Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (38 page)

Another old friend, Christian Raymond, says that the nickname that his daughter Brigitte had coined years earlier now ‘caught up with Merckx’. ‘Even if he always rejected the nickname, he wanted to be the Cannibal right to the very end,’ Raymond says. ‘He was convinced that the 1975 Tour was just a mishap, a blip, but it wasn’t: it was a sure sign that he was on the decline. I always got on great with Eddy, both during and after his career, but I have to say that he was stupid to carry on after 1975. He’d always told me before that he would give up at age 30, so why didn’t he?’

Hennie Kuiper is no doubt right when he confirms that Merckx’s ‘problem’ had once been the very cornerstone of his success: his pure love of the sport and of winning.

‘He seemed OK from the outside but I think on the inside it was tough for him,’ Kuiper says. ‘Years later I was a directeur sportif for a team which used Eddy Merckx bikes, and I can remember asking him, “Eddy, why did you do so many races?” He said that he just loved riding his bike so much. Which of course was fantastic for the sport. These days the Tour de France is so huge that a rider’s season is judged on that and maybe a couple of Classics. Back then Eddy felt as big a responsibility to perform in a little criterium as he did in the Tour, because people were paying to go and watch him. He was angry when Greg LeMond came along later and only started focusing on the Tour. It wasn’t the riders’ fault, it was just the way sport had turned into a business. If you look at Eddy’s palmarès, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he won Milan–San Remo, which comes at the start of the season, seven times, and the Tour of Lombardy, which comes at the end, only twice. He probably would have won Lombardy seven times
if
he wasn’t so exhausted by his racing when he got to October. If he’d maybe given himself a couple of months’ break in the middle of the season, like riders do now, he perhaps could have won two more Tours de France.’

As far as Merckx was concerned, all hope of extending his and Jacques Anquetil’s record of Tour de France wins to six still wasn’t lost when he set off for the 1977 Grande Boucle. At the start of the Tour, even
People
magazine in the United States was ladelling his ‘comeback Tour’ with hype, and quoted Merckx vowing once again that, ‘When I abdicate my throne, it will be in full glory – I’m not made to be second best.’

A bout of glandular fever had in part mitigated a wretched spring, and he seemed convinced, or at least tried to convince everyone else, that he was starting to rekindle his old sparkle. Aided by a route that barely skimmed the Pyrenees, remarkably, he maintained the illusion for 15 stages and was 25 seconds from Bernard Thévenet’s yellow jersey on the cusp of the only two, truly difficult Alpine stages on the route. But on Stage 16 the next day, under the imposing silhouette of Mont Blanc, Merckx’s limitations were brought abruptly into focus on the Col de la Forclaz. Having sunk out of the top ten of general classification, he then drowned completely on the Col du Glandon 24 hours later. His ascent of Alpe d’Huez was among the fastest in the field, a rally in some ways as gutsy as his ride to Marseille the day after Orcières-Merlette. But it was less the rise of a phoenix than the final, desperate flap of a bird whose wings had been clipped by age and his ceaseless determination to rule the skies.

On returning to their hotel room on the Alpe that afternoon, having himself finished outside the time limit, Merckx’s teammate Patrick Sercu says that, ‘I looked in the mirror, saw my sunken face and decided then and there that it was time to call it a day on the
road.’
Sercu, though, had won three stages and in some ways, at 32, was riding as well as at any time in his career. A year his junior, Merckx was really the rider with nothing left to give. His performance in the Alps had been affected by food poisoning, but surely that wasn’t the only excuse for him finishing 13 minutes behind the leaders on the Alpe. Merckx didn’t care. Sercu remembers, ‘The next morning, while I was packing my bags, Eddy was already saying “Just you wait and see, next year…”’

Sure enough, having claimed all year that this would be his last season, his last Tour, he now called Claudine to inform her that, no, he wanted to come back and leave the Tour with a bang in 1978. ‘Everyone at the Tour thinks that Eddy Merckx has suddenly gone crazy,’ wrote Cesare Diaz, not mincing his words in
La Stampa
in Italy. Nothing of the sort, said the accused: ‘I can’t leave the people, my fans, with a memory as ugly as my Tour this year. Once again, I’ve lost the Tour because of an illness, not through my own fault, against riders who I still believe that I can beat.’

