Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (23 page)

Perhaps more to the point, like his feuding teammates, Godefroot had the world-weary air of a man whose best years had been the first of his career. The years, specifically, when Merckx still seemed mortal. ‘I can remember [the Salvarani directeur sportif] Luciano Pezzi coming up to me one morning that year and saying, “Ah, I’ve heard Merckx isn’t going well, so we’ll put the hammer down and attack him.” I said, “Luciano, with respect, I’ve heard before that Merckx isn’t going well, and it’s usually a sure sign that it’ll be him who’s
attacking.”
We tried anyway and the attack from Merckx duly came. And that was Merckx. You perhaps thought that he wasn’t the same any more, or on a bad day, then he rammed it down your throat.’

Here, unwittingly exemplified in Godefroot’s anecdote, was perhaps also a key reason why whatever Merckx had lost after Blois was imperceptible to his main antagonists. Merckx’s then Faemino directeur sportif Marino Vigna explains it best: ‘Maybe he wasn’t quite as strong [in 1970], but then maybe it also didn’t matter as much because by that stage he’d put the fear of God into everyone. They were scared of moving, because they knew what chaos Eddy would then unleash. They never wanted to give him any bait. The memory of what he’d done to them in those ’68 and ’69 seasons terrorised a lot of people for years.’

By ‘people’ Vigna means not only riders but also the press and race organisers who had begun to fear for the sport itself in 1969. The second group, in particular, were damned if they did invite Merckx and damned if they didn’t, and so some resorted to striking a strange kind of bargain. The rumour was that the Giro d’Italia chief Vincenzo Torriani had overcome Merckx’s reluctance to return to the race which, he felt, had betrayed him in 1969, by offering him 80,000 Belgian francs a day to compete. In return, Torriani asked Merckx to ride economically, holding back some of his own energy in readiness for the Tour de France and also some suspense in the battle for the pink jersey. As it transpired, he appeared to amuse himself by taking three stages out of the first nine to all but wrap up the general classification, then by ensuring that Felice Gimondi beat the Faema defector Martin Van Den Bossche to second place overall. That, at least, was how it looked from the outside. In truth, even Van Den Bossche understood then, and still understands now, that it was in the interests of the Giro and Italy that Gimondi should finish second. ‘Merckx never spoke about that, but it
was
obvious. When there was an attack and Gimondi wasn’t part of it, Merckx just wouldn’t ride. It was all part of the game, however much the Flemish press tried to build it into a Flanders versus Brussels thing. I mean, even I tried to sell my third place to my [Molteni] teammate Michele Dancelli, but he wouldn’t pay up, and tried to finish third in a sneaky, cunning way,’ Van Den Bossche concedes.

Another, at first more open secret, was that Merckx was suffering in the mountains, and Van Den Bossche had precipitated a recurrence of his leg problems on the Passo di Crocedomini on the stage from Zingonia to Malcesine. When his lanky former domestique accelerated, Merckx tried to follow, but felt his left leg immobilise. He was over a minute behind at the summit, then regained touch on the descent, before falling back again on the next climb to the Bezzecca plateau. He had returned to the main peloton by the time they reached Malcesine, but knew some would already be hailing a landmark moment: Eddy Merckx had been distanced in a major tour mountain stage for the first time since the 1967 Giro. His irritation showed when he initially refused all interviews at the finish line, only later admitting that ‘I haven’t suffered like that for a long time.’ Perhaps wisely, he chose not to mention Blois or the leg, and chose instead to attribute the crisis to a bad cold and sore throat. The following day, sure enough, normality resumed and the pink jersey was secured with a trademark solo win at Bretonico.

From that point on, if Merckx wasn’t ‘allowed’ or wouldn’t permit himself to crush the opposition as he had at the Tour, there were still plenty of other outlets for his competitiveness. Dino Zandegù remembers one in particular on Stage 15 between Casciana Terme and Mirandola.

Dino, Dino, they say Merckx used to go crazy even for the bonus sprints! Did you ever see that?

