Van Looy, at the same time, was not charitable about his young rival, producing lines such as these: ‘he’s vulnerable, he’s been lucky, I wonder if he’ll bounce back when he is beaten head-to-head, he’s morally fragile and can’t take defeat, half his team left him this year, I wonder why, he’s not an easy guy to get along with, he will never be the greatest, Anquetil made me suffer more, and then I was at my best, when I took over from Van Steenbergen he was only twenty-nine, I wish it was the same with me and Merckx’ (Van Looy was now thirty-two). That last phrase was key: he sounded like an old champion who was unhappy at the arrival of the young pretender. For Van Looy, the rivalry was about more than prestige: at issue was the contract money from the national criterium circuit. It was a huge proportion of a cyclist’s annual income. Van Looy was declining physically but was hugely popular because of his racing style and public image; Merckx gave less to the public but won more.
The eclipse of Van Looy was total now, and that marked the birth of a new hierarchy within cycling. During the late 1950s and through the 1960s, after the decline and death of Fausto Coppi, the top end of professional cycling had settled into a fairly rigid structure, with the arrival of Rik II and Jacques Anquetil at the top of the sport. The Emperor dominated the Classics. Master Jacques ruled the stage races. Around them there was a clique of leaders who formed a little magic circle, the grands coureurs. They creamed off the bulk of the start money in the criteriums and track meetings and didn’t exactly fix the major races as such but did their utmost to ensure that the circle of big winners was kept small. That way, their appearance fees remained high. It wasn’t formal: a rider could break in, and quite a few did, but they had to abide by the unwritten rules and not rock the boat. Everyone at the top benefited, because they were guaranteed a relatively straightforward existence in a super-tough milieu.
Anquetil and Van Looy were in decline when Merckx arrived, but his emergence put an end to their manner of doing things, because he raced in ways that the elite weren’t used to. He would attack many miles from the finish and would defy tactical logic by having the strength to hang on. He could sprint, he could climb, he could win three-week stage races, and he was forming a strong team around him. They simply didn’t know how to respond: the bitterness Van Looy showed was largely because he could see change happening and he could do nothing about it. Merckx could be beaten but it took a bludgeon, or, rather, several bludgeons, rather than the waving of a purse. The only solution was for a team to be present in numbers at the key moment of a race – as the Flandria team were in Paris–Roubaix the week after that Tour of Flanders in 1969. There, they had four men in the front group: Roger and Eric De Vlaeminck, Eric Leman and Godefroot, who attacked three times and got clean away the third time.
Physically, Merckx as champion did not fit the Flandrian mould either. ‘A miner and built like one. Billiard-table legs and a chest like the front of a coal barge’ was one British writer’s description of the average Flandrian. The Flandrians tended to be stocky, gritty, bulldog riders in the style of Walter Godefroot, Rik Van Looy, Frans Verbeeck or Eric Leman, and later on Marc De Meyer and Michel Pollentier. Stylish greyhounds such as Roger De Vlaeminck or Freddy Maertens were the exception rather than the rule.
Merckx was emphatic rather than aesthetic in his style. The Giro d’Italia stage to the Tre Cime di Lavaredo had first revealed to the cycling world the sheer strength of the man who was now its master. Merckx’s way of riding was only partly dependent on pedalling speed and suppleness. Mostly, he relied on pure power, ‘hardly aesthetic but admirable for its intensity and its efficiency’, as one writer observed. Flat out on his bike, Merckx had a style that was unique and lacked the effortless grace that was the hallmark of Anquetil, Coppi or Hugo Koblet, the legendary pedaleur de charme. ‘He wobbles his shoulders, grapples with the bars, stands on the pedals, moves his hips like a madman,’ wrote one journalist. ‘He doesn’t fight like a stylist but like a thug. It’s like the difference between a boxer sparring and a whirling Apache horde.’
