Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal (42 page)

‘Today, I look back and I’m glad that my generation and I had Merckx,’ Gimondi says. ‘I’d have won more without him there, earned more, but life isn’t just about money. The respect, the rivalry, the memories…they’re all more valuable. Even three million euros more doesn’t have the same impact on your life as that stuff, some of the battles I had with Eddy.

‘We were friends, but it was a beastly rivalry,’ he goes on. ‘I never actually got depressed but it was like being beaten with a stick, time after time. He could be cruel, Eddy. People in my family would tell you – he never let me win a race. Never. His engine capacity was superior to ours, he could change pace a lot more easily than I could – he could go from a hundred and twenty heartbeats per minute to two hundred in the blink of an eye. He was faster. There was nothing you could do. And on top of it all, there was this great determination, this application, this rigour. He didn’t just have God-given talent. It was that plus his temperament, his character, his determination. Everything he did, he did with amazing rigour. Where did the hunger come from? Some people have cycling in their heart. It’s in your DNA. You can be born here or there, in this family or that family, but that’s the bottom line. The passion burns inside.’

Gimondi’s bitter rival, Gianni Motta, regrets only that, ‘When Merckx was reaching his peak, I was on the way down because of my blasted left leg. I would love to have fought against Eddy at my best.
He
was determined, nasty on the bike, clever and strong. He’d been built to ride a bike.’

Even the one surviving rider who according to the Belgian journalist and broadcaster Marc Uytterhoeven ‘never accepted Merckx’s superiority’, Roger De Vlaeminck, today acknowledges that his was an unwinnable crusade. In 1986, Merckx began a ten-year stint as the coach of the Belgian national team at the World Championships in Colorado Springs, and De Vlaeminck and Merckx found themselves renewing hostilities on what was supposed to be a friendly pre-Worlds trundle with VIPs. At one point, Uytterhoeven found himself riding next to and chatting with De Vlaeminck when all of a sudden The Gypsy broke off mid-sentence to ask whether they couldn’t carry on the conversation a bit later. ‘Look, there’s Merckx, five positions ahead of me. I can’t have that,’ he called over his shoulder to Uytterhoeven as he sped off up the road.

Today, though, De Vlaeminck admits that Merckx was ‘just more talented than me’ and a ‘fabulous athlete’. So fabulous, in fact, that De Vlaeminck chose ‘Eddy’ as the name of his son born in 2000.

Such is De Vlaeminck’s esteem for Merckx, you will no longer even hear him bragging on behalf of his hero Rik Van Looy that Van Looy won every Classic, including Paris–Tours, which eluded Merckx. Merckx and Van Looy themselves still have a complicated relationship, alternating periods of rapprochement with murmurs of the old rancour. Merckx was touched when Van Looy attended his mother’s funeral in 2009 (Merckx’s father, Jules, had died in 1983), and they occasionally bump into and eat together at official functions. Merckx, though, seems the one more inclined to forgive and forget.

Merckx’s son, of course, ended up becoming a successful professional cyclist in his own right. In his teens, Axel had seemed destined for the football career that his father would have pursued, he said, if
he
hadn’t been a cyclist. One day, though, when he was injured, Axel decided that he would rather try cycling. The legend goes that he scrawled, ‘I want to give up football’ in lipstick on a mirror in his parents’ bedroom. The reality was slightly different – he left a letter in the bathroom – but it amounted to the same thing. In a decade-and-a-half spent riding for some of the world’s leading teams, and unfortunately coinciding with the most scandal-laden chapter in cycling history, he won 15 races and an Olympic bronze medal in 2004 in Athens. His best result in the Tour de France was a 10th place finish overall in 1998. Théo Mathy, the old TV journalist and family friend, put these achievements nicely in perspective: ‘When he started racing, kids would fight tooth and nail to beat him in a sprint for eighth place. Frankly, I never thought he’d become a professional. To make it, he must have had an amazing head on his shoulders. What’s amazing is that he accepted the situation. He never knew whether he was getting offers because of who he was or who his father was.’

As of 1996, when King Albert II made his father one of around 300 titled barons in Belgium, Axel, his mother and sister also became part of a noble lineage. Already a ‘Cavaliere’ of the Italian Republic, in December 2011 Eddy Merckx received the even higher honour of ‘
Commandeur de la Légion d’honneur
’ from French president Nicolas Sarkozy at the Palais de l’Élysée in Paris. On receiving his medal, the man who once detested lounges and awards ceremonies smiled boyishly, his mother might have said even ‘commercially’. Who knows, perhaps Eddy Merckx would have made a decent green grocer after all.

epilogue

‘Come on, can we go? Let’s go. Can we?’

