The ‘dogs’ did, however, pass Merckx a bottle from time to time when his teammates were no longer there, but no one was willing to share the pace. The price of three years of dominance was that, when the crisis came, Merckx was made to endure it alone: the physical pain, the mental torment of hearing the time gaps shouted from the team car, knowing with each one that Ocaña was carving out a colossal advantage. Gradually the knowledge must have dawned on him that there was more to this than just the humiliation of 120 kilometres, chasing to no avail: he might well lose the Tour. Briefly, he considered abandoning but, instead, he rode his own time trial, with the gap to Ocaña growing and growing. The stage ended with a long gradual climb up the valley to the little ski station: at the finish line Merckx was eight minutes forty-two seconds back. It was an unimaginably large deficit, but he made a point of winning the sprint for third place ahead of the half-dozen who had been able to hold his wheel in the final kilometre.
‘THE EMPEROR SHOT TO PIECES,’ ran the headline in next morning’s l’Equipe. Luis Ocaña had managed something which was seen only once in the years when Merckx was in his prime. He had crushed the Belgian and he had done it by the kind of gaping margin Merckx himself was accustomed to open. The speed of the stage was so high that seventy-one of the 109 riders in the race were outside the normal time limit, which had to be extended. It was, said the triple Tour winner Louison Bobet, the finest Tour stage he had seen since his retirement in 1961. As for Merckx himself, he said simply that he had wanted to lose with panache, if defeat was the only option. He had seen no point in inciting the others to help, as it was not clear whether they were physically capable of it. Critically, he emerged with his head high, although the Tour seemed lost. There was no petulance, no excuses: he accepted that Ocaña had taken a firm grip on the race and said he didn’t see how the Spaniard could lose now. He was, after all, nearly ten minutes ahead.
There were inevitable rumours that Merckx might quit, but within an hour of the finish he was with his mechanics, fixing up a new bike which had just been delivered from Belgium. He took his teammates out on a brutally hard ride on the rest day, then made his plans for the next morning. The stage looked unthreatening: the route dropped out of the Alps all the way to Marseilles, beginning with the hairpinned descent off the hillside on which Orcières was situated. The stage was 251 kilometres long, starting at 8 a.m., on the grounds that it would take seven hours to complete. After a series of mountain days such ‘stages of transition’ were usually taken at a steady pace as the field recovered. ‘It should be a formality,’ Ocaña told reporters. Merckx had other ideas. Wagtmans, the most daring descender in the Molteni team, was ordered to attack from the second the start flag dropped, taking the first hairpins at maximum speed. Later Ocaña accused him of going off before the race was actually under way, although according to one source the Spaniard was busy doing press interviews and had only just got to the back of the bunch when they arrived at the départ réel. Wagtmans was joined by Merckx and two other teammates, Jos Huysmans and Julien Stevens, and, with a crash holding up the bunch a little, by the time they had flown down the valley and tackled the little climb to Gap the lead was one minute fifty seconds.
What ensued was probably the longest and most dramatic chase the Tour has ever seen. The pursuit match between Merckx and his two teammates – Stevens did not make it past the only climb of the stage – and Ocaña and the rest of the field, lasted all the way to Marseilles. The most hardened experts in the caravan said they had not seen a battle of this intensity for twenty years, since Hugo Koblet’s legendary Tour-winning attack on the stage to Agen. It was not an equal fight. All the leaders who had been trapped in the bunch assisted Ocaña and his Bic riders, particularly Cyrille Guimard and his Mercier-Fagor team, because Guimard had his eyes on gaining points for the green jersey. In the escape, Merckx received a little assistance from three other riders, not in his team, who could sense a possible stage win, but Lucien Aimar (Sonolor), Robert Bouloux (Peugeot) and Desiré Letort from Ocaña’s Bic were all under instructions from their team managers not to contribute. Behind, there was near-disaster for Molteni, as Jos Bruyère punctured in the bunch, and four of the remaining six Molteni riders all waited for him, finishing twenty-two minutes behind at the end of the stage, and coming close to being eliminated.
