Luis Ocaña was a man for whom the word mercurial seems to have been coined. ‘A volatile rider of undoubted class but uncertain temperament … accident prone and understandably anxious,’ wrote Geoffrey Nicholson of him. As well as crashing frequently, he was also superstitious, hypochondriac and vulnerable to poor weather, the antithesis of the nervous but robust Merckx. ‘He was the cliché of the Spanish nobleman, all pride,’ Jørgen Leth recalls. Ocaña was surprisingly similar in appearance to Merckx, if squarer in the jaw and straighter of eyebrow; from certain angles they could have been taken for brothers. But the Spaniard bore a slightly bitter half-smile on his lips, as if no matter the joy of the moment he was always aware of the tragic undercurrents in his life.
‘Merckx and I were the same age, twenty-four,’ wrote Ocaña, ‘but he had had a happy childhood and adolescence, not marked at all by the same privations that I had suffered, and life continued to smile on him.’ Ocaña was from the village of Viejo in Castile, where his father worked in a textile mill carding wool, but the family had trouble scratching a living in the years after the Spanish civil war. ‘Meat was a luxury, so too our sweets at Christmas,’ wrote Ocaña. They moved several times as his father sought work, ending up in the Landes of south-west France, close to the town of Mont-de-Marsan. There he began racing only at the age of sixteen, because his family could not afford a bike for him (he ‘borrowed’ his first one, without asking the owner). By 1968, after his father’s premature death, he was supporting his wife and child and his mother and four siblings. He was a near neighbour of the legendary rugby player Guy Boniface, to whom he was related by marriage. Ocaña was as much French as Spanish, and might well have had a French professional licence had he not been offered a contract with the Fagor team in 1967. These were all connections that endeared him to the French public and press.
Ocaña could climb almost as well as his fellow Spaniard José Manuel Fuente, the supreme mountain specialist of the early 1970s, but he had more all-round talent. He was a stylish cyclist when in perfect health – which was not as often as it should have been – a supreme time triallist on his day, twice a winner of the Grand Prix des Nations, the longest and toughest time trial on the calendar. He was more talented than the best cyclist Spain had produced until then, Federico Bahamontes. ‘The Eagle of Toledo’ had set the mercurial standard for Spanish cyclists with a series of spectacular mountain victories and dramatic – occasionally petulant – abandons during the 1950s and early 1960s. Both Fuente and Ocaña burned brightly but briefly. Their careers lasted seven and ten years respectively, their retirements were premature and their deaths tragically early, Fuente at fifty from kidney disease, Ocaña taking his own life at forty-nine.
Fuente’s challenge to Merckx would not gain momentum until 1972, but by 1970 Ocaña was already rapidly emerging as a possible rival. He had won the Spanish national championship in 1968 (and had taken the prized jersey to his father, who was bedridden with terminal cancer). He had been narrowly beaten by Roger Pingeon, the 1967 Tour de France winner, at the 1969 Vuelta a España, and had overcome Raymond Poulidor to take the 1969 Midi Libre stage race. In 1970, after picking up the leader’s spot at the French Bic team when Jacques Anquetil retired, he was already being tipped as Merckx’s next big rival even before winning the Vuelta and Dauphiné Libéré (at this point known as the Critérium Dauphiné-Six-Provinces). He had crashed out of the 1969 Tour de France but not until he had attempted to race for two days with his wrist and arm in such a state that he could not get food from his jersey pockets and had to be fed like a baby by his teammates.
He had struggled in the 1970 race, where he fell ill in the Alps, but recovered to win the stage at Saint-Gaudens with Merckx’s Faemino chasing behind him. Ocaña believed that he was one of the few who made a point of trying to avoid passive acceptance of Merckx’s superiority, and he questioned Merckx’s decision to chase him that day. Merckx’s response was that Ocaña had won the Tour of Spain that year and you could not simply let a rider of his calibre have his head. He might also have been repaying the Spaniard for an episode during the opening week where Ocaña attacked, Merckx responded, but then punctured, at which Ocaña promptly attacked again. This was not the kind of incident that would endear him to the Belgian.
