Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike

by William Fotheringham

  The sequence that best captures the visual essence of Merckx comes from La Course en Tête, where he is seen training on static rollers at his home near Brussels: the sweat drips down his nose and cheeks to gather in a puddle on the floor, the long legs whirl faster and impossibly faster again, the tyres rock back and forth, but the Elvis Presley quiff above the mod sideboards remains pristine. Like Fausto Coppi, Merckx is a style icon, but one for the 1970s: those sideburns and cheekbones, matched with white polo-neck jumpers, sharp suits, wide collars. He is one of the few men who have ever looked good in flares.

  Capturing the essence of such a visual, sporting and human icon poses particular issues for a journalist. Ours is a reductive art: stripping what we are presented with to an immediate bite. The issues have to be explored within a limited window of time. You can’t cover them all. The question I was mulling over all the way to Brussels was the same one I would have asked Senna, Ali or Pele, and which I was lucky enough, later, to be given the opportunity to ask other huge, and in some cases, prolific winners: the jockey Tony McCoy, Sir Chris Hoy, Serge Blanco, Lennox Lewis. What I wanted to know was not how Merckx became the greatest. The question in my mind was why?

  Why the years of total focus? When defeat happened, why was the only solace to be found in victory, the only way that the sheet could be wiped clean? What had inspired in this man a need to win on such an epic scale, confined only by the sheer physical limitation of what one human body could achieve before it finally ran up the white flag? Why, when he had won a Classic such as Milan–San Remo five times, did he still want to win it again? Why, when you have an impregnable lead in the Tour de France, do you make a 140-kilometre solo escape, and add another eight minutes to your margin, as Merckx did at Mourenx in the 1969 Tour? Why, in short, was this man so insatiable?

  With Merckx, it was clear that if his body had not eventually given way, he would have kept winning. Indeed, closer examination of his career suggests that he began to feel his physical limitations as early as the third year of his dominance. As the ride to Avoriaz and its aftermath showed, he was truly unstoppable, to the point of recklessness, in the same way that the true greats of mountaineering seem to ignore the potential consequences of their actions. The self-destruction that marked the end of Merckx’s career was the cycling equivalent of the climber who continues towards the top of Everest or K2 knowing death is not far away. Rational thinking does not come into it.

  I didn’t expect a clear-cut answer from Eddy, but I got the beginnings of one. ‘Passion, only passion’ was the reply to my question, the word repeated like a mantra. ‘At school they asked me what I wanted to do and I said “I want to be a racing cyclist”. They said “but that’s not a job”. I don’t know why it was [I felt like that]. There were no cyclists in my family. It really was just passion. I don’t know how to explain it.’ It was, he said, not merely a question of winning, but of fulfilling what you were given, to the best of your ability.

  Human genius takes many forms, but it is not restricted to art, science or industry. Sport is a hobby to most of the world, but its supreme practitioners are as driven and creative as a Mozart or a Brunel, a Dickens or a Shakespeare. All seem to be possessed by their métier in the same way. The French writer Pierre Chany saw this, producing the perfect riposte for those who criticised Merckx for making cycling predictable: ‘has anyone wondered whether Molière damaged theatre, Bach harmed music, Cézanne was detrimental to painting or Chaplin ruined cinema?’

  What Merckx created in his eight years at the top of cycling was a series of little masterpieces. His escape to Mourenx, the Hour Record, or his attack to win his seventh Milan–San Remo were works of sporting genius. They were not born of brute force and ignorance, but each was the culmination of a lengthy process: countless hours of training, sleepless nights of worry, experience, acquired knowledge. They were not mere stunts to earn prize money. Famously, Merckx never knew what cash might be on offer for any given event. And as the 1975 Tour de France’s denouement showed, he could lose in style. Cycling was about more than merely winning, or earning a good living.

