Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (2 page)

Merckx’s French biographer Philippe Brunel is right when he says that it wasn’t just how he approached his sport, but also his life. ‘He had a different way of attacking life from the rest of us,’ Brunel says. Again, that word: ‘different’. In a sport that glorifies suffering, sacrifice and endurance, Merckx turned them from a kind of martyrdom into forms of private elation and personal compulsion. The hunger for victories that prompted a teammate’s daughter to christen
him
‘The Cannibal’ – and the world to adopt that moniker – was really a craving for what he found only at the outer limits of his physical and mental capabilities. ‘The whole point of a race is to find a winner. How can you take part without trying to win? How can you be criticised for doing what is the object of your chosen work?’ he pleaded almost
ad nauseam
.

A simple sport for a complicated mind – that was cycling as seen by Merckx. ‘I’m only truly happy when I’m on my bike,’ he admitted in 1970. Thus, one man’s search for simplicity found its outlet in perfectionism. Or perhaps absolutism was a better word. For when Merckx said ‘when I’m on my bike’, what he really meant was ‘winning on his bike’. And that meant battling not only his adversaries but also himself. Especially himself. To the point where he suffered nightmares, nerves that tied knots in his stomach, and endless, labyrinthine self-doubt.

All of which gave us two Merckxes: the pedalling despot, blunt and guileless, and the Sphinx who stepped off his bike and on to race podiums. Joy would flicker briefly across otherwise inscrutable features, relief would exhale from his lungs, but the overriding impression was one of impatience or at least restlessness. The opposition may have been far behind – sometimes, literally, still racing on the road – but Merckx’s ears already thumped to a familiar beat. This was the noise drumming at
his
back. Where was his bike? – the same question he asked wife Claudine within moments of returning home after the crash that nearly killed him in Blois in 1969. Where was his next race? When, if ever, would his appetite be sated?

For all that has been written about Merckx, so much of his persona remains unexplained. Flemish journalist Walter Pauli said that continual losses and humiliation harboured one consolation for his rivals and a curse for their perpetrator: ‘In one sense, they saw more
of
life than him. They became more real. They realised that losing was a fact of life, not just sport. For Merckx, on the other hand, losing always meant that something had gone wrong.’ In other words, as a group of boys became men, Merckx remained cocooned in a child’s illusion of omnipotence, imprisoned by the very regime he had imposed. ‘In order to be human, Eddy Merckx would have had to be superhuman,’ is Pauli’s wry conclusion.

So who really knew Merckx? His teammates? Not according to Roger Swerts, one of the best and longest-serving, who said he was still none the wiser after 25 years in the Merckx orbit, during and after their careers. Misty-eyed former comrades describe the Faema and Molteni teams which grew around him as ‘a band of friends’. The more clear-sighted among them, though, also speak of a latent, inescapable, asphyxiating tension. At the dinner table, the captain’s mood dictated that of his lieutenants. There was nothing unusual about that, but it became troublesome when not even they could tell exactly what he was thinking. It was maybe no coincidence that, for many years, Merckx’s best friend in cycling was the painfully sensitive Italo Zilioli – a man in the grip of his own torments. More straightforward characters like Martin Van Den Bossche grew weary of the aura that came to resemble a fortress. ‘If he ordered a Trappist beer, everyone ordered a Trappist beer. As an individual, you might as well have been dead when you were next to Merckx,’ Van Den Bossche told Rik Vanwalleghem in the 1993 book
, Eddy Merckx – De Mens achter de Kannibaal
.

It seems clear, then, that a lot remains to be deciphered. As well as Merckx himself, there is the peer group he eclipsed, practically effaced, but which formed as bright a constellation as cycling has ever seen. The swashbuckling Ocaña, the mercurial Fuente. The pride of Van Looy and the De Vlaeminck brothers. Gimondi’s tenacity, Maertens’s
audacity.
These were rich, textured, vulnerable personalities. As rich and textured, no doubt, as Merckx, but with the freedom of expression which only fallibility affords.