Without either of the pair being aware of it, the stage was gradually being set for a confrontation in the Tour de France of 1971 that remains one of the race’s greatest battles. Merckx versus Ocaña in the Tour of 1971 ranks with Muhammad Ali and George Foreman’s Rumble in the Jungle for intensity; but although it was Merckx and Ocaña’s defining encounter, its particular fascination is that there was no satisfactory resolution. During the three years in which they went head-to-head, 1971, 1972 and 1973, Merckx’s campaign against the Spaniard was decisively won by the Belgian. But the pair’s relationship is defined by the 1971 Tour de France, and its inconclusive ending.
Faema was dissolved in the autumn of 1970 after the death of Vincenzo Giacotto from lung cancer during the Tour de France of that year. Merckx and the bulk of his entourage moved to the Molteni squad, a longstanding Italian set-up sponsored by a family-run sausage company based in Arcore, near Milan. Molteni had expanded rapidly since the 1950s and their team had been founded in the early 1960s. In 1970 Molteni had won Milan–San Remo through Michele Dancelli – one of the riders Merckx overcame in the finish sprint of his first victory in the race – but Dancelli had moved on when Merckx and company arrived.
Driessens came along as directeur sportif – for the time being – sharing his duties with Giorgio Albani. The Italian, known as Il Professore, was, like Giacotto, a contemporary of Coppi as a professional and had been a confidant of Eberardo Pavesi, Gino Bartali’s legendary manager at Legnano. Molteni’s budget was substantial and the team had other leaders, notably Van Springel, who had been signed before the team had landed Merckx. They also hired the sprinter Marino Basso, and the blond Dutchman Rinus Wagtmans, who had finished fifth and sixth in the last two Tours de France. It was a far stronger squad than Faema, although the other leaders would not last long at Merckx’s side.
In 1971, Merckx enjoyed a decent enough early spring, winning the Tour of Sardinia with an escape on the last stage in pouring rain that left his adversaries shivering. He added Paris–Nice for the third year running after leading from start to finish, with Ocaña third, and went on to win his fourth Milan–San Remo. This was a fine piece of teamwork in wet conditions: an early ‘selection’ on the Turchino Pass, a further sort-out along the coast when Merckx himself reduced the leaders to seven, including two teammates, Jos Bruyère and Jos Spruyt. After a brief intervention from Gimondi, the Molteni pair engineered the final break on the Poggio and launched their leader.
A solo escape in Het Volk six days later took the victory tally for March to nine, but April was more fraught, in spite of a victory in the Tour of Belgium, in similar snowy conditions to the previous year. Merckx could be beaten when the opposition were there in numbers and worked together to foil him, as happened in the Tour of Flanders. He was not immune to mechanical problems, such as the five punctures that lost him that year’s Paris–Roubaix. There was a certain desperation about the other riders: Merckx noted that when he punctured, they all started racing. When he had ridden back to the field, they would slow up. ‘The fifth time, I felt out of breath,’ he said afterwards.
The build-up to the Ardennes Classics, Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Flèche Wallonne, was not propitious: a spot of stomach trouble – probably picked up during a flying visit to Italy to negotiate with Molteni over whether he should start the Giro – and a boil on the backside. Merckx was not his usual self in Liège but refused to take it into account. It was yet another diabolical ‘Merckx day’ – chilly rain, and snow on the higher parts of the Ardennes – and The Cannibal attacked alone ninety kilometres from the finish in typical style. He caught the early break (closing a six-minute gap in just twenty kilometres) but opted to go past, leaving his teammate Jos Spruyt be
hind, a mistake as it turned out. Victory was apparently in the bag thirty kilometres from the finish, as he had a five-minute lead. Then, however, the seemingly impossible happened and he crumbled, just as the small, pugnacious Belgian Georges Pintens attacked from behind. Merckx’s teammates, led by Bruyère, appear to have let him have a free rein on the mistaken assumption that he would only be racing for second place.