Eddy Merckx looks and sounds restless. His fingers are wrapped tightly around his handlebars and carbon dioxide is spewing from his nostrils into the chilly November air. Either side of him, Jos Huysmans, Jos De Schoenmaecker, Roger Rosiers, Herman Van Springel and their bikes stand in perfect alignment, blocking the right-hand lane of the road, but their heads are turned to face each other and their gloved hands act mainly as props to add humour or emphasis to noisy banter. Two or three minutes ago, Merckx was in the line and in the thick of the jokes, but now he positions himself a few paces ahead of them on his own – Roger De Vlaeminck would probably say like the lone striker ahead of a four-man midfield.

‘Can we go yet? Let’s go…’

De Vlaeminck, by the way, is also here, instantly recognisable in a different, dark-blue jersey from the rest. Like a
libero
he lurks slightly behind and apart, and he also looks noticeably younger and leaner than the others, even if it’s them who were up at dawn to ride 40 kilometres, and De Vlaeminck who has just unpacked his bike from his car. A few minutes ago, another big, silver saloon like his pulled into the town square in Erps Kwerps, where 1960s and ’70s
Belgian
cycling royalty is assembled. Walter Godefroot got out, and now moves up the line shaking hands. In September, at his house in Nazareth near Gent, Godefroot explained that he was recovering from a heart operation. When his friends ask now why he’s dressed in a suit, and not lycra, Godefroot points to his throat. ‘I’ve got a bit of a cold. The doctor says best not, after the operation…’

Merckx listens as patiently as he can then turns. ‘OK, come on, we go…’

As he leads one gathering on the road, another small one of Godefroot, a couple of photographers and journalists step out of the cold and into a brasserie overlooking the square. Godefroot takes the seat next to the fireplace, while everyone else huddles their hands around cups of coffee. Fifteen minutes later, a voice announces that ‘they’ – as in the riders – are back and the group again decants outside just in time to see Merckx and Van Springel swinging into the square. The rolling reunion is expected to stop but instead only slows to take instructions from the camera crew filming out of the back of an estate car. No, apparently, they have ridden the lap too fast again, for the second time, and will have to repeat the circuit again for a third.

Today is all about Herman Van Springel and the book documenting his career by the television presenter and journalist Mark Uytterhoeven. In many ways, Van Springel’s memoirs are interchangeable with those of all of the former riders here today – except of course Merckx’s. He would figure in each of them as he has here, a hopeful face and an unwritten script like all the others in a class photograph which years later would be rescued from attics and pinned on walls, but then only because of
him
. The title of Van Springel’s biography,
Herman Van Springel 68
, dates not only his best season but also the moment when life and Merckx began their cruel discrimination.

A man so mild of manner that his every word and action seems like an apology, Van Springel wouldn’t dream of bearing a grudge. Merckx signed him for Molteni in 1971, partly because it was better to have a rider as talented as Van Springel riding with rather than against you, only to then leave him out of the 1972 Tour de France team. That, at least, is assuming Merckx was in charge of or at least had significant influence over selection, which Van Springel did assume, and Merckx denied. The mystery of why Merckx often seemed so loath to take responsibility for fractious decisions was solved when they grew close again in retirement, and a convivial
bonhomme
emerged from the rigid shell of the former cyclist. It turned out that Merckx was and always had been a people pleaser. You try that, though, when you’re also busy being a cannibal.

Having finished their ride, while Merckx, De Vlaeminck and the others convene and reminisce in the other room, Van Springel tries not to dwell on what might have been. This can’t be easy for a man who lost the 1968 Tour de France in a time trial on the final day – ‘my last chance. I knew Merckx was coming’ – but Van Springel has at least had forty years’ practice. ‘It was an amazing generation in Belgium, and we should be happy that we could at least put up some resistance and win a few incredible races ourselves…’ he says.

Still, Van Spingel will admit under duress, it wasn’t easy to live with a man so fixated on constantly feeding his winning addiction, yet seemingly so insensitive to the fact that others, just on the odd occasion, might need the same sort of affirmation. Van Springel now laughs when you ask him about the 1972 GP Mendrisio, but only with time has the memory lost its bitter edge.

