Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (33 page)

Another impartial observer – at least we assume – Gimondi, believes that Maertens’s error wasn’t so much the speed of his acceleration as its timing. ‘He started winding it up with two kilometres to go, but if Merckx or Maertens had done a short sprint, they would have beaten me hands down, because I had no jump, I was screwed.’

Having accused Merckx, Gimondi and the race referees who hadn’t disqualified him, Maertens focused next on his great Campagnolo conspiracy. Nearly four decades later, the theory that Gimondi, Merckx and Tullio Campagnolo somehow connived to guarantee a winner from the Italian manufacturer’s stable has been roundly discredited…except by Maertens. ‘We’ll never know what happened with Campagnolo and Shimano,’ he says sombrely. ‘I think only they’ll ever know. It was Shimano’s first year and, while they didn’t have the history or prestige of Campagnolo, their equipment was already good. I just know that Campagnolo did three-quarters of their advertising in Spain, and that Shimano wasn’t nearly on the same scale.’

Perhaps better than Merckx, Walter Godefroot came to understand Maertens and the ill-feeling that would grow between him and not just Merckx, but a number of riders in the mid-1970s. From his vast, open-plan living room in Nazareth near Gent, Godefroot speaks with such authority and insight on almost anyone and anything from his era that it is easy to see why he later became a highly successful team manager, albeit one whose record was severely tarnished by doping scandals before his retirement in 2006. He wasn’t always so lucid, he admits, and on the night of the Barcelona Worlds, he sided with his Flandria protégé. Within months, in 1974, their relationship had begun to deteriorate.

‘First of all, the Campagnolo thing,’ Godefroot says. ‘I might have put the idea in Freddy’s head. I might have said something about Campagnolo maybe giving their riders a bonus if one of them won. That’s possible. We were just talking like that. But Freddy immediately told other people who maybe got the wrong end of the stick or blew the thing out of all proportion.

‘The story’s not feasible, not reasonable. At first Maertens and I got on well. It was already my eighth year as a pro, so I could teach him a few tricks of the trade, what to look out for and so on,’ Godefroot continues. ‘But there were people who took advantage of certain situations, people who weren’t trustworthy, and Freddy was vulnerable. On the other hand, he didn’t trust us. He didn’t trust my generation, Merckx’s generation, yet Merckx always keeps his word. It comes down to personality.’

Maertens’s feuding with Merckx, says Godefroot, had just begun and would go on for decades, still with Barcelona at its source. For Merckx, the ’73 Worlds represented maybe his bitterest defeat to date and also one of his most unexpected. In one sense, Maertens’s
machinations
had done him the favour of obscuring his collapse on a course and finishing straight that could scarcely have suited him better. He had failed to win the Worlds before, but always on courses or with teammates who brought more hindrance than assistance. The bottom line in Barcelona was that whatever Maertens had or hadn’t done shouldn’t have mattered. That it did may just have been a sign. Because that was the new face the people were really yearning for – the one belonging to a declining Merckx. He only had to look at Raymond Poulidor for proof that turning 30 needn’t be a death knell, but the Frenchman was the exception; cyclists in general didn’t last as long as they do today, and Merckx fully expected to burn out sooner than most. Had he not told Marc Jeuniau in 1971 that he would not ride on beyond 30, and that in any case his aggressive riding style was incompatible with any kind of longevity? He was now 28. Already in that 1971 season he had said that his bruising duel with Ocaña made him ‘feel like I’ve aged terribly’. In
Coureur Cycliste Un Homme et Son Métier
, released in 1974, he would then address this message to his fans: ‘Don’t fear for one second that you’ll see me on the decline, served up on a plate to a vengeful peloton, like some shipwrecked, stranded sailor clinging to the buoy of his former glory. At the first signs that I’m weakening, and maybe a bit before, I’ll bid farewell… There have been one or two who haven’t known when their time had come, having succumbed to the nostalgia of a glorious past… I know that I’m strong enough to use my head not my heart at the right time.’