  Merckx is not an expansive man, but he was clearly capable of waxing lyrical in his guttural Bruxellois French about passion. That intrigued me, because other greats of cycling I had met, most notably Bernard Hinault, were almost dismissive about their cycling careers. Others had regrets that seemed to consume them. Others had raced hard and didn’t delve into the whys and wherefores. Merckx had expanded on it elsewhere: ‘It’s the most beautiful thing that there is in the whole world. If nature has given you exceptional ability it would be a shame not to use it. You have to work on what you are given. Otherwise you will have achieved nothing in your life and wasted what you have in you.’ What drove him, he said in another interview, was ‘dreaming [in my view another term for ‘passion’]. It was stronger than me. I was a slave to it. There was no reasoning involved.’

  Passion was Merckx’s word for what drove him, and it provided a perfectly adequate sound-bite answer for a magazine interview, but it didn’t completely get to the heart of the question. Passion is a catch-all term for enthusiasm, drive, motivation. Merckx described it as the most beautiful thing in the world. With that veneration came a sense of his respect, duty and his fear of the guilt that would come were that duty not fulfilled. Merckx told me: ‘As well as being the best, crossing the line in first place, the fact that you are making your living out of your passion is very important. When something is your passion and you can make it into your profession, that is the most beautiful thing anyone can have.’ These are words that could have been spoken by a genius in any field of human endeavour, from Ernest Shackleton to Albert Einstein. Therein lies the eternal fascination with such figures.

  As sports fans and sports writers, we spend our lives watching legends from a distance. We know what they do and how they do it. We rarely meet them. Some of us know the facts and statistics in more detail than may be entirely healthy. We marvel at the little strokes of genius produced by a Dan Carter or a George Best, shake our heads at the insatiable urge of a McCoy, a Michael Schumacher or a Merckx, and perhaps hope that some of it may rub off on our own attempts to be the best we can. But we rarely understand why our idols are so driven.

  For the bulk of the human race, ‘the why’ is the hardest thing to understand when we look at heroes who achieve on the scale of Merckx. That is because, as normal human beings, we are satisfied with what we can get, within certain limits. Most of us keep our lives in proportion. What we strive to comprehend is what drives these people to go beyond the limits of what is physically or psychologically reasonable. These men visit places that are out of reach of 99.9 per cent of the human race. Hence the eternal fascination.

  Perhaps, first time round, I had dismissed the ‘how’ a little too readily. The how and the why are conjoined. The Merckx story is about competition pure and simple. Within cycling, Merckx is one of the few greats where the passion relates solely to two wheels. Coppi had his ‘White Lady’, a sexual intrigue that convulsed his country, and his place in Italian history as an icon of post-war reconstruction. Tom Simpson’s tale was that of a tragically premature death in cycling’s greatest drugs scandal. The story of Lance Armstrong encompasses cancer and controversy; Jacques Anquetil’s drugs and sex as well as five Tour wins. A lack of ‘reason’ is the only side to Merckx, whose story was described by the French writer Philippe Brunel as ‘a vocation fulfilled in exemplary style’.

  The ‘why’ and the ‘how’ are not just about the man in question: they encompass the motivations that drive men to compete, what makes some better than others, and what made one man much better than all the rest. For once, it actually is about the bike.

  PART ONE

  * * *

  THE 1960s

  FATHER AND SON

  HE WAS TOO small to have any chance of winning. That was the feeling among the group of teenage cyclists, maybe fifteen strong, when the little lad attacked as they sped acros
s the old market place in Enghien, a small town south-west of Brussels. The boy was aged sixteen years and four months, a couple of years younger than most of the others, and was riding a smaller gear, pedalling at a furious cadence on his single-speed bike. He would never keep it up. The local youths had put their heads together before the start and had decided that one of them should win; the attacker was not a local, indeed they had no idea who this youngster was in the red jersey on the blue bike. But he looked too small to hang on to the finish line located across the Brussels highway, a few hundred yards down the road, outside the Café Alodie – known as the Pink Café – in Petit-Enghien. Or so they thought.