It was an age, too, when humanity itself was in flux. While Merckx was making his first grand tour appearance in the 1967 Giro d’Italia, 100,000 hippies were preparing to converge on San Francisco for their ‘Summer of Love’. The following year, he rampaged through the Giro as students and workers tore through cities across the world and American troops through Vietnam. In July 1969, Neil Armstrong walked on the moon within hours of Merckx going where no one had been before in the Tour de France – to a 17-minute winning margin in his very first Grande Boucle. A month later, across one long weekend, Merckx won criteriums at Londerzeel, Saussignac and Moorslede on the days that half a million people watched Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young make musical magic at Woodstock.

Nine months of interviews and meetings with these individuals form the basis of this portrait of Eddy Merckx. In amongst it all there are characters to decrypt, relationships to unpick, with friends, family members, teammates, enemies and observers. Merckx himself declined my request for an interview, as did his wife Claudine. In an email they informed me that they are contractually tied to their own, official project. But instead of proving a handicap, this turned into a blessing. In researching this book, painstakingly poring over dozens of volumes written about and with him, and hundreds if not thousands of interviews, I was struck by something curious: whatever he says and attempts to explain, the
essence
of Merckx, what they called ‘Merckxisme’, somehow remains elusive. A mutual friend, the
Het Nieuwsblad
journalist Hugo Coorevits put it like this: ‘He was born
as
Eddy Merckx, he lives his life as Eddy Merckx, but he still somehow doesn’t know what it’s like to be Eddy Merckx in the eyes of other people.’ Precisely: at the risk of stating the obvious, Merckx can’t quite understand the fuss because his life is the only one he has ever known.

The public has a tendency to want to demystify, normalise, pare down the great and the good until we understand them on our own terms, as ordinary folk with the same humdrum habits and tastes as the rest of us, but also a single remarkable talent. This, patently, is how Eddy Merckx perceives himself. And because of that, his past musings may help us to understand certain actions and reactions, but they will never assist us in understanding a bigger, important part of Merckx – the essence and aura that will outlive him and his records.

Yes, time has passed and will eventually run out even for Eddy Merckx, and herein lay my final motivation: I never saw Merckx race and neither, in not too long, will anyone have witnessed him in action. Merckx’s generation is getting older, dare we even say, old. In the hours I spent talking to them, they mentioned ailments and operations quite different from the ones that might once have kept them out of a Tour de France or cost them seconds in a time trial. The truths they never told, the memories they never shared, are nearing expiry. As this happens, a new and less gilded recollection of their era begins to take hold, and open creaks a window of both opportunity and responsibility: those who grew up watching Greg LeMond and Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich, as I did, must now decide how Merckx will be consigned to that dim, distant, two-dimensional place in history where some vibrancy is lost but a different kind of lustre can be gained.

1

folgorazione

‘You see that kid over there. That’s Eddy Merckx.
He’s going to be a champion.’
E
MILE
D
AEMS

AN ELECTROCUTION. ‘
UNA
folgorazione’
– literally, in Italian, what happens when two pairs of eyes meet, the air sizzles with electricity, the spine tingles and the heart gulps.

It had happened in the spring of 1967. Not to Claudine Acou, a 21-year-old language student from Brussels who married Eddy Merckx on 5 December 1967. No, their romance had begun four off-seasons earlier in the room above her father Lucien’s café, near the abattoirs in Cureghem. Eddy would come to the café, greet Lucien, the Belgian national amateur team selector, then they would both head upstairs to talk bikes, while Claudine pottered about, pretending not to listen. Soon Eddy’s visits were becoming suspiciously frequent. Claudine was right to sense an ulterior motive. Which was fine by her; she liked his eyes, his smile. Which was fine by him; he liked her grace, her poise.

The real electrocution in 1967, though, was the one which had befallen Nino Defilippis in the third week of April, a month before the Giro d’Italia. It was a kind of blind date: Vincenzo Giacotto, the matchmaker, had called Defilippis, his former star rider from the
Carpano
team, and invited him to Cervinia, the resort on the Italian side of the Matterhorn. Giacotto said that he had someone for Defilippis to meet. Truthfully, he wanted Defilippis’s advice; there was a new Italian team in the offing, Giacotto had been lined up as its manager, and he now needed a headline act, preferably one to take the fight to Felice Gimondi in major stage races. Giacotto had seen Merckx win Milan–San Remo in 1966, excel in Paris–Nice the following spring, then retain his Milan–San Remo title, and now he wondered whether the kid couldn’t be turned into more than just a flat-track bully. Giacotto thought he might be on to something, but he couldn’t be sure, not 100 per cent. That was why he had called his old friend Nino.