If his sixth place overall in Paris, over 12 minutes behind Thévenet, didn’t pull the wool from his eyes, finishing dead last in the 1977 World Championships in Venezuela perhaps should have. Again, it was admirable that he had kept going, just as there had been lessons about his respect for himself and his audience in an unblemished record of starting and concluding 15 major tours (excluding his disqualification from the ’69 Giro). Nevertheless, it can’t have escaped Merckx that riders born before him, but subjected to different self-inflicted and external pressures, were still competing and winning.

Felice Gimondi was the oldest swinger in town at 36, yet still had kept pace with the youngsters to finish 11th in Venezuela.

‘I lasted a couple more years than him at the highest level, but I never had the workload, either physical or psychological, that he had,’
Gimondi
says. ‘As far as racing was concerned, it was more the
way
he raced than the amount. Whether he was in Belgium, France, Germany or Italy, he took his aura with him, but also the immense pressure on his shoulders. That must have taken its toll. Sometimes I was in awe of that, as well. He had that for ten years. And I think it got him down in a similar way to the effect that he had on me. I think we all have a certain pool of energy and resilience, but there’s only so much ball-breaking you can tolerate. You explode.’

From his first-floor lounge in Izegem in West Flanders, Patrick Sercu can look back today and say that in the end his old friend, teammate and Six-Day partner Eddy Merckx ‘exploded psychologically and not physically’. Merckx signed contracts for no fewer than 14 Six-Day meetings in the winter of 1977 to 1978, perhaps because without Van Bug his arm was too easily twisted. He certainly hadn’t considered that FIAT fully expected him to retire at the end of 1977 and wouldn’t be interested in accommodating Merckx and his teammates in 1978. That, though, was what they told him, and what FIAT president Lorenzo Cesari announced at the Grand Prix des Nations at the start of October. This left Merckx with the monumental task of finding an existing team prepared to absorb him and his entourage or a new backer, all while honouring his track commitments. Within a few weeks, he had lined up the razor manufacturer Wilkinson, the team’s new jerseys had been designed and everything including the riders were in place. Patrick Sercu was with Merckx when the deal was signed at the Six Days of Zürich at the end of November – and vividly remembers hearing the news that Wilkinson had changed their minds on 12 December. Perhaps it would have been better for Merckx at this point if everyone went their separate ways, but the loyalty of men like Bruyère and De Schoenmaecker left him under
the
moral obligation to come up with an alternative. Christmas came and went, Merckx was still searching and racing frantically, and the outlook was still bleak until he attended a Standard Liège–Anderlecht football match in January 1978, then went to dinner with a director of the clothing firm C&A the same evening. Twelve days later, his new C&A-sponsored team was unveiled to the press in Brussels. Merckx’s big objective, he said, was the Tour de France.

Instead of relief, Merckx being Merckx, he now felt a daunting responsibility to repay C&A’s faith. It didn’t matter what anyone said, there was always a reason to keep on training, keep on racing and, in Merckx’s deluded imagination, to keep on winning. He fell ill, again, at the team’s training camp in the south of France, but was soon back on the bike and finishing fifth in the Tour du Haut Var in the hills behind Nice. Merckx was relieved and delighted with the result; suddenly, losing wasn’t a drama but cause for quiet celebration. And if that wasn’t evidence that the Cannibal was nearing or had already sat down to his last supper, the world wouldn’t have to wait much longer.

a spoonful of sugar

‘Did he have some product that others didn’t have access to? That’s the eternal question.’
C
HRISTIAN
R
AYMOND

WITH THE BELLS
about to toll for the greatest career that professional cycling had ever seen, it was natural that in 1977 and early 1978 thoughts were already turning to Merckx’s legacy. At first glance, there appeared to be nothing to debate, only to admire. The statistics said, and had been saying for years, that Merckx was just that: the greatest.

Sadly, however, a Classics campaign unbefitting his name and palmarès wasn’t the only stain added to Merckx’s gilded endowment in the spring of 1977. For the third time in his career, at Flèche Wallonne, he had tested positive for a banned substance.

If twice was a coincidence, three times was starting to look like a pattern. Yes, as on the previous two occasions, at Savona in ’69 and Lombardy in ’73, there were caveats and conspiracy theories; no, as had been the case on those two occasions, the advantage procured cannot have been significant. But the blemishes remained – three asterisks that were part of the Merckx patrimony, like his 500 victories, plus the questions that would now legitimately outlive him about how many of those had been achieved with artificial aid.