‘We were riding off the front in a group of eight, with all the best Italians and Eddy, who of course was my teammate,’ he remembers. ‘I attacked, got away and with two kilometres left was sure I was
going
to win. That was until I looked back and saw Eddy coming on his own. Before I knew it, he was past me and had won the race – yet
another
race. I can remember us getting into the elevator together back at the hotel, just me and him, and me just turning to him and saying, “Eddy, could you not have given me just this one?” He said, “But, Herman, the fans, the organisers…everyone wants me to win”. When I heard that I let out a big sigh. “Yeah, but Eddy,” I said, “everyone
always
wants
you
to win…”’

‘
Avec plaisir
.’

The first words that Eddy Merckx has spoken to me, or at least in my vicinity, since our serendipitous meeting in May midway through an interview with Felice Gimondi, are these.

Merckx has of course declined to collaborate with my project. That is his right, just as it was his right to attempt to win every race that he entered. With time, I have also come to be grateful for his decision, not only because his input might compromise my objectivity, but more because there is an unknowable quality that is central to Merckx, more than to other, apparently less accessible stars. If a biographer who did get to know him, the Frenchman Philippe Brunel, tells me, ‘When I see Merckx, I wish it could be just as another human being and not Eddy Merckx, because he’s a wonderful person to spend time with,’ I realise that even Merckx himself has become crushed, submerged beneath his aura. The flesh-and-blood Eddy Merckx may just have died, been eaten with all the other mortals, the moment that Merckx became Merckx. There came a day, different for everyone, when the palmarès was overtaken by a mystique, and from which there was and never will be any going back.

Nevertheless, this is the closest I will get, the last and only opportunity. Merckx doesn’t know my face, won’t remember my name
and
therefore won’t suspect my motives. As we know, he also has trouble saying ‘No’. As it turns out, after one interview with a TV crew, intercepted between a lounge in the front of the restaurant and the bar where his old colleagues are now drinking to Van Springel, he says, ‘
Avec plaisir
’.

So we turn back into the lounge, find a table, and sit down. Merckx wears a blue, open-neck shirt under a brown suede jacket and black trousers. His hands are folded in his lap and his expression is neutral. The first question is about him ‘ruining’ Van Springel’s career, and is supposed to be light-hearted, but Merckx also light-heartedly interrupts it by protesting that ‘ruin’ is too strong a word. If anyone has reason to curse him and his domination, he’ll say in a minute, it’s Felice Gimondi, who had won the Tour de France, the Giro d’Italia, Paris–Roubaix and Paris–Bruxelles, all before Merckx became Merckx.

He speaks quickly, Eddy Merckx. His eyebrows are almost permanently raised, not in surprise but arched almost like brackets around everything he says, or around everything he is; almost as if to say, ‘I’m telling you this, but you have to remember that I’m Eddy Merckx, and not even I know what that means…’ That, at least, is my impression. It could be just a mannerism.

In 1970, the journalist Odélie Grand likened the experience of interviewing Eddy Merckx to a ‘black-out’. She had the distinct feeling that Merckx’s gaze ‘[erased] you from the picture’. From where I’m sitting now, it’s himself that Merckx at least manages to hide if not efface. His replies are detailed but also instantaneous and shorn of any kind of emphasis, emotion or dramatic intonation. His eyes flit like a metronome back and forth between me and the same empty space on the tile floor.

We talk for ten minutes, all he has before the next journalist and the next round of questions he has heard endless times before. Why
did
you always want to win? ‘It’s not a question of wanting to win. The strongest wins. It’s the law of sport’; Why were you the best? ‘Talent and hard work’. When did you become Merckx? ‘I think at the Giro ’68 everyone realised that I would win the Tour de France the next year…’ Why were you so ruthless? ‘You give gifts at Christmas and birthdays, not at bike races…’

The answers will appear in print or on film but their essence, like Merckx’s, will never be as vividly reflected as on the road where his legacy really resides, a road strewn with the shattered dreams of the men whom, after he’s shaken my hand and said ‘you’re welcome’, he’ll rejoin in the bar for a glass of champagne. They say they don’t mind, that the greatest cyclist ever added lustre to their careers, but who knows what they’ll be thinking in a few minutes’ time, when someone proposes a toast to Herman Van Springel and it’s their turn to clink glasses, look into the eyes and consider the effect on their lives of Baron Edouard Louis Joseph Merckx.