Whether Merckx knew it or not, it was a kind of blind date, but also a sort of trial. The climb to Cervinia begins in Breuil and rises for 28 kilometres at an average gradient of 5.1 per cent. It is, Defilippis recalled in the book he wrote in 2004, six years before his death, ‘a climb of a certain difficulty’. Giacotto and Defilippis wanted to see how Merckx would fare. Until that point, he had never raced in the high mountains.

They cleared the car seats and dashboard, sunk into their seats, and peered expectantly through the windscreen. It was then, moments after the engine started, as the road lurched towards the Matterhorn, Merckx shifted forward in his saddle and began devouring the slope, that Defilippis was ‘electrocuted’.

‘The power, the way he attacked the curves, the way he pedalled, I was bowled over,’ Defilippis recalled. ‘I can remember him getting off the bike at the end and asking me how Cervinia measured up to other Alpine climbs. Almost as if to say that he still felt fresh, and was this not a bit too easy?’

There was a third privileged witness to Merckx’s marvellous ascent. Teofilo Sanson, an ice-cream maker from Turin, had sponsored a team
managed
by Giacotto in 1965. Surely the best excuse he’d ever have to return to professional cycling was now staring him in the face. That, at least, was Defilippis’s view. ‘I remember that I took Sanson and Giacotto to one side and asked them whether they didn’t have a pen, a scrap of paper, something. Why? To get the kid to somehow sign a lifetime contract, money no object. He could put down whatever he wanted, because this was a real prodigy. And in fact Giacotto didn’t let him get away, unlike Sanson.’

Giacotto’s new backer would be Faema, the Milan-based coffee-machine maker. Formerly the title sponsor of the team where the last great Belgian, Rik Van Looy, had spent his best years, but absent from the peloton since 1963, Faema now prepared to make its grand re-entrance.

Its leader, the man Giacotto thought could win Tours and Giros if only he learned to ‘think and race Italian’, was a 22-year-old from Brussels who, before the spring of 1967, had barely if ever ridden up a proper mountain. Its leader would be Eddy Merckx.

Even with 45 years of hindsight, contemporaries of Eddy Merckx dispute the idea of an ‘electrocution’, some kind of juddering epiphany, when the full magnitude of what was about to strike professional cycling suddenly revealed itself.

In that respect Nino Defilippis was unusual. But it made sense: the Italian had retired from racing in 1964 and had kept his distance from professional cycling ever since. He had not seen Merckx in 1966 or the spring of 1967. He had probably paid scant attention to the way the defending champion had grabbed the peloton by the scruff of the neck at Milan–San Remo in March ’67, like some uncouth ruffian, then dragged them at record speed along the Ligurian Riviera. To Defilippis, the uniqueness, the difference of Merckx, the
way
the bike became a threshing machine between his thighs, was surely striking. Giacotto had talked him up as Anquetil’s potential successor; to Defilippis, who competed for years against the Frenchman, they must have seemed as equally brilliant yet as different as Mozart and the Rolling Stones.

For those who had been around since Merckx turned pro in 1965, the revelation, or the end of self-delusion, was much more gradual. The boat had been rocking for some time, the ripples near the surface were becoming ever more ominous, yet most continued to ignore the evidence. ‘We knew he was a good rider, but he was one of several in Belgium and even more in the world. It was a kind of golden generation,’ says Walter Godefroot, the man who up until the summer of 1967 had staked at least as strong a claim as Merckx to be Belgium’s next world-beater.

Patrick Sercu endorses the view that ‘we would still never have imagined at that point what he would go on to be’. Primarily a track rider, Sercu had swept on to the scene in the Belgian talent tsunami that included Merckx, Godefroot, Willy Planckaert, Roger Swerts, Joseph Spruyt and the two Hermans, Van Loo and Van Springel. In one sense, Sercu was the most precocious of the lot, having amassed Olympic, European, national and world titles on the track by the age of 23. He had won three of his national titles with Merckx in the Madison. Nonetheless, Merckx remained ‘just a guy who had won a lot of races as an amateur, like a lot of others who had done the same, then totally disappeared,’ Sercu says.