Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (20 page)

The evening programme consisted of three ‘legs’ of 50 laps, all ridden behind a derny and with various sprints and spot prizes distributed throughout the races. Merckx, as usual, had pepped up as soon as he climbed on to his bike and won the first leg. He then set off behind his French derny rider, 56-year-old Fernand Wambst, for the second match. The other riders and the pacers buzzed around them like hornets. The skies darkened. The 3,000 bayed.

Claude Lair is now positioned exactly where he was that night, midway down the home straight.

‘One of the riders, I can’t remember who, and his derny man had punctured, and I was here trying to get him going again. Then, BOOM!’

Lair swivels and points to a corner of the track 50 metres away, next to the tiny changing rooms. ‘There!’ he says. ‘
There!
The Czech rider Daler’s derny man, Marcel Reverdy, touches the balustrade there, falls down the track and Wambst can’t avoid him. BOOM! They all fall down, and I run over to try to get Reverdy’s derny off the track. I see Wambst and you can tell that he’s dead. Then I see Merckx…’

Raymond Riotte and his pilot managed to avoid the crash and completed another lap while looking fretfully over their shoulders at the carnage behind them. When they swung into the home straight again, the track was still littered with bodies and bikes, and it was clear that the racing was over. Riotte pulled up close to where Merckx and Wambst lay and gulped.

‘It was so upsetting,’ he says. ‘I saw Wambst, then looked at the blood coming from Merckx’s ear and thought that it was over for him, that he was a goner. That night we’d been all nervous as soon
as
we got there and saw the track. It was too narrow for the number of people racing. You were rubbing shoulders and touching the other people’s pedals all the time. Then, when the crash happened, we all got the fright of our lives.’

First aiders from the Red Cross were quickly lifting an unconscious Merckx and Wambst’s already inanimate carcass on to stretchers. Reverdy was also badly hurt, as was an eight-year-old boy who had been watching from behind the balustrade that the derny had hit then scraped along. When he picked up Reverdy’s derny, Lair noticed that a pedal was missing. He found it lying in the track 10 or 20 metres from where the pilot had lost control. Reverdy’s own derny had been in for repair, and he had borrowed this one from a friend, Pierre Morphyre. A police investigation later ascertained that a pedal had been loose and became detached during the race, ultimately causing the crash. Reverdy was later fined 600 francs by the Tribunal Grande Instance de Blois for negligence, and Morphyre 400 francs. For his involuntary sins, Reverdy would spend over a week in hospital with a broken nose and fractured skull.

Merckx had also been rushed to the Hôtel Dieu de Blois hospital. When he regained consciousness, he was still oblivious to what had befallen Wambst. Guillaume Michiels had been standing in the track centre, five metres from where Merckx smashed into Jiri Daler. Merckx asked Michiels for news of his derny man. ‘He’s the same as you,’ Michiels lied.

Merckx’s life was not in danger. As for his cycling career, well, for a few hours it was too early to tell. The doctor diagnosed severe concussion and scalp wounds. Claudine and both of his parents hurried immediately from Brussels to see him the following morning, but visiting time was restricted to a few minutes. On waking, Merckx had worried about how Claudine would take the shock; she was
pregnant
and due to give birth to their first child early in the New Year. After a restful second night and more satisfactory checks from the doctor, she and Jean Van Buggenhout were both reassured, and informed local reporters that Eddy no longer feared for his future as a cyclist. In fact, in the warmth of the sunshine that streamed through the window, he could already feel the lure of the road.

The crash had occurred on Tuesday, and Merckx would leave hospital on Saturday. King Baudouin had dispatched a Pembroke military plane to fly to Blois and bring the nation’s wounded hero back to his homeland. At 13h30, the priceless cargo flew out of Le Breuil aerodrome north of Blois, bound for the Melsbroek air base, where Lomme Driessens was among those waiting to greet him. A short ambulance ride home, a quiet afternoon among friends and family, and Merckx was soon heading to bed for another night of rest. Before the light went out, he turned to Claudine. ‘Did they bring my bike back? We’ll have to get it…’

Perhaps understandably in the circumstances, it had been the last track meet studded with stars of the road ever to be organised at the Pierre Tessier velodrome. Claude Lair as a coach and the same concrete track went on to nurture leading French sprinters Florian Rousseau and Frederic Magne, but very soon the site will have seen its last action. Its location on a flood-plain has forced the authorities to step in and build a substitute velodrome just a few hundred metres away, slightly closer to Blois’s elegant town centre. The new track will be longer at 285 metres and significantly wider at seven metres.

