Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike

by William Fotheringham

  The following day, the Spaniard made a point of winning A Travers Lausanne, an invitation time trial and road race through the Swiss city. He then teamed up with Leif Mortensen – the amateur world road race champion in 1969 – to take a scintillating win in the Baracchi Trophy two-man time trial, at an average speed of over thirty miles per hour. The season, however, belonged to Merckx: he had taken the Lombardy/world championship double, the Milan–San Remo/Lombardy double – last done in 1951 by Louison Bobet – and an unprecedented season-long ‘Grand Slam’: Milan–San Remo/Tour de France/world championship/Lombardy. Incredibly, the Belgian had won every stage race he started.

  Not surprisingly, however, given the massive interest in the Merckx–Ocaña duel in the Tour de France, and its controversial ending, Jacques Goddet and Félix Levitan were already plotting how to set up the pair’s rematch in 1972. The intention was to load the scales in the Spaniard’s favour. The route was particularly mountainous, with four summit finishes including Mont Ventoux, Mont Revard and the Ballon d’Alsace. Eleven of the twenty stages included mountains of some kind. Most pointedly, however, the race returned to Orcières-Merlette. Generalisations are dangerous, but the Tours of the Merckx years included more mountain-top stage finishes and fewer kilometres of time trialling than in the Hinault era, and certainly the Indurain or Armstrong Tours. Based on what had happened in 1971 – where Merckx was outclimbed by Ocaña in the Alps – the equation was superficially simple. A mountainous Tour would favour not just Ocaña, but also José Manuel Fuente and his group of climbers at the KAS team, who could together give the triple champion a hard time. There was more than a little wishful thinking here, however, as Merckx had gone into the 1971 Tour a little off his best form, and with only a weakened team to support him.

  What was building that winter was a head-to-head between two contrasting characters – Ocaña manically energetic, Merckx more clinical; Merckx self-analytical, Ocaña fuelled by raw emotion, which made him as unpredictable as the Belgian was consistent. The Spaniard was happy to give the press the lurid headlines they loved. Merckx, on the other hand, famously remained withdrawn. That winter, the Belgian took particular care of himself. He had his displaced pelvis treated by an osteopath. He kept away from track racing, which would have involved extra travelling and fatigue, although that in turn meant he did not begin the season in his usual scintillating form.

  His start to the year was disrupted by a quite appalling finish-straight crash at Saint-Etienne during Paris–Nice. It was the heaviest fall of his career after the Derny chute at Blois. A classic sprint pile-up, with bikes in the air, bodies falling heavily at high speed, it left Merckx with a broken vertebra. But it was also where the psychological warfare with Ocaña began in earnest. There was controversy over whether or not the organisers should have applied the rule that states that a rider crashing in the final kilometre is given the same time as the winner. As Merckx was being treated in hospital, Ocaña’s manager, Maurice de Muer, filed a protest, and threatened to withdraw his team unless the forty-two seconds Merckx crossed the line behind Ocaña were deducted from the Belgian’s time.

  Next morning, Ocaña told the television cameras ‘there’s nothing wrong with Merckx’. That didn’t tally with the view of the doctor who had examined him in hospital. His advice was that Merckx should quit the race – ‘It’s as if you have fallen from the third floor of a house’ was his diagnosis – and that was echoed by his team doctor. That, however, was not Merckx’s way: he tested himself by riding flat out behind a team car and believed he felt better on his bike, although he could barely ride out of the saddle. The attacks were immediate as the race climbed the Col de la République straight from the start in Saint-Etienne: Ocaña flew ahead three times but was retrieved. Any doubts over Merckx’s decision to stay in the race were dispelled on the stage to Manosque where he left Ocaña 150 metres from the line to win. He simply could not afford to give even the slightest psychological edge to the Spaniard and the press that supported his rival. ‘Why hide it? The way Ocaña behaves is deeply annoying,’ he said, through a ghost-writer, in his personal account of the year. ‘Firstly because he says aggressive things to the press, and secondly because he takes himself for the head of the peloton. He tells all the riders what to do; he gives orders; he calls back those who have escaped and looks daggers at anyone who looks as if they intend to attack. Who does he take himself for?’ Who indeed?

