Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (35 page)

Everything felt somehow different as he set off for the Tour de France, and not only because the race was starting in Charleroi in Belgium, and he could ride there from his home in Kraainem. There were many familiar faces among his teammates – notably Spruyt, De Schoenmaecker, Huysmans, Mintjens and Marc Lievens – but something slightly odd about not starting the first stage proper in the yellow jersey, having narrowly missed out to the young Italian Francesco Moser in the prologue. Not since 1969 had Merckx failed to win at the first bite of the cherry.

The next day there was much to reassure him. On the first climb of the Tour, the côte d’Alsemberg, scene of a boyhood defeat to Felice Gimondi in 1963, a Merckx attack cost Gimondi and Thévenet a minute. That day there were two stages, and in the afternoon it was
another
of the riders tipped to trouble Merckx, Zoetemelk, who lost over a minute due to a puncture. Merckx would soon have mechanical problems of his own; on Stage 2 to Amiens, he stopped four times to make adjustments to his bike. There were no serious consequences, just the suspicion again that nothing was going quite as smoothly as it once had.

The difficulty for his rivals and everyone else who wanted to see him fail was that the alternation of hope and despair was a motif as old and repetitive as his supremacy: no sooner had optimism flickered than Merckx had doused it with a splash of his old brilliance. In the first time trial of the Tour, 16 kilometres on the Atlantic coast, typically, he put everyone back in their place with a 27-second win which gave him the yellow jersey. Another time trial four days later at Auch saw him win again, but this time by only nine seconds from Thévenet. The Frenchman was now third overall, two minutes and 20 seconds behind Merckx on general classification. Merckx predicted that the Peugeot rider would be his most dangerous rival in the mountains. ‘I have to keep improving,’ he said of his own form.

As much as his own fitness or Thévenet, as the Pyrenees approached, Merckx’s team threatened to be his biggest source of concern. Stage 10 was but a taster with Gimondi taking a close-run victory in Pau and Merckx maintaining his lead. The course the next day and particularly the final ascent to the Pla D’Adet ski resort, brought back bad memories of 1974, when Raymond Poulidor, a recurrence of the sciatica in his left leg, and Bruyère’s only ‘
jour sans
’ of the Tour had conspired to inflict one of Merckx’s heaviest losses in the mountains of the Tour. On every other stage featuring multiple mountains in 1974, Bruyère says, ‘I had been able to set the pace over every climb until the last one. There was only so much damage anyone could do to Eddy on one mountain.’

Merckx had decided that another of his Josephs, De Schoenmaecker, was the best equipped to act as Bruyère’s stand-in a year later. De Schoenmaecker, though, had one big weakness: he was a dreadful descender. Consequently, in previous Tours, he had been deployed mainly on the first climb of the day and excused for the remainder of mountain stages. Even if he didn’t come unstuck, the mental stress of a 100-kilometre-per-hour white-knuckle slalom off a Pyrenean or Alpine pass could often end up taking its toll on a rider’s physical resources for whatever obstacles lay ahead. Even Merckx admitted that De Schoenmaecker was ‘limited’. ‘He descends the mountains with his buttocks and brakes clenched. Whatever he’s done going up the climb is therefore cancelled out, and on the second climb of the day he languishes in anonymity.’

This less-than-sparkling reference seemed unmerited when he led Merckx and the peloton over the Tourmalet and the Aspin, but a little more accurate when he vanished to leave Merckx alone and exposed at the bottom of Pla D’Adet. Merckx should have been grateful that he had already eliminated Fuente – literally ridden him outside the time limit – on the stage to Roubaix. Unfortunately, Zoetemelk and Thévenet were still in the race, and in that order they both crossed the line just under a minute faster than the race leader. Merckx’s advantage over Thévenet was down to a minute and a half.

Never had the mountains been so closely crammed together in a Tour de France. Eight mountain stages and the ranges of the Pyrenees, the Massif Central and the Alps were to be covered in nine days. Pla D’Adet represented the last action in the Pyrenees, and two days later the first of two summit finishes in the Massif Central saw the Belgian Michel Pollentier win at Super Lioran. Again, on the final climb, Merckx received no help from his teammates. His legs, fortunately, were spinning more sweetly than they had in 1974, even if the same could not be said of the other men in Molteni jerseys.

‘If you were really a champion, you could do it without your teammates,’ Rik Van Looy used to tease him. Increasingly, if Merckx wanted to win a sixth Tour de France, it looked as though he might have to do just that.