If that sounds like one cyclist’s paradise, Lair has turned his home into another on the opposite side of town. With his sick wife away in Lourdes, he had planned to ride 20 kilometres to catch the Tour de France on its way to Châteauroux and a second stage win in 2011
for
Mark Cavendish. Instead, his ballbearing eyes will dart between the two television screens he has rigged up in his basement to watch the Tour, one tuned to the Eurosport channel and the other to French state broadcaster France 2. One of the three rooms on Lair’s first floor is a shrine to professional cycling that would make museum curators jealous. He announces proudly that he has all 480 copies of
Miroir du Cyclisme
, the French bike fans’ bible launched in 1961 and discontinued in 1994, and also a full collection of its nominal successor
Vélo Magazine
. Among his most cherished possessions is a photo of Merckx signed when he came to Blois during the 1969 Paris–Nice. ‘The greatest champion of all time!’ Lairs says, pulling the picture from one of his scrapbooks.

‘Ah, yes, that made some noise, that crash,’ he says. ‘It was a shame that the track meets died after that. They started asking for too much money. They’d get to the velodrome, do a rough head count of the people in the stands, then think they were getting short-changed and ask for more in their envelope. They became too expensive. They shot the goose that laid the golden egg.’

Now slightly hard of hearing, Lair races these days on a tandem in the handisport category. At the time of writing he is the oldest competitive cyclist in France.

‘I worked for thirty years in the Poulain chocolate factory in Blois, but now it’s just cycling for me,’ he says, surveying the shelves and cabinets crammed full of trophies and memorabilia. ‘Cycling has been my life…I still ride! Three hundred kilometres a week! Oh, no, you must never stop cycling. Never!
A fond la caisse
!’

Twelve days after the crash in which, by his own admission, Merckx had ‘flirted with death’, it appeared to be business as usual as he completed and won a criterium in Schaerbeek on the north side of
Brussels.
He was a little groggy, a little short of kilometres, but all seemed well given what had come before. Wambst’s death had nonetheless upset and shaken him, and even more Claudine, who had known about the perils of derny racing ever since she used to accompany her father to the track as a young girl. As for the road, as Merckx had said in the clinic in Blois, he hoped that 9 September would soon be and remain in his career ‘nothing but a bad memory’.

On 28 September, he excitedly watched Herman Van Springel win Paris–Tours from his living room in Tervuren. The following day he started and abandoned a criterium in St-Genesius-Rode. Merckx’s next big test, his last of the season, would come at the Trofeo Baracchi two-man time trial in Bergamo, northern Italy on 2 October.

The Baracchi was a prestigious but strange event, ridden in pairings often irrespective of trade team allegiance and covering a mammoth distance of 120 kilometres. Merckx had won back-to-back editions in 1966 and 1967 with his Peugeot teammate Ferdinand Bracke. The 1969 race would be his first official competition since Blois – criteriums didn’t ‘count’ – and Merckx had been due to partner his compatriot and Faema teammate Julien Stevens. Stevens, though, had also crashed at a recent track meet and been forced to pull out. Over several days at race HQ in Bergamo, discussions dragged on about who would replace Stevens as Merckx’s partner, with Merckx requesting Van Springel. The final decision, though, fell to organiser Mino Baracchi, and he liked the idea of rewarding local lad Davide Boifava for a brilliant first season among the pros with the plum role of partnering Merckx. Merckx raised no objections.

Merckx had arrived in the Bergamo area two days in advance to prepare. On the eve of the race, he headed out for a final, intensive session behind a motorbike, which was briefly interrupted by strikers blocking the road in Dalmine. When they recognised Merckx, luckily,
the
picket line parted to let him through. He then flew back to Belgium for an awards ceremony on Saturday evening, before returning to a chilly Bergamo, briefly warming up, and discussing tactics with Boifava the next morning. When Merckx spoke of ‘aiming for an average speed of 53 kilometres an hour’, Boifava feigned nonchalance while shuddering inside.