Unlikely as it seems, Merckx did not panic as Pintens closed rapidly on him. He made sure he stayed ahead over the final hill, with Pintens breathing down his neck. He then sat up, ate a little and waited for the other man, who caught him 3.5 kilometres from the finish, after which Merckx glued himself to Pintens’s wheel, then left him trailing in the sprint. All that made Merckx great is there in that win: the aggression, cavalier bordering on foolhardiness; the disregard for tactical niceties, as using Spruyt to make the pace for a few kilometres would have been the conventional and, indeed, the sensible thing to do; the clarity of mind when things went against him; finally, the absolute need to win. And presumably the despair the opposition felt when their nemesis seemed to be on the ropes, but bounced off with the knockout punch. The press loved it.
That year, Merckx opted for two prestigious stage races in France, the Dauphiné Libéré and Midi Libre, rather than returning to the Giro for a fifth time in five years. He won both races – with Ocaña the runner-up in the Dauphiné – but he displayed hints of frailty against the climbers who had come out of the Tour of Spain in peak condition. In the Dauphiné he was left behind briefly on the Alpine Col du Granier, partly because he was experimenting with a raised pedal to make up for the difference in length between his legs, and had altered his position on the bike. In the Midi Libre he complained of aches in his knee, due to referred pain from the attempts to perfect his position. More seriously, he lost one of his main assistants in the mountains, the domestique Jos de Schoenmaecker, who broke a leg in a crash. He ‘massacred’ the bunch on the stage from Béziers to Millau, then came close to abandoning in the final stage to Montpellier, run off in chilly rain.
Ocaña, for his part, felt that Merckx was now beatable. Merckx had spent three years more in professional racing but that seemed less significant now. ‘Luis was getting closer and closer to Merckx in terms of mindset, professionalism, attention to detail, and the constant urge for improvement,’ wrote François Terbéen in Merckx–Ocaña Duel au Sommet. ‘Both were rigorously self-disciplined, and had the same meticulousness where their equipment was concerned, to the point of obsession. Luis knew that, however it might look, however flattering his record might be, success had not come easily to Eddy.’
In La Fabuleuse Histoire du Tour de France, Pierre Chany wrote that an ‘anti-Merckx climate’ was prevalent at the start of the 1971 Tour after his crushing wins in 1969 and 1970. ‘His repeated victories annoy people and people are muttering that a defeat for him would be to the benefit of cycling.’ The race was widely expected to be a walkover for Merckx, so much so that beforehand senior figures within cycling suggested to Jacques Goddet that an extra prize be awarded for ‘first behind Merckx’. That race is now famous for a single day, the stage to Orcières-Merlette in the southern Alps, when Merckx was tested as never before.
The prologue was a team time trial at Mulhouse, won by Molteni at over fifty kilometres per hour with Merckx winning a twenty-second time bonus. He experienced minor hassles, such as the fact that he did not get to begin the Tour in the yellow jersey because the organisers had forgotten to bring it to the start. After the first split stage – the first day’s racing consisted of three stages in a single hectic day taking the riders first to Basle in Switzerland, on to Freiburg in Germany, then back to Mulhouse – Merckx was told he had to give the yellow jersey to Wagtmans, who had finished twentieth in the sprint and therefore was ahead of Merckx on points. Merckx was, not unreasonably, annoyed by the nitpicking and, fifteen minutes after giving up the jersey, he won it back by taking a time bonus at the first intermediate sprint on the second split stage.
The first major sort-out came on the second day. It was instigated by Zoetemelk, Van Impe and Fuente, a hundred kilometres from the finish in Strasbourg on the Col de Firstpan, with Merckx sensing the opportunity. The ‘royal escape’ involved most of the race favourites. The fifteen riders came in more than nine minutes ahead of the bunch, and the yellow jersey and De Vlaeminck fought out a dangerous sprint on the flat cinder track in the Tivoli stadium. Merckx diced with disaster on the final bend as he went around De Vlaeminck on the outside, flat out, but won the sprint. By pushing for the stage win like this, he was yet again going against the conventional wisdom that an overall contender should save himself for the key moments.