‘Oh yes, that day in 1970, we were going over the Abetone in Tuscany, but on the way we were passing Luciano Tajoli’s estate in Pontebuggianese, and Tajoli had put up forty flasks of Chianti for the winner of a bonus sprint there. You know Luciano Tajoli, the singer – “
Terra straniera, ho pianto per te, la, la, la…
.” Him. Anyway, when there was wine involved, I was always particularly motivated for that kind of sprint, so there I am, we go round a big curve, over a little bridge, and I sense this big shadow looming over me. I see out of the corner of my eye that it’s Merckx in the pink jersey, but I’m so motivated that I do the sprint of my life and I beat him! As always, Merckx is black with rage. I try to hide in amongst my teammates, but he’s seen me, and he’s throwing every kind of insult you can imagine at me. “You rotten scumbag! You scoundrel! Just you wait and see! I’ll make sure that you never race a criterium again! That Chianti’s mine!” Then, that night, all the teams are staying in hotels next to each other and he comes to find me with Rudi Altig. He likes a drop of wine, too, Rudi. Merckx says he’s not leaving until I give him half of the bottles. A few hours earlier I thought he was going to kill me, so I daren’t say no, and off he goes with half of the Chianti…’

Midway through 1970, Eddy Merckx had won his second Giro d’Italia, asserted his authority over Roger De Vlaeminck in the Classics, and was already beginning, perhaps even subconsciously, to accept and adapt to the legacy of Blois. ‘After Blois, cycling became suffering, especially in the mountains, when previously it had just been fun,’ Merckx would comment in his retirement. At the time he swore to Guillaume Michiels that he had lost ‘fifty per cent of my power’. Even in 1970, though, public and private hints by Merckx to this effect were greeted with rolling eyes. ‘If you were to look at his career, just the results out of their context, you couldn’t say there
was
a “Blois effect”,’ argues the journalist Walter Pauli. That may be true, but it’s equally reasonable to point out that the accident occurred when Merckx was 24 and, most physiologists would argue, still two or three years short of his peak. There may have been no discernible dip in 1970, but most would have conceded that there had been no improvement on the stratospheric performances of 1969, either. Whether that also was because he had matured, mellowed, and was beginning to heed the advice of everyone who had warned that he was heading for burnout – their sole remaining hope or commiseration – maybe only Merckx knew. An interview with Marc Jeuniau early in 1971 would certainly indicate that Merckx had at least considered the long-term impact of the hell-for-leather approach he had employed in the previous three or four seasons. ‘I won’t race beyond the age of thirty,’ he said. ‘My way of racing makes it impossible to last a long time. But the public likes the way I ride. The quality of the spectacle and panache count more than everything else. Anquetil used to say that he didn’t care about public adulation. That’s not true. No champion is indifferent to it.’

If Merckx was really to retire at age 30, that left six more Tours de France to ride and, based on the evidence at hand, probably win. While he rode with new frugality at the Giro, however, down in the Alps, a rider with similar pizzazz and ambition was staking his claim as the most credible ‘anti-Merckx’ to date.

Luis Ocaña had been born a week before Merckx and into a very different milieu. His native Priego was a woebegone hodgepodge of ruins dozens of kilometres from anywhere and 150 to the west of Madrid. As his biographer François Terbeen put it, it was ‘a desolate land where only misery found shelter’. A small flock of sheep, their wool and a tiny olive grove were the family’s only income, and scraps
of
bread sometimes their only nourishment. Even at age five or six, the young Luis would decline to eat, like his father, if he could see that there was too little on the dinner table to go around.

In 1951, when Luis was six and money still short, his father accepted a job in a mine in Vila in the French Pyrenees. It was a success, or at least an improvement, and soon Señor Ocaña was heading back to Priego to round up Luis, his mother Julia and brother Amparo, and take them to France. Six years later, one of Julia’s brothers raved about the new life he had also created in Magnan, just up the road in Armagnac country, and the Ocañas moved again. While Luis felt more and more at home in France, he remained a foreigner to the bullies among his classmates. One day, apparently for this reason alone, one of them spat in his face.

Another move, this time a few kilometres to the east and Houga, coincided with the start of Luis’s apprenticeship as a joiner, his first journeys to work on his new ‘Automoto’ bike, and the Spanish climber Federico Bahamontes’s victory in the 1959 Tour de France. Soon, Luis was entering races in the colours of the local Stade Montois cycling club and winning with increasing regularity. In 1967, he rattled off victories in the amateur Grand Prix des Nations, the Tour des Alpes de Provence and the Tour of Majorca. One of the leading Spanish teams, Fagor, moved swiftly to sign him in 1968, and Ocaña repaid their faith by winning the Spanish national road race championship in Mungia. For Ocaña, the symbolism of the victory dwarfed even the privilege of wearing the yellow and blood-red jersey of the Spanish champion for the forthcoming 12 months; his father was dying, at just 49 years of age, ravaged by a prostate cancer for which he had refused any treatment. Luis had ridden the entire race in Mungia possessed by the idea of returning to his dad’s bedside with the champion’s jersey and laying it at his
father’s
side ‘as a testimony to my affection for him’. ‘Bitterly, I kept telling myself that everything would have been wonderful if destiny had spared my father this illness,’ Ocaña later wrote in his autobiography. ‘In fact, my sister Amparo had just given birth to her second child. Life was being renewed all around us, bringing into our family new faces to love, to feed, to bring up, but, alas, there was also this dreadful ordeal that my father was enduring on his bed of suffering.’

