Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (29 page)

Philippe Brunel’s eyes and voice still mist with nostalgia when he talks about Ocaña. Over the course of a long career reporting and poeticising on cycling for
L’Equipe
, Brunel has met and become close to many now departed cyclists, but has cried only for Ocaña. In 2002, he wrote a fine biography of Merckx and today often wishes ‘that when I see Merckx, it could be just as another human being and not Eddy Merckx, because he’s a wonderful person to spend time with’. Of Ocaña, though, Brunel says just, ‘We were brothers.’

‘I would never say that Luis died on the Col de Menté, but when he falls there’s this sense that his family history has given him, of his father who flees Spain and Francoism, over the Portillon, carrying all his worldly possessions. There’s this sense not of malediction but at least melancholia about Luis and his life, and that increases with the fall. There are people who say that he could have got up but that’s false. Two riders smashed into him. I also think there was a third thing – this idea, somewhere, that happiness wasn’t for him. I think that like all Spaniards, he had a relationship with fatality that unconsciously made it impossible for him to get over that thing. To him, there was a sense of “I fall, it’s fatal, it couldn’t have gone any other way.”

‘In any case,’ Brunel continues, ‘Luis died a bit every day when things didn’t go as he wished on a bike. What he told me that day in 1994 about wishing he could ride the Tour again and die on the finish line…that showed that he had a visceral, almost mystical relationship with his profession, which is perhaps why he had problems after he retired. Merckx is the greatest champion in the history of cycling, but there are other riders who are the very expression of the sport, who left a very deep impression, who expressed what cycling should be. It’s like in life – occasionally you do things that you shouldn’t do, but you do them anyway, and you’re right, because you can’t always be calculating or rational. Cycling’s not a sport for
accountants.
The mark that Luis left on cycling wasn’t much more than one performance, his ride to Orcières-Merlette, but that mark was indelible, like the essence of cycling distilled in a perfume bottle. That’s why I loved Ocaña and also why he and Merckx would have become great friends in other circumstances. I’m sure of that. Ocaña, Merckx and Jacques Anquetil were kindred spirits. They had this relationship with life, this attitude of, “We’ll grab life by the scruff of the neck. We won’t conform. We’ll take it head on.” Yes, if Luis was still alive, he and Eddy would get on famously now.’

hour of need

‘You’re a real gherkin!’
J
ACQUES
A
NQUETIL

MERCKX ENDED UP
winning the 1971 Tour – the one that he said he and Ocaña both ‘lost’ when the Spaniard crashed – by a shade under ten minutes. If he was the villain before, the emergence, then downfall of a tragic hero, had eroded his popularity still further. Again, Merckx didn’t or couldn’t help himself. On the Pyrenean blockbuster to Gourette, he chased then berated Lucien Van Impe, guilty of wheel-sucking for 12 kilometres on the Tourmalet then ‘jumping away under my nose’. He then sought retribution on Cyrille Guimard for his earlier ‘conspiracy’ with Ocaña by attacking in the pine forests of the Landes. The ambush gave Merckx his fourth stage win in the Tour and the green points jersey formerly held by Guimard. ‘I think Guimard’s green jersey is still hanging from a pine tree somewhere in the Landes!’ he tittered years later.

If he didn’t know to what extent the French public had turned on him before, even after those threatening letters early in the Tour, he did when a fan pelted him with stones in Angoulême. Or when the choruses of ‘Eddy, Eddy’ he remembered from La Cipale in 1969 had turned to jeers two years later. ‘It was particularly bad that year,’ says Rini Wagtmans. ‘I can remember the stones in Angoulême. The
French
just couldn’t understand Eddy. They had Thévenet and Poulidor, and to them he’d just ruined the party.’

Even away from the Tour, in the criteriums, it seemed that age and money were doing nothing to curb Merckx’s cannibalism. Losing was still that ‘big drama in his life’ that so mystified Dino Zandegù. One afternoon in 2011 – for the record at around two o’clock – Zandegù’s memories of a circuit race in Modigliana four weeks after the ’71 Tour come cascading back.

Dino, Dino, what’s this: Zandegù first, Merckx second?! Amazing! How did you do it?