At one point, sixty-five kilometres from the finish, Ocaña and Bic – with help from another team, the Spaniards of Werner – dragged the bunch to within a minute of the Merckx group, close enough to see the cars behind them. Merckx and company pulled away again, and at the finish the Belgian had gained all of two minutes for 251 kilometres of effort. Those 251 kilometres were covered at 45.351 kilometres per hour, a record speed for a stage at the time, and among the fastest still. The race was ninety minutes ahead of schedule when Luciano Armani outsprinted Merckx by the Vieux Port in front of barriers devoid of crowds. Most of the potential spectators were still at lunch – as was one television journalist, who emerged from his chosen restaurant to see dozens of the Tour field in front of him. He assumed the only way they could have arrived at the finish so soon was by car, so got the idea they had all abandoned the race. Live television slots were missed, and Marseilles’ mayor, Gaston Deferre, was so annoyed at the lack of spectacle – in spite of the fact that the racing on the stage was as dramatic as anything the Tour has ever seen – that he did not want the race back. It would not return to Marseilles for eighteen years.
The escape to Marseilles was ‘pure folly’ in the eyes of Ocaña’s manager, Maurice de Muer, but it was also, probably, the ultimate example of Merckx’s way of racing. The Tour looked as if it was lost, and for many cyclists the instinctive response would have been to accept that Ocaña was the strongest. As Merckx saw it, however, the race was still there to be won. Ocaña’s advantage seemed insurmountable, but he might crack. To that end, he had to be kept on edge, given no respite, no chance to settle into the lead, or to gain any authority within the peloton. Hence the attack into Marseilles: Ocaña was forced to expend energy the day before a time trial at the town of Albi. That would be followed immediately by the Pyrenean stages. By racing all the way to Marseilles, Merckx ensured that Ocaña had not a single second’s respite.
In the Albi time trial, Merckx won and regained eleven seconds. That was a small psychological step forward, but it came amid controversy. He claimed live on Belgian television that the Spaniard had been taking pace behind a television car. Merckx made it clear that he was not accusing the Spaniard of cheating, rather the television car of giving him unfair assistance, but the French company responsible for creating the television images warned that unless he retracted the accusation they would not show him on screen. Ocaña, for his part, was offended. The atmosphere of the race was becoming heated. There had already been claims that the race organisers had acted wrongly in permitting several Spanish cyclists who were outside the time limit at Marseilles to stay in the race – the implication being that any Spaniard was a potential ally for Ocaña. In the case of the time trial, the Merckx camp was wrong. The car had been alongside Ocaña simply because for the first time ever the television pictures were broadcast in colour, and a car rather than a motorbike was needed to carry the camera.
Before entering the Pyrenees, Ocaña was warned by Maurice de Muer that he should avoid overreaching himself. The fear at Bic was that Merckx was trying to rattle him to make him push too hard. Ocaña himself was convinced he would win the Tour. The first Pyrenean stage to the spa town of Luchon via the Cols de Menté and Portillon – where his family had moved before crossing the border to France – was nothing to fear. It began in fine weather. The action was started by Fuente, who was out of the picture overall, and was allowed to open a healthy gap, but behind him Merckx, inevitably, attacked early on. He made his first move on the Col du Portet d’Aspet, the incredibly steep little ascent where the Italian Fabio Casartelli was to die in the 1995 Tour; Ocaña, Zoetemelk and Van Impe all went with the Belgian. They ca
me down off the Portet d’Aspet and on to the Col de Menté, a similarly short, steep climb up over a wooded hilltop and straight down again. It was here, at about 3 p.m., that a huge thunderstorm gathered as they climbed. As the thunder rumbled, Merckx continued his attacks.
The storm broke just before they went over the top and on to the descent. Television footage of the climb is surreal: blurred shots through sheets of rain, with the road barely visible among the torrents of water, thunder echoing around the mountain. The sudden rainstorm, the lack of visibility – it was only possible to see for about five metres – and the intense pace produced carnage on the tight hairpins. The riders tried to stay upright by putting one foot on the tarmac as they cornered, spraying fountains of water into the air. Fuente, who was in front, went right off the road at one point and had to crawl back up the muddy slope on to the tarmac. Riders were puncturing left, right and centre and having to change wheels and, if their cars were elsewhere, they had to put on spare tubulars.