The start of one Tour de France stage seems the perfect place to reminisce about another. Unfortunately, in the hospitality village tucked beneath the old city walls in Dinan, Bernard Thévenet keeps getting interrupted. First by so many one-off acquaintances and well-wishers that, having smiled or politely obliged their requests, he turns his seat to hide his face, then by around half-a-dozen calls in the space of 15 minutes from his wife. ‘Is the water leaking directly out of the pipe? Have you checked the boiler…?’ After the second or third call, he is embarrassed and feels compelled to explain. ‘We’ve got a problem with our plumbing. Bit of an emergency…’

Thévenet has kept his thick Burgundian accent, a souvenir from the cycling backwater and vinicultural mecca where he grew up. If you didn’t know their ages, based on their appearance now, you would guess that Thévenet was more than three years younger than Merckx, but only because he looks exceptionally sprightly for a 63-year-old. You would also guess from his affable nature that he was one of those whose preferred antidotes to Merckx, like Gimondi’s, had been patience and pragmatism rather than bombast and bluster. And you would be right.

He started cycling only in 1962, on a bike with mudguards but also proper ‘drop’ racing handlebars. As far as Thévenet was concerned it was ‘wonderful’. It was also highly fitting – he had spent part of his childhood in a hamlet called ‘Le Guidon’ or ‘The Handlebar’. In July 1964 a criterium took place in La Clayette, up the road from his parents’ farm. A few days or weeks later, friends who owned a nearby restaurant told him, ‘Ah, we had a young Belgian lad in here
on
the day of the criterium. Good rider apparently. Can’t remember his name…’ Thévenet twigged immediately that it must have been Merckx, who was about to become the amateur world champion. When Thévenet himself turned pro six years later, he won his first race on the Mont Faron above Toulon, ahead of Eddy Merckx who had crashed.

Thévenet had been just one of the more resilient and prominent victims in the Merckx massacre which had continued ever since, but recently he had been inching almost to within striking distance. At the ’74 Worlds in Montreal and the ’75 Liège–Bastogne–Liège, he had been caught and passed only by a last, despairing Merckx charge. Then had come the Dauphiné.

‘I can remember the day in the Dauphiné when he cracked,’ Thévenet recalls. ‘We were climbing the Col du Granier, the Cucheron and the Porte, what we called the Chartreuse trilogy. It just made him seem human again. Before that he’d seemed like a Martian. He was out of our reach, beyond our imagination even. He was head and shoulders above the rest of us physically and mentally. With hindsight, that Dauphiné and him losing eleven minutes that day was maybe a watershed, the moment when the mask started to fall, but at the time people just said to themselves, “Well, he was ill, now he’s getting ready for the Tour.” For me, mentally, it was very useful later when we got to the Tour. It was the first time that we thought, reasonably, that we could beat him in the Tour de France as well. You could suddenly see how you could nibble away and take a little bit of time every day in the mountains. He also didn’t have Bruyère…’

And yet, Thévenet’s challenge in 1975 had almost ended before it began. The man who had nearly masterminded Merckx’s dethronement with Luis Ocaña, the former Bic directeur sportif Maurice De Muer, had moved to Peugeot at the start of 1975 and had a plan for
Merckx’s
assassination. ‘A guy who loses that much time in the Dauphiné can’t be a hundred per cent for the Tour. There are these summit finishes. You have to get to the Pyrenees less than three minutes down on Merckx. If you’re less than three minutes down, it’s on,’ De Muer had told Thévenet in Charleroi. But those best-laid plans threatened to go awry when his teammate Patrick Béon crashed and took Thévenet with him on his way to the prologue, leaving Thévenet with a golf ball-sized swelling on his knee. He then lost 53 seconds on Stage 1A to Molenbeek. ‘The Tour de France wasn’t even in France yet and I’d already blown half the budget, in terms of time,’ he says. ‘I said to myself then that it didn’t look good. In the next few stages, though, I was very vigilant. Merckx won the first time trial very easily, but I’d punctured, then I almost beat him in the second one in Auch. We were about to enter the Pyrenees, and I was less than two and a half minutes down. We were back on schedule.’

Thévenet’s confidence took a jolt when, on Merckx’s command, De Schoenmaecker set a savage pace on the Tourmalet, but by doing so cannibalised his team. Thévenet duly attacked with Zoetemelk on the climb to Pla D’Adet and bit off 49 seconds of Merckx’s overall advantage, despite a puncture 300 metres from the line. Zoetemelk now told the press that Thévenet would win the Tour. Thévenet wasn’t so sure. ‘We hadn’t cracked Merckx, but it was just like we said before the Tour: if we nicked a bit of time from him on every summit finish, we could perhaps do it. But it was Merckx. We were all afraid of him. Still, you dared to dream,’ he says.