That had first been noted when he won his amateur world title back in 1964, when l’Equipe’s correspondent described him ‘moving his head from one side to the other to the rhythm of his pedal strokes …’ although when he rode the break off his wheel it noted he was ‘still nodding at the head but in a more accentuated manner’. ‘He may be a pleasure to watch but he’s not elegant,’ said the Frenchman Albert Bouvet. ‘He’s extremely efficient and he gives an impression of extraordinary power. He sits back in the saddle and gets the entire weight of his body on each pedal as he presses it down. He moves his body from side to side, there is a certain stiffness, a bit of heaviness. It’s all power.’
Watch footage of Merckx racing flat out, be it up a mountain pass or trying to escape the pack in the finale of a Classic, and the left–right movement of the shoulders with each pedal stroke is always there, varying with the effort between mild and extreme, to the point where at times it looks as if he’s going to dive off his bike, particularly when he is attacking on a mountain. It is the same throughout his career, be it the stage victory at the Blockhaus in the 1967 Giro d’Italia, training sessions behind the motorbike of Guillaume Michiels or the mountains of the Giro and Tour in the mid-1970s. At times it is as if he is diving forward over the bike with his arms bent on the brake levers. The mouth is half open beneath the slicked back Elvis Presley hair, the high cheekbones and long sideburns. The effort is there for all to see, and that went down well.
‘When Anquetil made an effort you couldn’t see him making it, even when he was dropping everyone, but with Eddy, you could always see him working on the bike,’ Patrick Sercu told me. ‘You could see the rage on his face, his shoulders moving. That impressed the public as well.’ Merckx differed from the archetypal Flandria champions in one vital respect: he was – just – slender enough to get over a mountain pass with the best climbers. Climbing was an area in which the traditional Flandrian champion such as Van Looy or Van Steenbergen did not excel, hence the rarity of victories by Belgians in the Tour de France, last taken by a Belgian in 1939.
Most importantly of all, Merckx differed from the Flandrians in his focus. There were Flandrians such as Leman who built a career around winning the Tour of Flanders – which he managed three times – and those like Verbeeck who spent an entire career trying to win it and narrowly failing. For Merckx, the Flandrian Classics mattered only in that they were races, prestigious races, but there to be won among a raft of other great events rather than the crowning glory of a season or a career.
Ironically, however, although he never fitted the Flandrian cycling template, and spent all of his career apart from the first and last years in the service of French and Italian sponsors, Merckx would raise his sport to a level never seen before in his home country, precisely because his lack of linguistic identity meant he could attain universal popularity. Asked a week after his first Tour win what he stood for, he said ‘a symbol of unity’. Another Belgian described him as ‘our uncrowned King’.
‘Merckx elevated the status of cycling in Belgium’ believes Walter Godefroot. In this, Merckx’s status as a Bruxellois was critical. ‘His personality meant there was more respect accorded to the sport as a whole, and his victories felt good whether you were Flemish or Walloon. He was invited by the King and his son into the castle because they were supporters of him like everyone else.’ Indeed, the Belgian royal family were so keen on Merckx that you suspect they were hoping some of his lustre would rub off on them. They travelled to see him race, and watched the Giro when they were on holiday in Italy. They were photographed with him informally, at tables strewn with bottles that suggested they had been drinking happily together.
With the royal seal of approval and a cyclist from the capital to admire, cycling in Belgium changed over the Merckx years. It ceased to be seen as a purely working-class Flemish sport and became one with broader appeal, one which the middle classes could watch without the feeling they were l
owering themselves. In France, in contrast, the educated middle classes remained prejudiced against the peasants’ sport for many years, because they could not identify with sons of the soil such as Anquetil and Bernard Thévenet. ‘Here in Belgium we have a third generation of prime ministers who ride bikes,’ says Godefroot. ‘Having the prime minister ride a bike was unthinkable fifty years ago. It’s Merckx who made the sport respectable, universal. There was no discussion of whether he was a Flamand or a Walloon. He was one of us.’ Gripings about language in the Flandrian media apart, Merckx transcended nationalism in a way that made him akin to royalty, and in fact he transcended royalty. He had gained his heroic status through his own efforts rather than through birth. His near-daily appearances at one race or another made him more accessible and better known than the King. It was summed up in the cartoon that depicted him shaking hands with the King, with the caption: who’s this man next to Merckx?