To suggest that he was already slipping in the final weeks of the ’73 season, already flouting that self-imposed deadline, would have been premature. Of course it would. He proved it with a consummate ride in Paris–Bruxelles, his ‘home’ race which returned to the
calendar
after a seven-year absence, and another one at the GP des Nations. He then obliterated Roger De Vlaeminck, Frans Verbeeck, Franco Bitossi and the rest of the Italian ‘
gruppo
’ to win a third Tour of Lombardy on 13 October. That, at least, is what it said in his
Carnets de Route
for the 1973 season. Evidently the book went to press before 8 November, when it emerged that Merckx’s urine sample after Lombardy had contained traces of the banned drug norephedrine. On this occasion it didn’t take Merckx long to solve the mystery: the Molteni doctor Angelo Cavalli, the erstwhile Italian federation doctor who had tested his urine samples in Savona, soon remembered and publicly admitted that he had prescribed Merckx the cough medicine Mucantil, which contained the offending substance. Not that the alibi cut any ice with the authorities; Merckx was stripped of his Lombardy win and left furiously lamenting another anti-doping injustice.

Was this another indicator, the faintest portent like Barcelona that, even if his opponents weren’t yet encroaching, maybe the sporting gods were closing in? The unbroken winning run in major tours dating from the 1968 Giro coincided with a six-year period during which Merckx’s longest lay-off due to injury had been the 12 days after his crash in Blois. There had been punctures, illnesses and crashes, some at crucial times, but nothing that had compromised an entire major tour or Classics campaign. History had shown that the best riders possessed an uncanny knack of avoiding such ‘imponderables’, and indeed this was one of the reasons why they took their place among the elite. What passed for luck was also, actually, often nothing of the sort. Merckx was ‘luckier’ than Ocaña, for example, because he happened to be a better bike handler in wet weather, because Mother Nature had blessed him with a more robust constitution and immune
system,
and in all sorts of other regards that owed more to genetic or nurtured merit than random forces. The day when Merckx’s ‘luck’ took a turn for the worse would in fact be the day when he no longer had a sufficient margin of superiority to master his rivals, the weather, the politics of the peloton, media pressure and anything else that professional cycling could throw at him. Barcelona and the positive test at Lombardy had been isolated blips, but they were harbingers of the kind of adversities that would one day overwhelm and outnumber his coping mechanisms. And on that day, if not before, Merckx knew that there would be no shortage of volunteers to dig and then dance upon his grave.

Plenty were already toting their spades early in 1974, for Merckx’s spring was by general consensus a ‘disaster’. The first symptoms of a chest infection appeared at Paris–Nice, then kept him out of Milan–San Remo. Soon he was diagnosed with viral pneumonia. He did admirably to come back and finish fourth at the Tour of Flanders, then second behind Barry Hoban at Gent–Wevelgem. He then lined up at the 1974 Paris–Roubaix believing that he was nearly back on song, only to be eclipsed by an irresistible Roger De Vlaeminck. The next day, Merckx was told by his doctor that his lungs were not yet clear and that he must rest for another two weeks. He therefore missed Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Flèche Wallonne. Not since 1965, his first season, had Merckx finished the spring without a single Classic win.

It was little wonder, then, that the press in Italy was already uttering that unspeakable word – ‘decline’ – when he returned to action there at the end of April. A report in
La Stampa
said that he was ‘agitated and insecure’ and ‘no longer himself’. The evidence? Merckx had said himself before the Coppa Placci that he was only racing to train. And Merckx never,
ever
raced just to train.

In May, Maertens riled him at the Four Days of Dunkirk, where a series of on- and off-the-bike spats confirmed that their made-for-TV reconciliation the night after the Barcelona Worlds had been a PR charade. The trend of other riders troubling if not beating Merckx then continued at the Giro, which he had only decided to ride when his illness in the spring left him short of racing. Again, the main thorn was José Manuel Fuente, although it was the Italian pair of Gianbattista Baronchelli and Felice Gimondi who both came heart-stoppingly close to beating him. As in 1972, Fuente took the pink jersey at the first mountainous opportunity, on Stage 3 to Sorrento. He then won two further stages to lead Merckx by over two minutes by the halfway mark. Fuente’s fate, though, was already sealed according to Franco Bitossi; having been critical of his tactics in 1972, Bitossi now says that, maybe like Ocaña in the 1971 Tour, the Spaniard had been lured into trying to beat Merckx at his own game. ‘He’d had the pink jersey for over a week and during that time had tried to ride like Merckx and make his team ride like Merckx’s. In doing so, he had worn himself and them out completely. He then paid the price and collapsed,’ Bitossi says.