  The race on 1 October 1961 was just one of seven such events run in Enghien each year by the local cycling club, Pedale Petit-Enghiennoise, and one of thousands of circuit races held across Belgium between March and October. They were usually organised to add a bit of pizzazz to a local fair, or kermis, with signing-on, start and finish at the local café. The Enghien race was over eight laps of a small circuit taking in the town centre, with primes – intermediate prizes – in front of each of the three cafés as the race went past. Kermis circuits, some claim, are specially designed so that the lap time is just long enough for the spectators to pop inside after the bunch has passed, order a round of brown beers, and get outside again to catch the next lap. For this race, a tombola had enabled the cycling club to put up 6000 francs in prize money, with 400 to the winner. The bouquet and cup were handed to the victor by a local girl, Marianne Leyre, daughter of the local police chief who was making sure the race was run safely. She was a friend of the organisers’ two daughters and it just happened to be her turn that day. She was a little put out because her platinum-blonde hair had been poorly dyed chestnut.

  Petit-Enghien was the first of eighty victories that Edouard Merckx – as the brief report in the Courrier d’Escaut newspaper called him – would take as an amateur, the first of a total of 525 wins he would land in more than 1800 races he would start in his career. It was not a particularly auspicious event. He had raced a dozen times since his first outing in July, at Laeken, the location of the bike shop run by the former professional Félicien Vervaecke where he had bought his blue bike. He had abandoned four times, come close to winning in a couple. His studies and his work in his parents’ grocer’s shop left him little time to train: he estimated he had put in two training runs of twenty kilometers, plus the daily trip to and from school. He was felt to be too frail to use the same gear as the others, so he rode a smaller one in order not to put too much strain on his young legs. It put him at a disadvantage.1

  The Merckx family were proud of their boy. Jenny Merckx, Edouard’s mother, took the photograph of him smiling shyly alongside Marianne Leyre, bouquet and cup in his hand. Even then, in spite of his lack of success, young Edouard had two supporters – used in Flemish the English word implies a following more obsessive than in most sports – and so the vegetable merchant and the neighbour who lived above the bookshop across the road were invited for dinner that night. Although the following weekend Edouard Merckx was brought back to reality when he finished eighteenth in his last race of the season, he and his advisers drew confidence from that first victory. And no one would ever consider him ‘too small to win’ again.

  Young Eddy had also been dismissed as too fat. Guillaume Michiels still smiles about that, more than half a century on. In the mid-1950s, Michiels was a professional cyclist who lived a few hundred yards away from the Merckxs’ grocery, up what was then a steep hill but is now a gently sloping lawn in front of a block of flats. His mother helped the Merckx family in the shop, cleaning, cooking items while they manned the counter; they in turn helped her feed her four children with items from the business which was no longer quite good enough to sell, but could still be eaten. Michiels did not have a car – his father had died a few years earlier and the family was short of cash – so occasionally Eddy’s father, Jules Merckx, a cycling fan, would help Guillaume get to races with a lift. On Sundays, when the shop closed at lunchtime, the family would come as well if the kermis was close by. It is likely that these were Eddy Merckx’s first encounters with cycle racing.

  One day, as they stood in the shop door, Eddy said to Guillaume – who was only ten years older than him – ‘moi, je vais faire coureur – I’m going to be a bike racer too.’ Michiels laughs as he remembers it, at his own reaction rather than the youth’s words. ‘I said “le foitie”’ – this is something he cannot translate from Bruxellois dialect, but it relates to corpulence – ‘“in five years you won’t get through that door, Eddy, given how fat you are”.’ Ten, fifteen, twenty years later, they would joke about the exchange as Michiels drove Eddy from race to race, the small plump boy now the greatest cyclist the world had ever seen.

  Even now, Woluwe is a curious mix of suburbia with hints of deep countryside. The villas and semi-detached houses cluster close together on the gentle slope, where the British Army placed an anti-aircraft battery after retaking the Belgian capital in 1944. The little suburb’s centre with its avenue, vast Catholic church and its school is just over the crest of the hill. The great triumphal arch that marks the road to Brussels stands in one direction. Down the other way lies the deep forest that used to surround the Belgian capital. Just a few streets below where the Merckx family made their home above their grocery shop on Place des Bouvreuils, the vast old trees survive in thick knots now broken up with roads, parkland, new housing, motorways and business parks.