All the Belgian riders – and that meant the Flandrians – raced in Merckx’s shadow henceforth: they were all compared to him, continually. The process started when he quit Rik Van Looy’s Solo team and goes on to this day. When a promising amateur went up into the professional peloton, the same questions would arise. Could he beat Merckx? Was he a possible successor to Merckx? For the established stars, from now on racing centred on Merckx. If he was absent from a race or under the weather, they would have a chance. If he was present and in form or merely motivated, their only option was to base their race around him. They reacted in different ways. Lucien Van Impe opted merely to be the best climber – this was a domain where he knew he could hold his own because it was outside Merckx’s dominion. Herman Van Springel made a speciality of the Bordeaux–Paris Classic, a race that Merckx never entered. Roger De Vlaeminck simply didn’t worry about pushing for the overall win in the Vuelta, Tour de France or Giro after contesting a single Tour with Merckx.
In the 1976 Tour, it was noted that Freddy Maertens was constantly reproached because he did not ride like Merckx. ‘It’s true that I’m not very popular because of Eddy Merckx,’ said Maertens, tipped, like many, as the next Cannibal. ‘Those who like him, and they are numerous, can’t like anyone else. It’s normal. He’s a great champion. Still, I’m used to it.’ When he reached his peak in the mid-1970s, Maertens clearly felt that he had no option but to race like Merckx, attacking alone rather than using his sprint – which was more than good enough to win most races – and pushing himself to feats such as a quartet of Classic wins in 1976, and a victory in the 1977 Tour of Spain with thirteen stage wins along the way. There was massive controversy between Merckx and Maertens at the world championship in Barcelona in 1973, largely because the Flandrian media were discovering a new hero and that hero had to be a rival for Merckx. In the process of attempting to become Merckx’s equal, Maertens burned himself out, psychologically, physically and financially, and the man who acts, occasionally, as guide at the Tour of Flanders museum in Oudenaarde seems like a shadow of a great cycling champion.
SAVONA
THE ITALIAN WRITER Gian-Paolo Ormezzano had always had a soft spot for Eddy Merckx, since the day in March 1966 when his editor at the Torinese newspaper Tuttosport had asked him to write his prediction for Milan–San Remo. He chose Merckx purely on a hunch, having seen him racing the previous week, and because he felt like living dangerously. Ormezzano was also close to Merckx’s manager, Vincenzo Giacotto, and accompanied Faema’s direttore sportivo when he travelled to Brussels to sign the Belgian in September 1967.
That explained why, on 2 June 1969, he found himself being given a flask of Merckx’s urine, with a walk-on part in one of cycling’s greatest whodunits. ‘Pure Agatha Christie,’ he recalls when asked about the episode that is now known as the ‘scandalo di Savona’. It remains one of the great unexplained cycling stories, the centre of claim and counter-claim, one theory after another over the years. But it is more than a mere controversy: the greatest moments of Merckx’s career can be traced back to this one day in the small, dingy resort of Albisola Marina on the Ligurian coast, thirty-five kilometres from Genoa.
As June began, Merckx was in complete control of his own destiny, or so he thought. The year had gone seamlessly with victories in the Tour of the Levant, Paris–Nice and three Classics, each a masterpiece in its own right: Milan–San Remo, the Tour of Flanders and Liège–Bastogne–Liège. The Giro d’Italia of that year had started in Garda on 16 May. Merckx was planning to ride more defensively than the previous year, as he was set to compete in the Tour de France as well, but he began to shake the race up as early as stage three over the Abetone Pass to Montecatini, which he won. He added the next day’s time trial – his hundredth win as a professional in a mere four years – then landed stage seven to Terracina and took the pink race leader’s jersey on stage nine to Potenza. After the stage to San Marino, stage fifteen, he was leading his old rival Gimondi by one minute forty-one seconds. The Giro was not over by any means but with the toughest stages still to come he had a strong chance of repeating his victory of 1968. According to journalists who spoke to him during the rest day at Parma, he was totally confident he would win. As Ormezzano recalls, there was little doubt among any observers that the race would belong to Merckx, and that he would dominate as completely as he had done in the previous year.
