the emerging generation spearheaded by Eddy Merckx wasn’t enough to deal with, Van Looy had to cope with constant efforts by Driessens to undermine and frustrate him. ‘Lomme the Liar’s’ favourite tactic was the one later employed, probably not coincidentally, by Van Looy against Merckx: stick to the stronger man, mark him, taunt him and under no circumstances help him, until finally either his legs or his nerve gave way. When it worked, as when Guido Reybrouck sucked like a leech on Van Looy’s back wheel en route to Ax-les-Termes in the 1965 Tour de France, then beat him in
a
sprint, Driessens was insufferable. And when it didn’t, Driessens was also insufferable. At the 1968 Giro, his Romeo-Smiths riders’ abject performances prompted a withering tirade and, eventually, Driessens’s departure for Faema. ‘The way things are going, you’ll all soon be back working in factories! I’m a directeur sportif and I want to be following races, not funerals!’ Driessens ranted.

It was somehow apt that Driessens should mention funerals. In the 1948 Tour of Switzerland, then working as a masseur for Mondia, he had been sitting in the back of a team car that ran over and killed the Belgian rider Richard Depoorter. Driessens’s contradictory statement in court and his fainting attack during cross-examination were typical of the antics Merckx could later expect at Faema. The driver of the car, the Mondia directeur Louis Hanssens, was convicted of causing Depoorter’s death in 1957.

In football in the 1970s, the phoney war between two managers, Brian Clough and Don Revie, would grip the English public, but by that time Driessens had already served up an uncanny cross-breed of their most distinctive traits. Before his time in cycling, Driessens had also been a football manager, for the modest Vilvoorde in the northern suburbs of Brussels. To the same round face and frame as Revie, the same thick jaw and hooded eyes, and a similar reputation for dirty tricks and skulduggery, Driessens somehow added Clough’s gift for the gab and his even bigger gift for self-aggrandisement. ‘Driessens was an egomaniac of the first order,’ confirms the journalist Walter Pauli. Another writer, the erstwhile
Tuttosport
cycling correspondent Gianpaolo Ormezzano, agrees that the same attributes which made Driessens poorly suited to Merckx also made him incompatible with the other top dog at Faema, Vincenzo Giacotto. ‘Giacotto and Driessens were at the antipodes,’ Ormezzano says. ‘Vincenzo was a paragon of civility, Driessens more like a bandit.
Vincenzo
was a bourgeois from Piedmont, Driessens was a peasant from Flanders…’

Observing from the outside, one of Merckx’s main rivals in the Classics, Walter Godefroot, could see why Van Bug had brought Driessens in, but also why it wouldn’t be plain sailing with ‘Lomme the Liar’.

‘Driessens was one of the best motivators, no, I think the best motivator in cycling at that time. But it doesn’t work for some people,’ Godefroot says. ‘It works with Van Looy for a while but not with Merckx. Van Looy likes him because sponsors like him so he brings in a lot of money, but cycling at this time is changing. It’s becoming more modern, more structured, and Driessens isn’t an organiser. What he is, is an incredible motivator. That’s why Van Buggenhout told Merckx to take Driessens: it was better having him on your side than against you. Driessens is very smart, plus he can talk himself out of any situation: if you kick him out of the front door, five minutes later he’ll be climbing through the back window. When he wants something, he does everything to get it. I mean, when you were on top of your game, Driessens was great. If I’d have had him in my peak years I would have won more races… So he’s great if you follow him blindly, but if you can think independently about bike-racing, which Eddy already could, it’s not going to work.’

Godefroot pauses to search for the right analogy.

‘Driessens is like…he’s like the husband who comes home and asks his wife what’s for dinner, and what time it will be on the table. At first she keeps doing what he says, but after a while, a wife with character tells the husband to sod off.’

Any expectation that Lomme Driessens had of being the ‘star’ at Faema evaporated about as soon as Godefroot et al.’s hopes of somehow getting the measure of Merckx in 1969.

At the beginning of the ’69 season, Adorni had left for Scic, Driessens was in the Faema team car, but otherwise it was as you were – only with Merckx’s supremacy growing exponentially. By the end of 1968, he had raced 129 times since the start of the year and won on 32 occasions, including the prestigious Italian semi-Classic the Tre Valli Varesine in August. It was getting to the point where all that seemed to matter in international bike racing now was whether or not Merckx was competing and, if he was, how or by what margin he would win. At the Spanish Vuelta a Levante in the first week of March 1969, he won three out of seven stages and the general classification. At Paris–Nice, the haul was identical: three stage wins and the overall title. In the final stage, the traditional last-day time trial up the Col de la Turbie above Nice, an estimated 50,000 fans witnessed a poignant changing of the guard. Once unassailable against the clock, the 35-year-old Jacques Anquetil heard the lethal drum of Merckx at his back as the crowd thickened 250 metres from the line. Anquetil had started a minute and a half before Merckx, but was now overtaken. Depending on your vantage point, it was either a fitting abdication to the new king or the grisly execution of someone who could and probably should have bowed out sooner. Merckx, incidentally, suspected the latter and told himself that he would never make the same mistake.

Sparing in his plaudits until then, Anquetil finally had the decency to recognise Merckx’s true merit. Master Jacques now called Merckx the greatest, most complete rider that he had ever seen.

In many pundits’ eyes, if that assessment demanded further accreditation, it came at Milan–San Remo a few days later. Again, more impressive than the victory per se, was the manner in which Merckx achieved it, breaking with the sequence of his sprint wins in 1966 and ’67 to attack alone on the descent of the Poggio. Not only
had
he turned a weakness, his descending, into a strength, it now appeared that Merckx was merely enacting the races that he had already ridden and no doubt dominated in his own head. Before San Remo, he had asked his Milanese mechanic and framebuilder Mario Milesi for a bike four centimetres shorter than his normal steed expressly for the two-kilometre plunge off the Poggio hill. The plan had worked so beautifully that Merckx had ample time to raise both arms in celebration on the Via Roma – a gesture that led one wag in the Belgian press pack to inform Merckx that he had just broken article 196 of the Belgian Cycling Federation rulebook stating that both hands must be kept on the handlebars when a rider crossed the finish line. Merckx’s response – ‘It’s worth paying the 200-franc fine to say that I can win’ – was substantially less newsworthy than his claim that it had been a race ‘without any difficulties’ except for a brief scare when he struck a kerbstone with his leg at the foot of the Poggio and momentarily considered pulling out.

Amid talk in Italy that he already bore comparison with
campionissimo
Coppi, Merckx flew home to Brussels, where a large group of fans was waiting to greet him at the airport. An even larger one would of course be in Gent two weeks later for the start of the Tour of Flanders, Belgium’s cup final, and one of a shrinking number of Classic races that Merckx had not yet won.

The days when Rik Van Looy’s Red Guard could tease and toy with the peloton were long gone, but the old Emperor had suggested there might be life in him yet with a victory over Merckx at the E3 Harelbeke semi-Classic.

A week later, it was Merckx’s turn to read a Flemish newspaper, specifically
Het Nieuwsblad
, and shake his head. Merckx, the newspaper’s preview of the Tour of Flanders suggested, may not have the requisite qualities to ever win the Ronde. Merckx had triumphed
before
on flatter courses, hillier ones, in harder Classics, and easier ones, so the logic was hard to fathom. ‘We’ll see about that,’ Merckx mumbled as he read aloud to his soigneur Guillaume Michiels. A few hours later, Hoban recalls, Merckx sparkled on the cobbles and hills, in the cold and rain of Flanders.