  A stunning final time trial by Raymond Poulidor left the injured Merckx in second place – by a mere six seconds – when the race reached Nice. Two days later, however, he landed his fifth Milan–San Remo in the space of seven years. He had decided to leave everything to the climb and descent of the Poggio; his team softened up the pack and he got the vital gap on the fifth hairpin going down into San Remo. He was asked, as usual, whether the risks he took going down were ‘insane’, but replied that in professional cycling risk is always there. As he said, he knew the descent perfectly; he was physically fresh and confident and ‘in those circumstances, you gauge it right’.

  After San Remo, it was decided that he would ride the Giro and the Tour. There was pressure to race the Vuelta instead; the organisers were offering Merckx a small fortune to start their race, and those around him, such as his manager, Giorgio Albani, knew that the atmosphere at the Tour would be hostile. Paris–Nice had shown how high emotions were running, and any opportunity would be taken to make The Cannibal feel uncomfortable. Merckx, however, felt that after the previous year’s events it was necessary to give Ocaña the chance to have his revenge. Pulling out of the Tour would have been seen as cowardice, he said.

  Merckx later estimated that it took him two months to get over the Saint-Etienne crash: the cracked vertebra did not show up in X-rays until after Milan–San Remo, but he was never the type to stop racing unless absolutely necessary. The ‘Northern Classics’ – Flanders, Ghent–Wevelgem and Roubaix – did not smile on him, and in the ‘Hell of the North’ he took a spectacular tumble on to his left shoulder, fortunately without aggravating the back injury, although the crash ruined his race. The morning after, his directeur sportif, Bob Lelangue – newly appointed from the start of the year after Driessens had been removed – phoned his house: Merckx was already out on his bike at 8.30, on a two-hundred-kilometre training ride behind the motorbike driven by Guillaume Michiels.

  What followed was special: victory in the Ardennes Weekend for the first time in his career, doubling up in Liège–Bastogne– Liège, held on the Thursday that year (and finishing in the town of Verviers), followed by Flèche Wallonne on the Sunday. There was an additional emotional side to the achievement: only two riders had managed the ‘weekend’ double. One was the Swiss Ferdi Kübler, the other was his boyhood idol Stan Ockers. Merckx was racing comparatively conservatively by the standards he had set, saving his strength until the key moments and using his teammates to soften up the field so that he could choose his time to make moves such as the forty-six-kilometre lone break that won him Liège for the third time. At Flèche, which finished in the Liège suburb of Marcinelle, the team’s work was far less straightforward. This was a tactical race which left the bulk of the favourites in contention in the finale, where a five-rider lead group formed. Merckx attacked late, bridged to the escape which included his teammates Swerts and Van Springel (initially he had thought of leaving them to contest the win, but the temptation to go for the double was too strong).

  With three riders from Molteni in the break against three from Ocaña’s Bic – Roger Rosiers, Leif Mortensen and Alain Santy – Merckx asked Swerts to lead out the sprint, but his teammate misunderstood him and attacked, setting in train a series of countermoves that made the final kilometre virtually impossible to read. In addition, Merckx’s gears jumped to the wrong sprocket three hundred metres out and, rather than risk changing again, he chose to sprint in a gear he would normally consider far too high on this finish, which was uphill, and on cobbles. He still won, of course.

&nb
sp; That completed a spring in which the Belgian had been competing against medical advice but had still pulled in three Classic victories in three contrasting styles. Not only were the opposition raising their game, opposing teams were stating openly that they would combine forces against him. But Merckx was now a mature, confident talent, able to call on reserves of experience as well as strength. Winning is not merely a habit: it can be ‘learned’. Experience and necessity were making him better able to distinguish between spectacular attacks and winning attacks. This would be seen to best advantage in the Giro d’Italia a month later. Once again, the principal opposition would be Spanish, but from another source: José Manuel Fuente and the disparate band of mountain climbers who made up the KAS team.