  From his eighth-floor flat in Woluwe, Michiels paints a bucolic if hard-working picture of life in the Brussels suburb in the late 1940s and 1950s. The community is only a few kilometres to the south-east of the centre of Brussels, but in those days it had not quite been subsumed into the capital. Where there are now ranks of apartment blocks and houses, there were fields with peasants growing strawberries and beetroot and tending cattle. Children could be sent out to play in perfect safety. It was quite a contrast with what Jules and Jenny had experienced not long before they moved here with their one-year-old son in 1946. The greatest cyclist in the word was brought up in a very green suburb but he had been born in a community that had been ripped to shreds by atrocities of a ferocity and scale that are now barely imaginable.

  Meensel-Kiezegem is a pair of small villages of some five hundred people fifty kilometres south-east of Brussels, in the peaceful rural heart of Flemish Brabant. It amounts to two little huddles of brick-built houses less than a mile apart on the top of a gently rolling hill. There have been many Merckxs in Kiezegem, the smaller of the two hamlets. Along with the name Pittomvils, Merckx is the most common on the stones in the small graveyard next to the brick-built church close to the road junction at the heart of the hamlet. One particular branch of the Merckx family, Rémy, his wife and their children, lived in no. 4 Kerkstraat, right next to the church at the crossroads where the lines of houses converge. When war came and the Germans marched through Belgium, Rémy Merckx’s family, and another landowner, Félix Broos, sided with the occupiers. Gaston Merckx, the third oldest of the sons, was a member of Vlaamse Wacht, a Flemish paramilitary organisation sympathetic to the Nazis.

  By July 1944 the tide had turned in favour of the Allies and the resistance became more confident, more open in its actions. There was the occasional ‘liquidation’ of a collaborator: these were isolated events, not always followed up by the Germans and their local allies, but in Meensel-Kiezegem it was different. On 30 July 1944, as he was walking to the nearby fair at Altenrode, Gaston Merckx was shot dead, a little distance from the village, right at the end of Kerkstraat, where his family lived.

  Reprisals from the German SS and the local paramilitaries were swift and deadly. There were two round-ups, on 1 and 11 August, when most of the male population was gathered in the playing field of the school in Meensel. In total ninety-one people, some from outside the villages, but sixty-three from Meensel and fifteen from Kiezegem, were transported to prisons in Leuven and Brussels where t
hey were tortured before seventy-one of them were taken to Germany, mainly to the concentration camp at Neuengamme, near Hamburg. Only eight returned. The detainees were mainly men: a large proportion of the male inhabitants of Meensel in particular was detained, and deported.

  Just under ten months later, the man who would make the name Merckx a byword for immense achievement, colossal physical and mental courage and an unstinting work ethic was born into this devastated community. His father, Jules, was a distant cousin of Rémy Merckx. Jules had married Eugénie (Jenny) Pittomvils, a farmer’s daughter, on 24 April 1943. Edouard was their first child, born at 29 Tieltstraat on the outskirts of Kiezegem on 17 June 1945. The house is several hundred yards down the hill from the church, the last in the road heading north to the fields and the neighbouring village of Tielt-Winge; the village football pitch lies opposite. The birth was a difficult one; Jenny Merckx was initially assisted by neighbours and a local midwife. When the doctor eventually arrived, he had to use forceps, which left marks on the boy’s forehead. He was christened Edouard Louis Joseph; the name Edouard ran in the family.

  By the time of his birth, peace had been declared in Europe, but that did not leave Meensel-Kiezegem at peace. This was a small community: every face was known, memories were long where even minor events were concerned. The impact of the events of August 1944 was immense and long-lasting. Jules Merckx, father of young Edouard, appears to have been blameless. He is said to have hidden in a septic tank which fortunately had been cleaned out just before the Germans began searching the village. It can be assumed that if he had had any allegiance to Rémy Merckx and that branch of the Merckx family, he would not have concealed himself.