Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (24 page)

Ocaña wasn’t listening, but an attack in the first kilometre on that fifth stage towards Rouen in Normandy was a brave riposte. Needless to say, Merckx was alert to the danger, reacted quickly, and a second consecutive bunch sprint ended with another win for Godefroot.

Almost a week in, the Merckx mind was unusually unencumbered – except for one thing. His friend Italo Zilioli had taken the yellow jersey on Stage 2, after Merckx’s victory in the prologue, and the
circumstances
of the ‘handover’ had sparked yet another row with Lomme Driessens. Zilioli and another Faemino rider, Georges Vandenberghe, had marked Godefroot when he attacked to join four other unfancied riders early on the stage to Angers, and initially refused to contribute to the pace-making until Driessens appeared at their side. ‘OK, you can go!’ Driessens told Zilioli. When the gap back to the main peloton grew to five minutes, Merckx loomed to offer viewers the unusual spectacle of the race leader chasing down a teammate and purportedly his ‘best friend in cycling’. The time gap as Zilioli took the stage and 20 bonus seconds was 24 seconds – enough to dispossess Merckx of his yellow jersey by four seconds.

Merckx said that he was angry not because his friend had broken rank and followed through on his pre-Tour promise-cum-threat to ‘see what I can do myself’. Nor was he upset, Merckx said, because he’d dreamed of keeping the yellow jersey all the way to Paris. His concern, he claimed, was that Zilioli would now burn himself out before the mountains, where Merckx needed his help. Although Marino Vigna admitted that it was he who had urged Zilioli to forge ahead, Merckx blamed Driessens.

Six days later, perhaps in an effort to atone or reingratiate himself, Driessens instructed Merckx and the Faemino Red Guard not to wait when Zilioli punctured close to the finish in Valenciennes. ‘I’d told them to stay at the front to help Eddy, and Zilioli wasn’t there when he punctured,’ Driessens explained that night.

Looking back now – and partly because it wasn’t the first or last time that Merckx’s brand of sporting leadership lapsed into megalomania – it seems fair to doubt whether he was really more concerned with ‘needing Zilioli in the mountains’ or monopolising the Tour. Zilioli, for his part, is still sticking to his version and sticking by his friend: ‘I was the kind of guy who, if he had good legs, would just go
to
the front and take off, without really thinking too much about the consequences. Eddy wasn’t angry with me. He was just concerned about how much energy it would take to defend the jersey. That night, he said, “Italo, today you’ve done a lot of work, and it’s a long Tour.” You see, a lot of people thought Merckx only had an accelerator, but he had an accelerator and a calculator. Eddy used to say “Legs don’t have a brain.”’

In his first day back in yellow, as the race headed towards the Brussels suburb of Forest, just a few blocks from Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, Merckx again welded power to intelligence in a devastating attack with Lucien Van Impe. Any other rider might have gifted the stage-win to his fellow escapee in return for a 1’20” reinforcement of his race leadership, but Merckx only knew one kind of charity, the one that consisted of donating his prize money to good causes, as he would at the end of this Tour. Besides, he didn’t like wheel-suckers – or ‘
profiteurs
’ as he called them – and Van Impe had already shown that tendency in his first 18 months as a pro.

The surprise move and victory, plus a further strengthening of Merckx’s position in the afternoon time trial, delighted the fans in Brussels but appalled the Tour director and
L’Equipe
journalist Jacques Goddet. ‘Gentlemen, this is a catastrophe!’ Goddet blurted in the newspaper’s evening editorial meeting, brandishing a printout of the general classification, which Merckx already led by over two minutes.

Luis Ocaña’s ninth place and 3’38” deficit were alarming but not a death sentence with four mountain ranges – the Vosges, Jura, Alps and Pyrenees – still jutting invitingly out of the road map. Unbeknown to Merckx, however, Johny Schleck’s misgivings about his team leader’s mental fortitude were proving sadly accurate, as Ocaña’s stomach tied itself in knots more intricate and painful than the hairpins he was about to face on Stage 10. Merckx knew all about how
and
where stress could collect, germinate and tyrannise in the body, having suffered the same problems as an amateur, and now he hastened Ocaña’s collapse by escaping with 13 other riders 170 kilometres from the finish line in Divonne les Bains. Earlier, just five kilometres into the stage, Merckx had chased the Portuguese Joaquim Agostinho only to be told that Agostinho had a score to settle after his contentious disqualification the previous day. More to the point Agostinho ‘[needed] a cow, and you, Merckx, have enough money to buy a hundred!’ Later, though, Merckx was in no mood to compromise; standing behind the finish line outside Divonne’s palatial casino, the journalist Gianpaolo Ormezzano waited with the Molteni team manager Giorgio Albani for what was now a three-man lead-group of Merckx, the Molteni rider Guerrino Tosello and the Belgian Georges Pintens to swing around the final bend. Ormezzano recalls: ‘I said to Albani, “If he lets Tosello win here, he’s got a friend for life,” but of course then Merckx smokes him.’ Ormezzano then walked over to where Merckx had stopped, already looking refreshed, and put the same point to Merckx as he had to Albani: ‘If you’d let him win, you’d have had a friend for life.’ Whereupon Merckx gestured towards the fans craning over the barriers and mumbled in his usual, bass montone, ‘I owed it to them. They have the right to see the best man win.’