By the end of the first week the other fourteen riders who he had led into Strasbourg were still all within a minute of him. That led to the inevitable murmurings: was he quite as fresh as usual? The answer came on the first mountain-top finish at the Puy-de-Dôme, the extinct volcano in the Massif Central that had been the scene of the dramatic showdown between Poulidor and Anquetil in the 1964 Tour. Merckx attempted to get away early in the stage, but then struggled to contain an attack from Bernard Thévenet on the lower slopes of the mountain, five kilometres from the finish. Both Ocaña and Zoetemelk sensed an opportunity and made their escape. Merckx had lost fifteen seconds, although not the jersey. It was a major event. ‘Thévenet and I had ripped up the notion that no one dared attack the ogre,’ wrote Ocaña. The ‘ogre’ admitted that he had sprinted ‘harder than ever before’ to limit his losses: expending that kind of effort takes its toll in a long stage race such as the Tour.
For Merckx worse came the next day, as the race crossed the Chartreuse massif en route to Grenoble. It began when he punctured his front tyre at high speed close to the foot of the descent from the Col du Cucheron, thirty-two kilometres from the finish. By this time, a sudden acceleration by Ocaña’s Bic team had reduced the leaders to just five, and left Merckx isolated from his Molteni teammates. The race leader kept control, however, and stayed upright, partly by pushing against the barrier that ran alongside the road. Because the team cars were a little way back, the wheel change was slow and he lost about a minute. Ocaña had attacked ‘like a bullet out of a gun’ the second he noticed Merckx had punctured, and he was joined by the other leaders: the Swede Gosta Petterson, Zoetemelk and Thévenet. The descent from the Cucheron was followed by another climb, the Col de Porte, which Merckx began with a forty-second deficit. Assisted by Agostinho and a trio of Spanish climbers who had been dropped on the Cucheron he made his way up through the convoy of team cars to approach the four leaders. At its closest, the gap was all of about eighty metres, but Goddet, regulating affairs from the race control vehicle, had made the line of cars wait behind a rider who had just been dropped. This barrage, as it is known, prevents that rider, or any other, from using the convoy’s slipstream to close the gap. For Merckx that eighty metres might as well have been eight thousand.
Merckx could not bridge the gap and crumbled. He was whistled as he finished in Grenoble, one minute twenty-eight seconds behind the four, with Thévenet taking the stage and Zoetemelk the jersey. It was the first time in the Tour that he had lost the jersey to a rival of stature. ‘NOTHING CAN BE THE SAME AS IT WAS,’ read the headline in l’Equipe, where Goddet wrote, not without a certain amount of wishful thinking: ‘Has the Merckx era begun slipping away to its conclusion? The least we can say is that it has entered a new period. The glorious bird has lost a little plumage but he will remain the eagle of cycling for some time yet. However, he is no longer in a class of his own.’ Blondin noted, somewhat maliciously, that at this point the previous year Merckx had been able to afford the luxury of adjusting his saddle as he opened a massive gap on his floundering rivals. The message was clear: things had changed.
Next day came the stage to the Orcières-Merlette ski station, on the southern edge of the Alps. Merckx had hardly slept that night and acknowledged that for the moment he was merely trying
to limit his losses. Maurice de Muer, manager at Ocaña’s Bic team, sensed an opportunity. He knew that after just twelve kilometres the race went up the Côte de Laffrey, a relatively short climb but as steep as the side of a house. It would be difficult for a larger rider such as Merckx and particularly tough in this instance because there was barely any time to warm up beforehand. De Muer recognised that the Laffrey would be hard enough to scatter Merckx’s teammates and with a further 120 kilometres to the finish any gap opened on the climb could be extended further.
‘We set the whole team to work, and the race was hard from the off, because we had seen the day before that Merckx wasn’t in his best form,’ he said. At the foot of the climb, the Hoover rider Joaquim Agostinho attacked first and Ocaña, Van Impe, Pettersson and Zoetemelk reacted. Initially, Merckx was not even able to stay in the second group, as he was suffering from stomach pains and indigestion. By the summit he was two minutes behind Ocaña, who then set a pace that was too much for the quartet who had remained on his wheel. One by one, they dropped back and the gap widened, with Merckx forced to chase alone, the whole lead group sitting on his wheel. Of his Molteni team, only Jos Huysmans and Wagtmans had been able to stay anywhere near him, but only the former was suited to this kind of terrain. While Van Impe stayed ahead, and raced for second place, Merckx rode with ‘a pack of dogs attached to his heels’, as Goddet wrote, most notably five of Ocaña’s Bic teammates, and Thévenet in his chequered Peugeot jersey.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 16