Merckx tackled the descent at the head of his little group with Ocaña, Van Impe and Zoetemelk close behind. He fell on one hairpin, but the true drama happened a few seconds later, on the same left-hander, among a knot of spectators in swimming trunks, brandishing umbrellas. Entering the bend too fast, Ocaña whizzed between a motorbike and a car, clearly out of control. Unable to take the corner, he fell heavily in the gutter. As he was trying to get up out of the torrent of floodwater, Zoetemelk collided with him at full speed. The Dutchman could not avoid the prostrate race leader as his front tyre was nearly flat and his brakes weren’t responding due to the wet. Immediately afterwards, four more riders missed the bend one by one and piled into the pair in their turn. At least two of them walloped Ocaña as he tried to get up and get back on his bike. That left him semi-conscious, severely winded, suffering from shock, possibly hypothermia, and he had bruising to the chest. He sank back into the mire in despair as the adrenaline that had built over the five days of psychological warfare with Merckx subsided from his bruised body. He was flown away in the race helicopter.
In spite of the photographs that show him by the roadside looking stricken, wrapped in a blanket, it transpired that Ocaña had no broken bones and might just have continued in different circumstances. The decision to pull him out of the race was not made by one of the race doctors as neither of them was on the spot, but probably by Goddet, who was right there, and can be seen in the footage trying to help him to his feet. That sounds peculiar, but it was only eleven years since the horrendous crash that had seen Roger Rivière break his back in 1960, and Tom Simpson’s death in 1967 was a recent memory. ‘My fear became panic,’ Ocaña wrote in his autobiography, ‘and I felt I was dying. It was as if my chest was smashed in, but my mental state was simply atrocious.’
That, to Merckx’s vexation, ended the Tour as a contest. The Belgian had fallen off twice himself and hurt his knee but was bitterly disappointed that Ocaña had suddenly been spirited away. ‘I’ve lost the Tour,’ was his conclusion. ‘Ocaña’s crash removes any interest from a possible win. I didn’t win it by fighting for it. We were going to battle it out all the way.’ He was awarded the yellow jersey that evening but refused to put it on when he was presented with it on the podium. He requested that he be permitted to start without the jersey the next day. This gesture was against the rules at the time, but dispensation was granted. He actually contemplated leaving the Tour – ‘I would rather finish second than win in this way,’ he said – but word came from Molteni that he was to continue. Clearly he saw little point in a victory that would have a question mark against it. He wouldn’t forget how this felt. In 1975, suffering from an injury that was far more severe than Ocaña’s, he would continue, as if to accord Bernard Thévenet a victory that could never be in doubt.
The next day’s stage was a hill-climb to the Superbagnères ski resort, won by Fuente (who had also taken the stage to Luchon, for what it was worth). Merckx did pull on the yellow jersey afterwards, and the following day he and his teammates controlled the brace of split stages over four cols to Gourette, and then on to Pau. The next morning he visited Ocaña – who had been released from hospital the day after the accident – at the start in the Spaniard’s home town of Mont-de-Marsan. The race was in the bag, but there were still issues to be resolved. He produced a typically Merckx-esque gesture en route to Bordeaux, where he won from a break in a flat stage that is traditionally a sprint finish. As a bonus, he was able to seal victory in the green points jersey and take his revenge on the French sprinter Cyrille Guimard for the alliance he had formed with Ocaña on the road to Marseilles. Guimard had the jersey as his goal: going into the Bordeaux stage, the Frenchman was only five points behind Merckx in the standings, and thus a threat. So Merckx attacked when Guimard was moving a bottle from one cage to another on his bike. After the finish, the Belgian was twenty-nine points clear, the classification won.
He took the final time trial to Versailles at forty-six kilometres per hour, two minutes thirty seconds ahead of the next riders. Wisely, Ocaña stayed away, although he was invited to attend. ‘Thousands of letters [it was estimated that they weighed a total of eighty kilos] had arrived at my home, full of compassion and warmth, but they suggested rather colder feelings towards Merckx. Their vindictive spirit worried me, and I did not wish to lessen nor spoil the triumph of my fortunate rival.’ It took several weeks before the Spaniard could breathe without pain from the bruising in his chest.