  Fuente, a child of 1945 like Merckx and Ocaña, was in the line of Bahamontes and Ocaña: mercurial, megalomaniac, a man of extremes. In his native Asturias, his nickname El Tarangu (also that of his father and grandfather) means a man of strong character. He would light up a cigarette before a stage start simply to prove he was not like the other riders: he is one of a handful of cyclists to have been photographed smoking during a race. Fuente was a classic ‘pocket climber’ (as in small enough to put in your pocket) along the lines of Julio Jiménez, Jean Robic, Charly Gaul or, later, Lucien Van Impe and Robert Millar. Tiny, curly-haired, stick-legged, he never looked particularly comfortable on his bike, due to his short arms and bizarrely long legs, one of which had an obscene tangle of varicose veins. He used old-fashioned gear shifters, at the end of his handlebars, a style which had been briefly popular in the mid-sixties. However, he could produce the repeated accelerations in the mountains that are the hallmark of the pure climber. He relied on pedalling at a high cadence whereas an all-rounder such as Merckx used brute strength at a much lower rhythm, shoving the pedals round where Fuente would spin them. It was recorded that Fuente attacked twenty times in one single climb in the 1973 Tour. He had no option: in any stage race, he needed to gain time in the mountains to make up for his losses in the time trial stages. He also lacked Merckx’s consummate descending ability and tended to lose much of what he had gained on one side of a hill when the road went back down on the other. ‘An anarchist,’ Jørgen Leth termed him, determined to spread chaos in every race he rode.

  Sponsored by a soft drinks company, KAS was Spain’s first serious professional team. They were the first to mount campaigns outside their own borders, but reflected the fact that Spanish cycling was still more primitive. Spain’s racers had fallen behind the rest of Europe in the years of the civil war, and were now a generation behind countries such as Italy, France and Belgium. As a result, their teams were less well organised than Merckx’s cohesive squads; the riders themselves were lacking in technical knowledge. KAS was crammed with talented climbers – mountain men such as Francisco Galdós, Miguel María Lasa, Santiago Lazcano and Vicente López Carril – but they never started a race with a plan and, although it might look to the outsider as if on certain days they were ganging up on Merckx, they were racing each other as much as the Belgian.

  ‘Fuente would always attack when you were least expecting it, he didn’t have the calculating spirit that says “I’m going to go for it here”,’ recalled his teammate Txomin Perurena. ‘He just went for it without thinking whether Merckx was in good shape or looking bad. He would just feel like attacking. There was no doubt he was affected by the moon. I can’t remember whether it was when the moon was waxing or waning but he would suddenly flip and it wouldn’t matter whether he had Merckx in front of him or not, he would go haywire.’

  El Tarangu was far less disciplined than his great rival, less able to focus on the task in hand. The tale is told that one night during the Giro he was unable to sleep due to nerves about the next day’s stage, so he simply stayed up all night in his hotel room smoking one cigarette after another. On one occasion, he crossed the line at a stage finish in the Giro with one foot out of the pedal, to show he was capable of winning on one leg. A journalist wrote that this was crude stuff, so Fuente sought him out at a stage finish and punched him.

  The duels between the little Spaniard and Merckx took place from 1972 to 1974, and tended to follow a pattern. The climber and his teammates would all start the Giro in peak form, having come straight from their home Tour. At this time, the Vuelta was held from late April to mid-May. Merckx, on the other hand, tended to start the Giro a little over his best racing weight, a handicap against a mountain specialist who weighed fifty kilos when wet through. To liven things up a little more, the Giro organiser Vincenzo Torriani tended to design routes that would give the Lilliputian Spanish climber every opportunity to ambush Merckx. The 1972 race included short mountainous stages, a finish on the massive Alpine climb of the Stelvio, and one hilltop finish after another. Fuente’s early form told: Merckx dropped two minutes thirty-six seconds on stage four, a brief hill-climb up the Blockhaus, ironically enough the place where he had recorded the first Giro stage win of his career back in 1967. However, a stage with just a twenty-kilometre-run-in before the climb was always going to favour an explosive pure climber, rather than an all-rounder like Merckx, who needed time to warm up.

  There was only one way to defeat Fuente on courses which included so much terrain that favoured him. That was to keep the pressure on, day by day. This tactic at least ensured that when he arrived at the key stages he would not be fresh. In addition, it was always likely that one so inconsistent, relatively inexperienced at stage racing and without a cohesive team, might be caught napping. So it proved: later that week Merckx made a surprise attack on the short stage to Catanzaro in southern Italy and snaffled the pink jersey. With a mountain early on he was expecting an early move from the Spanish and had the Molteni domestiques warm up for fifty kilometres before the start. Fuente attacked but cracked close to the top of the first climb of the day, the romantically named Pass of the Dark Mountain (Valico di Monte Scuro), and Merckx followed up almost alone, accompanied only by Gosta Pettersson of Sweden. Behind, the Spaniard had a little help in the chase from Gimondi’s Salvarani team but the die was cast: Merckx gained four minutes.