‘Oh yes, I don’t know what it was – my dinner the previous night had gone down well, or I’d slept well – but I was on one of those days, a day with a capital “D”! It was a hard race, circuits six kilometres long with a climb called the “Calla”. Three laps from the end, Merckx starts stirring the pot then puts in this vicious attack. Suddenly there are only six of us left. On the penultimate lap we’re all still there, then we get to the hill, this “Calla” for the last time. Merckx thinks he’ll put on a show…but I go away with him! Six hundred metres from the top of the climb, I’m dropped, but not by so much that I can’t catch him on the descent. He knows I’m on his wheel, but I’m too tired to come through. “Pull! Pull, you good-for-nothing…!” he’s shouting. He’s calling me all the names under the sun in this half-Flemish, half-Italian, half-French, half-invented patois – “
Verdomme
this,
bastardo
that!” – then he tells me that he’ll see to it that I never race again if I do the sprint. I say nothing – part of the prize is a golden hen that’s worth quite a lot of money, and I want to win it. So, anyway, we come under the kilometre-to-go kite and I go like a rocket and do the sprint of my life to win. Five metres beyond the finish line, I spot a gap in the crowd, turn off the road and down this little gravel path. At the end of the path is a house. I jump off
my
bike, sling it over my shoulder, burst through the open door of the house and run upstairs into one of the bedrooms. An old woman is there in her bed. I wake her and she starts shrieking. I say “Granny, granny, be quiet! I won’t hurt you, but Eddy Merckx is coming after me and he wants to rip my face off!” She says that she’s going to call the police, but eventually she calms down, and I end up staying in there for half an hour. I finally poke my head outside, check he’s not waiting, then ride off to get my prize. When I get to the podium it’s just me and the organiser because everyone else has gone home. It was worth it, though – I still treasure that golden hen!’

At around the same time, while Merckx was preparing for the World Championship road race that was another nail in Ocaña’s coffin, Lomme Driessens was getting ready for a change of scenery in 1972 in a team other than Molteni. Driessens informed Merckx that he would be leaving Molteni at the end of the season in a letter in August. The writing, though, had been on the wall for weeks if not months. His policy of allowing some riders’ wives to stay with them at stage races and banning others was just one of many things that irritated Merckx. Over the summer a bad relationship had slowly turned into an unsustainable one. Merckx didn’t ride Paris–Tours in September, but even from afar he could tell what to expect from Driessens when he took up his new role with Van Cauter-Magniflex the following year. If Magniflex’s Rik Van Linden was able to win in Tours, Molteni’s Marino Basso reported back to Merckx, it had been in large part thanks to Driessens. Had he not known it before, Merckx would soon discover that, as journalist Walter Pauli reminds us, ‘Driessens was obsessed with revenge.’

Perhaps the biggest indictment of him, though, was that Merckx never needed any of the attributes that Driessens had employed to
great
effect before and would in future against Merckx. His braggadocio, his mind games and even his knack for spotting talent had all become redundant. Rini Wagtmans, who was also leaving Molteni at the end of 1971, but only because Merckx had urged him to accept Goudsmit-Hoff’s astronomical offer, agrees. ‘Driessens was also a special coach,’ Wagtmans says. ‘There was no Internet, so team managers relied on their nose, and Lomme’s was brilliant. He would come up to you at the start of a race, put his right hand out to shake your hand, then put his left hand on your back and squeeze the flesh, then he’d go back to Merckx and say, “Eddy, don’t worry about Wagtmans. He’s three kilos overweight.”

‘He loved to play these psychological games. Sometimes, in the race, he’d tell someone to attack, and they would, then you’d get back to the hotel that night and he’d berate them for attacking. “When I say ‘Attack!’ that means you do nothing!” he would say. “When I want you to attack, I’ll say ‘Wait!’” He was always trying to trick the opposition.

‘I think Eddy got to the point where he didn’t need those games,’ Wagtmans concludes. ‘Cycling was simple to him. It was just a race. We weren’t animals in a circus. We were racers. Eddy knew that.’