On this occasion there at least seemed to be little doubt that Merckx was guilty, as were Freddy Maertens, Walter Godefroot, Michel Pollentier, Willy Tierlinck, Karel Rottiers or Walter Planckaert, all other illustrious victims of what was immediately dubbed the ‘Stimul affair’. For Godefroot and Maertens it was a case of déjà vu; in 1974, the then Flandria teammates had both tested positive for a previously undetectable class of stimulant, piperidines, unaware that the Gent professor Michel Debackere had secretly developed a method of tracing the substances in urine.

In 1977, Godefroot and Maertens were on different teams and a different kind of stimulant, Stimul, of the pemoline family. The drug could be used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy – and heighten alertness and concentration in athletes, while attenuating feelings of fatigue. Again, the same professor, Michel Debackere, the same top-secret research and this time an even weightier catch of major names within a fortnight of each other in 1977, including the biggest fish of all, Eddy Merckx.

To say that Merckx didn’t contest the charge would be inaccurate. At the time he claimed that he had ‘never heard of Stimul’ and ‘no longer believed in dope tests’, despite declining the ‘B’ test to which he was entitled. The idea that he was oblivious to the drug’s existence struck Debackere as implausible for a simple reason: three years earlier, the effects of Stimul had been the subject of Merckx’s brother Michel’s thesis at the end of his degree in medicine at the l’Université Libre de Bruxelles. Not only that but once Merckx had finally admitted his guilt years later, he also suggested that, in his opinion, Debackere had become interested in Stimul and suspicious that Merckx was using it the moment he got wind of Michel’s research. ‘I’m convinced of this,’ Merckx told the journalist Joël Godaert.

To anyone not familiar with how cyclists down the ages had been almost as adept at shirking moral responsibility as pedalling their bikes, it would have come as a surprise to hear the incriminated parties slamming Debackere for his conniving, or bemoaning their misfortune. At the time only Walter Godefroot was honest enough to admit that ‘Ninety per cent of riders take Stimul’, but even that sounded like a way of discharging the blame. Merckx told Godaert, but only two decades later, that ‘the riders who weren’t caught that year were lucky’ and was adamant that Stimul was ‘no magic potion’. Both points probably contained large elements of the truth. Nonetheless, and despite support for the guilty parties from the public and the press, the scandal highlighted the extent to which the riders’ ethical paramaters differed from the ones to which they were supposed to adhere, the ones laid down by the list of banned products.

The start of Merckx’s career had of course coincided with the very first of those dope controls that he claimed by 1977 had lost all credibility. In reality, the war on drugs in cycling had come a long way since the first official tests at the French national championships in July 1965, and the first at a Tour de France and a World Championship the following year. Given what we have already said about how cyclists would gladly discredit any measure they saw as an encroachment on their freedom or popularity, some of their horror stories about those primitive first tests should be treated with caution, but perhaps not blanket distrust. Although himself caught three times between 1967 and 1972, the 1968 Tour winner Jan Janssen admits today that action to combat doping was necessary to ‘stop second-tier riders doing these sensational performances, then the next day finishing half an hour down’. Nonetheless, Janssens maintains, the testing conditions could be alarming. ‘One day you had to piss one way, the next day another way; one day with a doctor, one day without,’ he
says.
‘Also, there was a certain doctor on the Tour de France who everyone had concluded was a pervert! He thought it was great fun to see naked bike riders. Oh yes, he’d be kneeling right down in front of you holding the bottle when you gave the urine sample…’

Merckx never complained about this particular ‘breach’, but he did propose several others to justify his positive test in Savona in 1969. After the uncertified mobile laboratory, the unauthorised B-test, then the possibility of swapped samples, with time Merckx appeared to settle on sabotage as the explanation for what remains the murkiest of his three transgressions. In more than one interview since his retirement, he has blamed but refused to name a particular individual who, Merckx has said, ‘bows his head when I see him’. ‘I know what happened. I know who spiked my water bottle,’ he told the journalist Gianpaolo Ormezzano in 1982. ‘There is someone who, when they see me, has to hide in the next doorway or behind the next corner.’