Merckx’s hat-trick of Tours put him level with Louison Bobet. Only Anquetil lay ahead, with five Tour wins. Even so, he was left with the feeling that the Tour win lacked something, because of the contest that had been cut short. According to Antoine Blondin, the 1971 Tour saw the emergence of a new Merckx: ‘a measured and judicious adult’ – dealing with defeat, first actual, and subsequently moral. Speculation over what would have happened was intense, with opinions divided. Jacques Goddet’s view after the race was that Merckx would not have broken Ocaña because he was not a good enough climber, and his showing after Ocaña’s departure proved this, particularly the fact that he was unable to win the mountain time trial the day after the Luchon stage.
‘Ocaña would have won,’ says Jørgen Leth, ‘I’m convinced of that. What he had done up to when he fell was so extraordinary, so convincing. He was successful in his attacks and there was no sign that Merckx would come back. There were more mountains and Ocaña could not be beaten easily on the flat or in the time trials.’ Merckx’s victory was, suggested François Terbéen, a triumph of science over art ‘because the ability to avoid falling seriously is one of the breastplates in the armour of a complete, scientific champion’. Another writer, Olivier Dazat, believes ‘in the Pyrenees, going through the Landes or in the final time trial, Merckx would have overtaken Ocaña. Why? Because he had to.’ Psychologically, Dazat claims, Ocaña needed defeat as a form of self-justification. Perhaps. What is certain is that Merckx needed victory every bit as much, and would have contested the race to the last metre. It remains one of cycling’s great unanswered questions.
ACCIDENTAL ATTACKS OF AN ANARCHIST
LUIS OCAÑA REMAINED OBSESSED with the 1971 Tour. His house in the village of Bretagne-de-Marsan was named Orcières-Merlette, and in it there were three items he valued: an old photograph of his family at communion, a wooden box made by his father who was much loved and sorely missed, and the yellow jersey he won at Orcières. ‘I was wearing it for the Revel–Luchon stage … and it has remained just as it was afterwards. Dried blood in the creases, and the scissor marks where the nurses in the Saint-Gaudens hospital cut through to search the wounds in my back. If I live to be a hundred it will never be far from me.’ He remained convinced that he would have won the Tour and that Merckx would be beaten one day.
After the inconclusive drama of the 1971 Tour, every contest between the Belgian and the Spaniard would refer back to the disputed race. The world championship at Mendrisio in the Swiss-speaking part of Switzerland was Merckx’s fir
st chance to prove a point. The race came seven weeks after the Tour; it was on a hilly circuit and in spite of his stature Merckx wasn’t given undisputed leadership of the Belgian team. Even so, he produced the perfect race: a five-man move going into the final laps included another Belgian, George Pintens, and it was Pintens who helped to set up the race-winning attack on the penultimate lap. Archive footage of the sprint shows Merckx stamping on the pedals as the 250 metres to go banner approaches: Gimondi has no answer, the power absent as he attempts to match the Belgian’s acceleration; he loses by four lengths. Ocaña was nowhere to be seen. So hard had Gimondi gritted his teeth in order to stay with Merckx as he made his move on the Cormano climb, the Italian gave himself a jaw strain that took two weeks to dissipate.
The duel between Ocaña and Merckx in 1971 continued up to the Giro di Lombardia, the last Classic of the season, and one of the few which Merckx had yet to win. Ocaña was enjoying a good end to the season, most notably winning the Grand Prix des Nations time trial, and attacked early on. Merckx responded, and – showing the same tactic that had worked so well in the Tour de France that July – he ended up making his winning move on the descent from the Intelvi Pass, firing into a hairpin flat out, with Jos de Schoenmaecker marking Ocaña a few yards behind. Once the gap opened, he was never seen again, with the Spaniard chasing behind together with Pintens, De Vlaeminck, Zoetemelk and Verbeeck. It was a chase group of incredible quality, which closed to within a minute, then fell apart, with the next rider home three minutes thirty-one seconds behind at the finish. By then Ocaña had quit the race in disgust, claiming that he was the only competitor who would not submit to Merckx. In the press, he addressed his fellow cyclists: ‘you have more to gain by taking on Merckx than competing against me. Where are the anti-Merckx alliances that are announced at the start of every season? So many words, so few deeds. If I had ridden in the Tour as you seem to do, I would never have got rid of Merckx in the way I did. If you keep riding in this way, I wonder what interest there will be in bike races.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 17