Four days later, following two further Merckx masterclasses in a time trial around Divonne and the big Alpine stage to Grenoble, Ormezzano would be the bearer of bad news which turned Stage 13 into a sorry one for both Merckx and Ocaña. Ormezzano had become as close as journalists could to Merckx over the previous three years, partly because the youngster had made him and his pre-race punditry look good by winning the 1966 Milan–San Remo, and more recently because, says Ormezzano, ‘I’d defended Eddy when
the
Italian press started turning on him for ruining their vision of Felice Gimondi dominating international cycling.’ In recent times, Merckx had come to know of Ormezzano’s involvement in local politics and taken to addressing him as ‘Il Senatore’.

Now, in Gap, Ormezzano waited for Merckx to come under the banner and into the mêlée, ready to relay some terrible news: their mutual friend, the Faemino team manager Vincenzo Giacotto, had lost his battle with throat cancer and died the previous night. For Ormezzano, Giacotto had been ‘one of those people who was impossible to dislike, except for the fact that he supported Juventus, which for a Torino fan like me was the worst sin a man could commit’. Amid tears, Merckx now described him as a ‘real friend’. Once or twice, after Savona, he had wondered whether Giacotto really believed that he was innocent of doping, and the mutual trust had briefly lapsed. In future, though, Merckx would cherish his memories of a man, he said now, ‘whom I really liked as a human being’. A few metres away, Italo Zilioli sat propped against the trackside and wept into his hands. His association with Giacotto went back further than Merckx’s, almost a decade.

At around the same time, another fragile bird, Luis Ocaña, was bringing to an end a terrible ordeal that reached new timbres of agony on the Col du Noyer. When his Bic teammate Charly Grosskost could take no more and climbed off his bike, Ocaña briefly wanted to follow him, but instead prolonged the martyrdom which would provide rich material for his memoirs two years later. ‘I touched the depths of despair… In front of a fountain which my fever lent the appearance of an oasis, I was even tempted to abandon. I was ashamed, as I told myself that I had no right to finish the stage, with Charly having abandoned. I kept telling myself that I wasn’t worthy of his sacrifice… My face was like Christ’s on the cross, but
the
solicitations of my directeurs sportifs seeped into my being and had the effect of a cracking whip.’

The following day, once again, Merckx and Ocaña found themselves united in suffering but divided by minutes on the torrid slopes of the Mont Ventoux, the ‘God of Evil demanding sacrifice’ described by Roland Barthes. In the morning, Italo Zilioli was still so shaken by Giacotto’s passing that, when the minute’s silence in his former boss’s honour ended, his head still hung and it was left to Merckx to cajole him with a hand on the shoulder and an ‘
Allez, camarade!
’ The way the pair then channelled their grief on the road where Tom Simpson had perished three years earlier then bore out what Zilioli said about how they responded very differently in adversity; if, as
L’Equipe’s
Antoine Blondin had said, the Ventoux was ‘a witch’s cauldron’, the rare brew of sadness and adrenalin spurred Merckx to yet another devastating solo win, while Zilioli floundered with Ocaña further down the mountain. Two kilometres from the summit, now flagging, Merckx had paid his respects to Simpson and the monument that marked the site of his collapse in 1967 by removing his cap, while Jacques Goddet jumped out of his race director’s car to leave flowers. Moments later, having been too exhausted to even raise a hand from the bars as he reached the summit and the finish line, Merckx caused a brief but serious alarm by barging past reporters while complaining that he had ‘fire in his belly’. For a few, nervous minutes, the spectre of Simpson and an unthinkable déjà vu hung in the heat haze, as the second-placed rider, Martin Van Den Bossche, also felt unwell and was bundled into an ambulance. Van Den Bossche now found himself sitting next to the rider who the previous year had killed his dream on another legendary peak, the Tourmalet – Eddy Merckx.