A mismatch at least in reputation and experience, the Merckx–Boifava pairing in fact had the makings of a dream ticket. Boifava had won a stage in the Giro in May, was the Italian pursuit champion, and had excelled in the other recent ‘unofficial time trial world championship’, the Grand Prix des Nations in France. As he waited with Merckx for the starter’s pistol, though, the wisecracks from a small gallery of ‘well-wishers’ were doing nothing to calm his nerves. ‘Oh, youngster, you’d better watch or he’ll drop you straight away,’ was Vittorio Adorni’s joshing send-off. Boifava’s Molteni team directeur Giorgio Albani and his mechanic Ernesto Colnago cackled their approval.

True to his word, Merckx started, says Boifava, ‘like a bullet’. As the route headed west out of Bergamo, skirting the hills of Brianza and towards Milan, Merckx bludgeoned his machine like rarely before. Fuelled by adrenalin, Boifava clung on, and at Robbiate after 28 kilometres, the duo was on schedule to smash Aldo Moser and Ercole Baldini’s 1959 course record. At Monza, where the route swung back towards Bergamo, they still led Van Springel and his stand-in partner Joaquim Agostinho by 45 seconds. It was here, a moment or two after Merckx had peeled to one side, Boifava moved through for his next turn, and the road began gently rising that something very odd and unexpected happened.

‘I’d been very nervous before we set off, because being paired with Merckx was such an honour and a responsibility,’ Boifava
recalls.
‘My team actually weren’t too happy about it because it was obvious that, if Eddy won, everyone would say “of course”, whereas if we lost it would all be my fault. Anyway, we’d started at this crazy pace, but I was doing OK. Then in Monza we got to this motorway flyover, I was on the front, and I felt a hand on my hip. I looked around at Eddy and could see him gasping for air. I couldn’t believe it. He said, “Slow down a bit.” But it was obvious from his face that he was in a lot of trouble. I thought maybe it was just a passing crisis, but he never recovered. I had to ride on the front the whole way back to Bergamo.’

Eighteen kilometres from the finish line, the route took them through Zingonia. This was the site of Faema’s new headquarters, an unholy breezeblock dystopia exhibiting the very worst of 1960s urban planning. Bruno Raschi had described it as ‘a forest of prefabricated cement columns, huge expanses of nameless, ownerless factories and 70 kilometres without a single tree’. Here Van Springel and Agostinho finally took the lead, and Merckx’s capitulation was almost complete.

As he and Boifava rode into the Stadio Atleti Azzurri d’Italia, Merckx cried and 25,000 people applauded. He crossed the line and could barely blubber a few words of apology in Boifava’s ear. He then turned to the journalists and admitted, ‘It went badly, really badly. I kidded myself about my strength. I started really fast, trying to beat the record, then I collapsed suddenly. Boifava was amazing…it was me who got it all wrong.’ As his Faema directeur sportif Marino Vigna placed a hand on his shoulder, above the continuing ovation, Merckx mustered enough humour for a sardonic observation. ‘You see, Marino, the only way I can get people to like me is by losing…’

‘The Italian fans had turned on him a bit after Savona,’ Vigna explains now. ‘Gimondi’s camp really destroyed a lot of the goodwill
the
Italians felt towards Eddy. Part of it wasn’t their fault; the Italians were always going to resent a foreigner. But they also came up with a different excuse every time he beat them, instead of recognising his brilliant performances for what they were.’

Perhaps it was no coincidence then, that in Gimondi’s home town, the
tifosi
warmed to the uncommon spectacle of Merckx suffering on a bike. Boifava conceded that he had ‘probably lost my only opportunity to win the Baracchi’, while also understanding that the race had come too soon for Merckx. Months later his own career would be badly affected by a crash in training which left him in a coma for ten days. He went on to win a handful of races before retiring at age 31 in 1978, but would forever be remembered as ‘the man who made Eddy Merckx cry’.

As far as Boifava and plenty of others were concerned, Merckx would be back to his tyrannical former self, if not in the last criteriums before the end of the ’69 season, then at least in the New Year. How could they be so sure? Merckx wished he knew, because that comment about Blois one day being ‘just a bad memory’ betrayed not only his, but every athlete’s, gravest anxiety. In Bergamo, his head throbbed. Were these the occasional, permanent symptoms that doctor in Blois had warned him about, or just the born winner’s psychosomatic rejection of heavy defeat? What if ignoring the doctor’s advice to leave it a few more days, perhaps even weeks, before getting back on his bike had been a dire mistake? Hadn’t people been telling him for years not to be so headstrong, so hasty?