Fuente hinted at the same thing when, in a documentary about the 1974 Giro fittingly entitled
The Greatest Show on Earth
, he said the rest of the peloton lost its bearings when Merckx wasn’t leading. He, clearly, had not known quite what approach to take and duly buckled on Stage 14 to San Remo.

He won one more stage, to the Monte Generoso, but that day Merckx didn’t care about the result. Fifteen kilometres into the stage, Giorgio Albani had pulled alongside him in his Molteni team car and announced that Jean Van Buggenhout, Merckx’s long-serving manager, was ‘in great pain and has had to be hospitalised’. Merckx worked out instantly, from the look in Albani’s eyes and what he
knew
about Van Bug’s recent heart problems, that his old friend and business brain had died.

Having initially wanted to abandon, Merckx struggled on, grief-stricken. If Maertens had at least contributed to his undoing in Barcelona, another member of the new generation, the 20-year-old Baronchelli, now assumed the same role. We know that Merckx was not superstitious, but there was a real risk of him crash-landing precisely where his Giro career had taken off, beneath the Tre Cime di Lavaredo on the final mountain stage in the Dolomites. Only a courageous last kilometre in pursuit of Baronchelli and Fuente under the three majestic Lavaredo spires saved him. Two days later the Giro was his…by 12 seconds from Baronchelli, the second smallest margin of victory in the Giro’s history, and 33 from Gimondi.

Merckx’s edginess had been apparent throughout the race, not least in his constant fussing over his equipment. Faced with Merckx’s demands and incessant tinkering with the 15 bikes he had brought to the race, one of the Molteni mechanics had left the Giro ‘on the verge of a nervous breakdown and swearing that he would never work with me again’ – Merckx’s words in his
Carnets de Route
.

The race had ended, incidentally, with Merckx claiming that another of his old mechanics, Ernesto Colnago, had offered him a substantial fee to gift the pink jersey to Baronchelli, something that Colnago denied. Baronchelli too naturally rebuffs the allegation, while also offering some interesting insight into how a new wave of riders was slowly dismantling the Merckx mystique.

‘The Colnago story is an old folk tale,’ Baronchelli says. ‘Why on earth would Merckx be selling a Giro to a twenty-year-old? Because he needed the money? Come on… As for his aura and whether I was intimidated by him in that race, I’d say you’re not scared of anyone
at
twenty years of age. The generation who had been riding with Merckx for years revered him and were terrified of him. I certainly wasn’t. I don’t think it was a coincidence that Gimondi and I ended up closest to Merckx in that Giro: on the one hand, you had a young and fearless guy like me and on the other you had probably the only guy from Merckx’s generation who had worked out that you couldn’t try to beat him at his own game. You had to feed off scraps. All those guys who went in thumping their chests, trying to challenge him head on, had been chewed up and spat out. It had happened to Motta, to Ocaña and to Fuente. If Fuente had waited for the last climbs in the mountains, he would have taken a Giro off Merckx, but instead he wanted to kill him by going on the first climb all the time. Merckx was maybe there for the taking but Fuente couldn’t take advantage.’

If Baronchelli wasn’t blinded, if he could see signs of mortality, that didn’t necessarily mean that everyone would, particularly not those riders who had been tortured for years. Maertens and Baronchelli were still juniors in 1969, when Merckx created a memory that his old directeur sportif Marino Vigna said ‘terrorised’ the peloton for years thereafter. At around the same time Gimondi had learned through painful experience that trying to wrest control of a race from Merckx was akin to waking a sleeping giant. The consequences were often humiliating. Thus a pattern of resignation or submission had gradually taken root. That or just a way of racing which was hardwired for defence and, as Fuente said, left many disoriented or ill-equipped when Merckx was either absent or below his best. Maertens, Gimondi and many others had said that racing against Merckx was easy because, instead of monitoring 100 or more potential opponents, you only really had to watch him. Thus, the peloton’s rhythms became adapted to Merckx.

Even when he did weaken, he would surely therefore have a year or two’s grace while those whom he had battered into anaesthesia processed what was happening. Or if not grace, at least a time when all of the savoir faire he had acquired since Blois would make up for the fact that he was no longer quite as strong. Was this what was already happening in 1973 and 1974? Hard to tell. Certainly, though, there seemed to be a lot of truth and an element of denial in the long passage he devoted in his 1974
Carnets de Route
to explaining why he was no longer wreaking such carnage in the mountains.