While the writing was a little overwrought, it chimed with the tragic aura the cycling world would come to associate with Ocaña, as over the next two years, he alternated swashbuckling success with crashing failures like his early exits from both the 1968 Vuelta and the 1969 Tour de France. Like De Vlaeminck, he was mercurial, swarthy, enigmatic – and also, crucially, immune to the spirit of resignation which had infected much of the peloton since 1968. As of the start of 1970, he was also now backed by one of the strongest teams in international cycling, sponsored by biro makers Bic. At first, on signing with team and their manager Maurice de Muer, Ocaña had worried that the Dutchman Jan Janssen might be a cumbersome presence alongside him, but the pair had proved to each other and De Muer at Paris–Nice in March that their talents – Janssen’s speed and cunning, and Ocaña’s rapier accelerations in the hills – were perfectly matched. Ocaña finished second behind Merckx despite frittering energy with reckless and fruitless attacks. Janssen responded to his new teammate’s claims that he would one day topple Merckx with a sceptical ‘
Ah bon?
’, while De Muer told him to stop racing like ‘some kind of cycling Don Quixote’ – the only novel that Luis had ever read. A month later, Ocaña appeared to be learning fast as he triumphed in his national tour, the Vuelta a España, with a performance almost Merckx-like in its assurance.

‘The sniper who played into his rivals’ hands has now been replaced by a lucid, organised, top-class rider,’ De Muer told him after the Vuelta, and Ocaña bore out his manager’s commendation with a masterly win at the Dauphiné Libéré, the last major test before the Tour. While, in June, Merckx began an exhausting but lucrative, made-for-TV schlep around France to recce some of the key Tour stages, Ocaña returned to his now beloved Armagnac, the French wife he had married on Christmas Eve in 1966, and a new level of expectancy.

The Luxembourger Johny Schleck, his team- and roommate at the time, says that Bic’s cosmopolitan, orange-clad army felt that they had no more, no less than a potential Tour winner in their number.

‘Merckx was the king at the time, but we felt that Luis, with the ability he had in the mountains and the ability he had on the flat above all, was a possible Tour winner,’ Schleck says. ‘He wasn’t explosive but he was enormously strong. When he accelerated, it took him a while to open up a gap, but he went so fast that he blew everyone off his wheel, one-by-one, until no one was left. He could climb in the saddle, with his hands on the drops, and just batter people. He had these big, rippling thighs and I think he must have produced about as much power as anyone in the peloton back then.’

Unfortunately, Schleck and everyone else knew that Ocaña’s thighs were as thick as his skin was thin. ‘You could practically see through it, Luis was so sensitive,’ another ex-teammate, Philippe Crépel, confirms. Schleck agrees that this was the one, major doubt that Ocaña needed to banish in 1970, particularly after a 1969 race that had started promisingly then thudded to a halt with a crash on the Ballon D’Alsace and withdrawal two days later. ‘He was a very fragile, very sensitive character. Sensitive to everything, even success,’ Schleck says above the drum of raindrops on a hospitality gazebo at the 2011 Tour de France, where his sons Andy and Frank are among
the
star attractions. ‘Luis used to get carried away. I personally think that he was very bad at dealing with pressure, right from the start. Sometimes he was on a cloud and sometimes he got out of bed and nothing was right with the world. Back then, going to the Tour de France with Luis as our leader was a big step into the unknown.’

If the press and other riders were all unanimous in considering Luis Ocaña the main and perhaps only threat to Eddy Merckx’s designs on a second straight Tour de France win, after four days the defending champion himself wasn’t convinced. Merckx was satisfied on two counts – one, a specialist from Brittany had been successfully treating the sciatica (that was now the diagnosis) in his left leg and, two, even on the plains of north-west France, Ocaña looked to Merckx like a man on the edge. This, says Marino Vigna, was yet another weapon in the Merckx panoply. ‘Eddy was very good at judging his competitors. He would come to me at the start of races and say, “Watch so and so today. He’ll be good. And they invariably were.” In the stampede to the line and a bunch sprint won by Godefroot in Lisieux, Merckx had positioned himself within spying range of Ocaña and made this unflattering assessment: ‘I got a good look at Luis. He looked washed out and had his mouth open like he was about to die. People are saying that he’ll be my most dangerous rival in the mountains. I hope they’re right, but he has to show a bit of resistance.’