Merckx’s order of priorities is well illustrated in his 1971
Carnets de Route
. For most in his position, a published autobiography would be the obvious outlet for the grievances about Driessens that had been piling up since 1969. Again, though, even in the printed word, Merckx’s dislike for conflict is apparent when he stresses that the story about Driessens’s conniving at Paris–Tours was only Basso’s version. Merckx himself devotes barely a single anodyne sentence to the end of their collaboration. Most likely, he and his ghost-writer Marc Jeuniau assumed that the audience was far more interested in how he had closed the season with victory in the only major Classic
or
‘monument’ which still eluded him, the Tour of Lombardy in Italy. That, though, was a story told before almost
ad infinitum
– of Merckx riding everyone including Ocaña off his wheel, in this case 50 kilometres from the finish line close to Argegno on the western shore of Lake Como. Of his 54 victories in 1971 – his highest tally to date, with his highest win-ratio of 45 per cent – Merckx claimed that only the Tour de France and the Tour of Lombardy had been ‘premeditated’. The rest, all 52 of them, had presumably come about just because Merckx felt a rumble in his stomach.

Merckx had erected the tightrope on which he would spend the 1972 season. He had condemned himself to win just as much, under penalty of critics announcing his terminal decline. Meanwhile those critics, and other forces trying to knock him, continued to multiply – the catcallers in the crowd, Ocaña, De Vlaeminck, old adversaries like Gimondi and Bitossi, new ones like Driessens, the sciatica that returned intermittently, fame, expectation, plus a Tour de France organisation which looked to have joined the Merckx refuseniks by plotting the most mountainous route for years in 1972. As well as all of this, Merckx had to find time to be a husband and a father. In August 1972, Claudine would give birth to a son, Axel. The couple’s first child, Sabrina, had caused Merckx one of his biggest disappointments of 1971 by failing to recognise him on his return from a training camp in Italy early in the year. Seeing her husband’s crestfallen face, Claudine had tried to reassure him. ‘It’s understandable that she wouldn’t recognise you after a few weeks apart.’

As ever, Merckx could see only one solution to the dilemma he had outlined, rather poignantly, to Marc Jeuniau in 1971: ‘Because I’m very successful, people imagine that I have no problems, when it’s really the opposite that’s true.’ He would just have to work even harder. He started at Molteni’s training camp in Laigueglia in January,
then
at Paris–Nice in March he realised to what extent his antagonists had redoubled their efforts and their vitriol over the winter. A terrible fall on the finishing straight in Saint Etienne at the end of Stage 3 hurt Merckx’s hip and back to the point where doctors advised him to abandon, but even more painful was the backstabbing that followed. First, Ocaña’s directeur sportif Maurice de Muer and Lomme Driessens lobbied hard for the rule waiving any time losses incurred due to crashes in the last kilometre to be disregarded for Merckx, who had got up and struggled over the line 42 seconds after the winner Eric Leman. Fortunately, every other directeur sportif opposed the motion, and Merckx retained his race leadership. The following morning in Saint Etienne, Ocaña scoffed that there was ‘nothing wrong with Merckx’. He then proceeded to attack him, in vain, three times on the Col de la République leaving the city. This prompted a rare outburst by Merckx in his 1972
Carnets de Route
.

‘I find Ocaña’s behaviour deeply unpleasant,’ he wrote. ‘First of all because he’s quite aggressive about me when he speaks to journalists, and then also because he takes himself for the boss of the peloton. He tells all the riders what they should be doing, he gives orders, he calls anyone who goes off the front back into the group, he looks daggers at anyone who’s shaping to attack. Who does he think he is? Prince Juan Carlos, or Franco?’

Merckx’s superiority over Ocaña in the remaining six stages set the pattern for their duels throughout 1972 and indeed the rest of their careers. Unfortunately for Merckx, at Paris–Nice, one man had been faster than both of them: the 35-year-old Frenchman Raymond Poulidor.

Order was restored at Milan–San Remo, where Merckx won for the fifth time in seven participations. No one except those immediately behind him saw his attack because, as Merckx put it, the descent
off
the Poggio is ‘like the dark side of the Moon’. Stated with less modesty, he was too quick there for the TV cameras.

The first half of his Classics campaign was beset by a recurrence of the pain resulting from his crash at Paris–Nice. A new round of tests revealed that Merckx had a torn muscle in his back and a cracked lumbar vertebra. In the circumstances, he had every right to feel as ‘happy as a king’ after his seventh place in the Tour of Flanders. A week later, he was less pleased with the same finishing position in Paris–Roubaix. Without a tyre blow-out in Arenberg Forest Merckx ‘had the feeling that I would have prevailed without too much difficulty’. The ‘ease’ with which Roger De Vlaeminck was able to win his first Roubaix title, said Merckx, ‘demonstrated that the opposition was relatively weak’.