Thévenet was less impressive at Super Lioran but knew that the next day’s mountain-top finish on the Puy de Dôme promised to be much more significant. At the start in Aurillac, he peered through the crowds and drizzle at Merckx and tried to detect some outward sign of nerves or weakness. When they rolled out for the start and
towards
the Auvergne volcanoes he glanced across at his legs and wondered what secrets they held within. Theories did the rounds – that Merckx twiddling his allen key and adjusting his saddle was a good sign, or an ominous one, or Barry Hoban’s that when he didn’t talk he meant business – but Thévenet didn’t subscribe to any of them. On the bike, in the mountains, there were no clues as both were as ragged as each other.

It was about substance, not style, and on the spiral staircase up the Puy Thévenet seemed to have more of the former than Merckx. Close to where Ocaña had dropped Merckx four years earlier, Thévenet darted clear with Lucien Van Impe. Van Impe, in turn, then pulled away from him 1,200 metres from home. Thévenet crossed the line 15 seconds behind Van Impe and waited. Merckx had one minute and 32 seconds to save his yellow jersey.

Like he had on the Puy in 1971, Merckx pounded harder as he passed the 200-metre-to-go banner on his right-hand side. He could also sense if not see the finish line or Thévenet being swamped by journalists beyond it. A gentleman in a blue jumper and white racing cap now flashed into his eyeline. The man tried to give him a friendly push, but Merckx was moving too fast and the hand just grazed his back. Before he could blink, he saw another body leaning into the road, this one in a beige coat, another arm and this time a clenched fist. The vision was accompanied by a thud under his ribcage, roughly over his right kidney. He placed his hand instinctively over the point of impact for a few seconds, then grabbed the bottom part of his handlebars and sprinted to save his yellow jersey by 58 seconds.

The pictures taken in the changing room close to the finish line of a bare-chested Merckx clutching his midriff, his face crumpled in pain like at Savona, would go around the world. He still had a hand on his stomach when he emerged minutes later in his Molteni
tracksuit
and went down the mountain with police to identify his aggressor. Outraged fans had already barricaded 55-year-old Nello Breton close to the spot where he had landed the most famous punch of 1975 outside of October’s ‘Thrilla in Manila’ between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. Breton told Merckx and the police that he had been pushed; from the replays, the alibi looked dubious. Months later, Merckx would make a point of attending the court hearing at which Breton was made to pay a one-franc fine and ordered to stay away from cycle races for the next two years.

How badly he had hurt Merckx was tricky to tell. The next day, a rest-day on the Côte d’Azur, the Tour doctor Philippe Miserez examined the race leader and confirmed that his stomach was only bruised, there was no need for an X-ray, but that ‘a rider with a less robust constitution might have abandoned’. Thévenet didn’t know what to think. It seemed to him, and plenty of others, that there was always something wrong with Merckx.

‘I had a lot of time for Eddy,’ he says. ‘Contrary to what people sometimes said, he wasn’t arrogant. He was also very straight: every time I punctured in 1975, he waited. The only issue I had with him was the way he was always complaining about some injury or ailment. It got tiresome, because he’d say that then win anyway. So it became like the boy who cried wolf. We just used to roll our eyes. “I’m hurting here. I’m hurting there…” “Yeah, sure you are, Eddy…”’

Perhaps the best indication to date of Merckx’s vulnerability was that for once he kept his suffering to himself. No, in fact, for a second time, because he had done the same with the cyst that had handicapped him in 1974. Could it just be that, for two years now, Merckx had feared his margin of superiority was no longer such that he could publicise his weaknesses and not get punished?

*

Both men began Stage 15 from Nice to Pra Loup with the firm conviction that this would be ‘
le jour J’ – the
day. The course featured five climbs – the Col de Saint-Martin, the Col de la Couillole, the Col des Champs, the Col d’Allos and the 6.5-kilometre climb to Pra Loup. The 2087-metre Col des Champs had never been climbed by the Tour and had immediately grabbed Maurice De Muer’s attention when the race route was unveiled, so much so that De Muer had sent one of his old Bic riders, Francis Ducreux, on a recce. Ducreux’s message to De Muer, says Thévenet, was ‘Oooh la la, it’s hard, it’s narrow, the surface doesn’t roll – it’s the ideal place to attack.’