However, there were reminders that events might intervene: Merckx came close to crashing in the finish of the stage in Savona when his back wheel was hit by the front wheel of a television camera motorbike as he cornered during the build-up to the sprint. But by then he had won four stages out of sixteen. At 10.15 on the morning of 2 June, in room eleven of the Hotel Excelsior in Albisola Marina, Merckx and his teammate Martin Van Den Bossche were killing time for the last quarter of an hour before setting off for the start of stage seventeen. Merckx was lying on his bed with the pink jersey he would wear that day spread out alongside him; Van Den Bossche was crunching into an apple when the door opened, and the Faema direttore sportivo, Vincenzo Giacotto, entered with the race director, Vincenzo Torriani, a television camera crew and two journalists: the Belgian Théo Mathy and the Italian Bruno Raschi.
The message was brief and devastating: Merckx had been found positive from the previous day’s stage, for the stimulant fencamfamine, which was similar to amphetamine but about half the strength: it was found in a commonly used appetite suppressant called Reactivan, which was available over the counter in pharmacies. Merckx had no right of appeal and must leave the race forthwith. It was a fait accompli to which there was no answer. To complete his humiliation, he was interviewed shortly afterwards by RAI television, with other riders and journalists crowding into his hotel room. The pictures show Merckx in a state of collapse, holding his head in his hands in despair as he lies on the bed. When interviewed, he was in tears, wiping his eyes with a handkerchief, his voice cracking, a little high-pitched, as he said in French. ‘It’s shameful. I don’t know what to say. I am sure I took nothing. I’m sure of it. I don’t understand anything.’ It was the first time a race leader had been found positive and thrown off a major professional Tour.
As the tears flowed in the hotel room, Giacotto drew Ormezzano aside, and passed him the little bottle of urine. The idea was that, perhaps, it might be possible to use the sample to carry out a private, unofficial analysis, which might at least prove that Merckx did not have the substance in his system. The test would have absolutely no legal value – it’s unclear as well how it would have been proven that the urine in the flask even belonged to the Belgian – but in such moments any straw is worth clutching. The analysis was never done: the urine was not used. Ormezzano does not remember what he did with it: he assumes it was thrown away.1
Merckx drove home through the night with his wife Claudine in the knowledge that he was banned for a month, which meant he would not be able to start the Tour de France. He returned, contemplating putting an end to his career. There was speculation that Faema might sack him. The letters of support started flooding
in and moves were begun to have the ban overturned.
The ‘Savona affair’ has to be seen in the context of the time. The anti-doping process – it wasn’t yet sustained enough to call it a campaign – was still in its formative years. It was less than two years since Tom Simpson’s death had led to the re-examination of the way doping was policed, it was less than twelve months since the Tour de Santé of 1968 which had seen the first regular urine tests, and the authorities were still trying to work out what approach was best. The notion that tests should happen at all was still relatively new. The tide had turned in favour of the pro-testing lobby, but such absolute basics as the list of banned substances, the methodology of testing – how often tests should be done, what counter-analyses to apply – and the scale of sanctions were still embryonic. The background issue, that in terms of racing and travelling the riders’ workloads were insanely heavy, remained the same as before Simpson’s death.
In 1968 ten riders had been found positive in the Giro, including some of the biggest stars such as Franco Balmamion, Gimondi and Motta. The scandal implicated the Giro winners of 1962, 1963, 1966 and 1967, while Gimondi’s positive test was most damaging of all because of his status as the heir apparent to Bartali and Coppi. The episode led to Gimondi and Motta being dropped from the azzurri for the 1968 Tour, although Gimondi and Balmamion were subsequently cleared on technical grounds. The substance found in Gimondi’s and Van Schil’s samples was none other than fencamfamine, the suspected source Reactivan, naturally.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 10