‘I can still hear the tour doctor, Pierre Dumas, saying that my heartbeat and circulation were good but that they’d give me a shot if
I
didn’t regain full consciousness in the next two minutes,’ Van Den Bossche says. ‘I heard him counting, “Sixty, fifty-nine…” then him telling his assistant to “Get it ready”, meaning the shot. Fortunately within a minute I was awake, and then Merckx came in. They closed the door, and we were in there for an age, about half an hour. It turned out quite well because there were these two Citroëns waiting to take us down the mountain with a police escort. We went down at a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour with sirens wailing and fans still all over the road. It was absolutely terrifying, but the good thing was that we arrived at the hotel an hour before our teammates who had been blocked on the mountain.

‘In the end it was much ado about nothing,’ Van Den Bossche puffs. ‘Both of us had been fine all the time. My directeur sportif Giorgio Albani had pinched my hand in the ambulance, and I’d pinched back. Meanwhile, our mechanic Ernesto Colnago was outside, sobbing and thinking that I was dead. Albani opened the door and told him to stop the cinema!’

If Merckx’s victory wasn’t assured before then, barring accident, it was now. In his hotel bed in Avignon, he had much to ponder besides what was now nearly a ten-minute lead over the second-placed rider on general classification, the Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk. As well as thoughts of Giacotto and Simpson, on the Ventoux’s barren upper slopes, Merckx had been haunted by the old neurosis that ran straight down his spine and into his leg. As it did, as he had done on numerous other occasions during the Tour, he had reached into his back pocket for his allen key and began adjusting his saddle height as he rode. At the top of every pedal stroke, he braced himself, waiting for his leg to lock completely.

The panic was more frightening than any pain, and Merckx didn’t intend to reacquaint himself with the feeling at any point in the
Tour’s
last nine days. He would limit himself to ‘just’ two more wins, in the time trials in Bordeaux and on the final day at La Cipale in Paris, scene of his second consecutive enthronement as the Tour de France winner.

It would be wrong to suggest that Eddy Merckx’s battles were over, that he faced no more opposition after Stage 14 to the Mont Ventoux. Neither Ocaña’s token, consolatory breakaway win at Saint-Gaudens, nor the young Frenchman Bernard Thévenet dropping and beating Merckx by over a minute on the Pyrenean stage to La Mongie, however, provided the champion elect with anything like the challenges which were increasingly coming from behind the barriers and inside the press enclosure.

Goddet’s remark about Merckx’s ‘catastrophic’ early lead betrayed the resentment which had again festered throughout the Tour, and which Merckx seemed powerless to assuage. Coming from him, the tiniest faux pas could be magnified to assume the proportions of a blasphemous insult. While Ocaña was winning at Saint-Gaudens, the Faemino soigneurs had arrived at the team’s allotted sleeping quarters in a stuffy school hall, and immediately taken the executive decision to check the entire staff into a hotel up the road in Barbazan. Later that evening, while they were eating, the former rider turned Tour bigwig Albert Bouvet strode through the dining room towards Lomme Driessens, race regulations in hand; sleeping and eating in a location not selected and approved by the race organiser, Bouvet reminded Driessens, was forbidden. Merckx and company duly trudged upstairs, packed their things and, in Merckx’s case, had barely slept when the alarm sounded for the next stage to La Mongie. Later that morning Merckx didn’t help himself by adding the lunch-pack laid on by the race organisers to his list of
grievances,
tipping its contents on to the tarmac in front of a group of journalists and squashing an unripe peach under his feet. ‘We anxiously await the day when the champion demands moules marinières in Sainte-Marie-de-Campan [the village at the foot of the Tourmalet], or maybe Lobster Thermidor,’ Antoine Blondin wrote in
L’Equipe
the following day.

The subtext was that Merckx was abusing his power, perhaps without even realising it. Whether he meant it or not, he had been swept along in the slow, seamless transition from boy genius to superstar, with all its trappings and the added complication, in cycling, of the authority that the best rider could exercise over other competitors. The French rider Cyrille Guimard was one of a number complaining that Merckx was now so strong that he was able to play God; he could ‘choose’ who was allowed to win at his own convenience. Godefroot had been ‘allowed’ to win the green points jersey only because Merckx liked him, and as a result of an agreement with Driessens even before the race started in Limoges that Merckx would grant him this privilege in return for the odd favour along the road.