  According to the journalist Bruno Raschi, one of those who could remember the days of Fausto Coppi, Merckx’s triumph led to similar scenes of public adulation: ‘I believed I had gone back twenty years and was in the time of Fausto. I saw people kneeling as Merckx went past and beating the ground with both hands, in a gesture which was familiar from the days of the campionissimo.’ In another episode, there was a near-riot at a hotel in Sicily when fans gathered outside and were determined to see the great man; Merckx and his teammates had to leave by the back door. As in the days of Coppi, the tifosi would climb the outside walls of the hotels to get access to the champion’s room.

  After a brief stay in Sicily the caravan flew to Rome – the organisers having insured Merckx for 40,000,000 Belgian francs – to begin the final phase of the race. He gained a further two minutes in a mid-race day of time trialling in Tuscany, two twenty-kilometre events run off over the same course on the same day, one of which he won, one of which went to Swerts. The last week was mountainous, with three finishes at high altitude. On the fourteenth stage to Jafferau in the eastern Alps, Fuente finally managed to isolate Merckx from his teammates and attacked with Francisco Galdós. Merckx expected to lose two minutes, but on the final climb to the finish he came back gradually, in the classic style of the all-rounder pitted against the specialist climber. He caught Fuente in the final kilometre and put forty-seven seconds into him. A similar thing happened on the stage to Livigno three days later, then came an eighty-eight-kilometre stage ending at the top of the Stelvio, like the Blockhaus finish a stage in its brevity made for Fuente. Merckx had stomach trouble and ate virtually nothing before the start, keeping his condition from the race doctor, as he wanted to ensure none of the other riders found out.

  There were echoes of Fausto Coppi’s great ride here in 1953 as Merckx climbed past the snowdrifts, limiting his losses to two minu
tes as Fuente rode to victory in blinding sleet; as at Jafferau, he controlled his pace, with five of Fuente’s KAS teammates around him, but he was unable to fight back at the end as he could not see the kilometre-to-go flag – it had been blown away. It did not matter. The effort was enough to clinch victory in the Giro. It had been a classic race where – apart from the one opportunistic move that sealed Fuente’s fate – he had ridden more defensively than usual. There were two reasons for this: taking on Fuente mano a mano would have been suicidal, but in the back of his mind Merckx probably felt he needed to conserve the maximum amount of energy for the duel with Ocaña in France. It was, wrote the journalist Marc Jeuniau, the victory of a mature rider. ‘Merckx is more experienced, he’s older, he’s wiser. He now has heavy responsibility. All of international cycling is based around him and he is alone in the peloton. He is still furiously in love with winning, bursting with ambition, but more than in the past he knows the difference between what is essential and what is not.’

  Ocaña had not ridden the Giro. Instead, he had won the Dauphiné thanks to an emphatic attack in the mountains of the Chartreuse Massif, and backed it up with a dominant win in the Spanish national championship. He looked as good as in 1971. Merckx, on the other hand, was probably in better form even though he had to sleep with a plank under his mattress to keep his back in order. The consensus coming into the Tour and during the first week was that Ocaña would outclimb Merckx; the Spaniard was prepared to lose up to a minute by the time the race reached the mountains, confident he could regain it. But after seizing the psychological whip hand by winning the prologue, Merckx began looking for openings such as the stage to Saint-Brieuc, with a little hill before the velodrome finish, the team time trial at Merlin Plage and a windy stage across the Vendée where the field split and all the favourites bar Ocaña lost three minutes. Here, it was argued, Ocaña had made a mistake, as, having eliminated all the other threats to Merckx’s hegemony, he became the sole concern for the Belgian. His counter-argument was that if Zoetemelk, Thévenet and Van Impe had been level on time, they would merely have waited for him to soften up Merckx before making a move. But Merckx came out of the opening phase in front, marginally: after a battle with Guimard for stage finishes and bonuses he went into the Pyrenees fifty-one seconds ahead of the Spaniard. It had been a classic plan: wear out the climbers by making the opening flat phase ‘nervous’, high-speed and high-intensity, no time for rest mentally or physically.