As soon as they hit the Aubisque, the first great mountain pass of the Tour, Ocaña began attacking. Merckx held him and they crested the summit together. As they tackled the Soulor, Ocaña punctured, Merckx and the other favourites went ahead and the Spaniard never regained contact. Pushing to the limit on the descent Ocaña pulled the gap down to a mere 150 metres before losing control as he changed direction to avoid some cars parked on a hairpin bend. He crashed, taking with him Van Impe and Thévenet and piling into a wall. At the finish he had lost one minute forty-nine seconds. Ocaña bitterly accused Merckx of taking advantage of his puncture to attack. (There were echoes of this in the dispute between Alberto Contador and Andy Schleck in 2010, when the Spaniard broke away after Schleck unshipped his chain.) Merckx made the point that twelve months earlier it had been Ocaña who had attacked when he punctured in the Alps.
It was meat and drink for the newspapers: one headline read ‘VENGEANCE WILL BE MINE SAYS OCAÑA’. That vengeance did not materialise on the next day at Luchon, where Merckx took the stage and won the yellow jersey from Guimard. After this Jacques Goddet began hedging his bets as to an eventual winner, acknowledging that Merckx was in better form than the previous year. For Merckx there were minor issues like losing his teammate Jos Spruyt to a crash, and falling off himself on a gravelly corner near Montpellier, finishing the stage cut and bruised on a damaged bike, with a back wheel so broken that he had to cut the brake cable. On the Ventoux he simply rode behind Ocaña, the kind of man-marking that he wouldn’t have dreamed of a year or two earlier. Close to the top, as Thévenet zipped away for the win Merckx left Ocaña behind to gain five seconds which were a kind of moral victory in themselves over all the doubters. This was Thévenet’s second Tour stage in two years; in this Tour he was to finish fourth, a foretaste of the duel that was to come between him and Merckx in 1975. Merckx marked Ocaña closely again on the next stage, to Orcières-Merlette – put in the route to titillate the media by acting as a constant reminder of what had happened the previous year – again beating Ocaña for third place behind Van Impe and Agostinho. The Spaniard was frustrated, complaining that he and his Bic team were unable to escape. ‘We are treated like lepers,’ he lamented. That was the point: Merckx had to get him under control, put him under psychological pressure, and keep him there.
The stage to Briançon witnessed another puncture controversy, on the Col de Porte, when Ocaña had to stop on the descent after Merckx had attacked just before the summit. The stage turned into a pursuit race between the two, with Merckx crossing the Izoard alone – in the wheel-marks of Coppi and Bobet – to win the stage by one minute thirty-one seconds from Gimondi, sealing overall victory in the Tour. Ocaña struggled in almost two minutes back and slipped to four minutes forty-three seconds behind overall. He was a sick man having suffered a bout of vomiting overnight. On the next day’s split stage the Spaniard fell to bits, first in the morning in the fifty-one kilometres over the Lautaret and Galibier to Valloire, where he lost two minutes, then in the afternoon to Aix-les-Bains through the Chartreuse where Merckx controlled the head of the race in a nine-man lead group. Ocaña finished five minutes back, coughing up blood because of a lung infection that appeared to have started after he caught cold waiting for his team car when he crashed in the Pyrenees. He quit the race the next morning, his third abandon in four Tours. As ever, he was determined to continue at all costs, and it was not until he was formally forbidden to do so by the Tour’s doctors that he desisted.
Guimard, meanwhile, was destroying his knees and his entire career in a vain attempt to wrestle the green jersey from Merckx. The little Frenchman had tendonitis from using gears that were too big for his small frame and was taking xylocaine injections every two hours to keep him on the road. He eventually quit two days from Paris. However, in a big gesture that captured the hearts of the French, Merckx presented the green jersey to him on the podium. There were those who charged him with being cold-hearted, but gestures such as this indicated that the opposite was true, as those close to him would reiterate. The difficulties both Guimard and Ocaña suffered suggest that they were simply physically incapable of taking on Merckx, while Ocaña clearly could not handle it mentally. There was a pattern here that was seen later with other greats of the Tour such as Hinault, Indurain and Armstrong. Rivals would take the fight to them once, then submit to their physical and psychological superiority and accept that they were going to be second from then on unless an opening occurred – or they would try to fight again, and fall apart in the process.
Victory in Paris, with Gimondi at ten minutes forty-one seconds, gave Merckx his second Giro–Tour double. The historian Jean-Paul Ollivier describes Merckx’s conduct in the battle of 1972 as a ‘masterpiece of clear-headed racing’. It was also a masterpiece of attritional racing: he gained time on Ocaña on all bar four of the fifteen stages that the Spaniard was in the race, ensuring that the psychological pressure never let up. Yet again Ocaña had confirmed the impression of many observers that he was massively talented but terrifyingly fragile, physically and mentally. It was, wrote the French journalist Jacques Augendre, the finest of Merckx’s wins in the Tour, with Guimard pushing him hard and the Belgian looking under pressure in the mountain top finishes from new riders such as Thévenet.
It was also the last Merckx–Ocaña confrontation in the Tour, although the following year’s head-to-head in the Vuelta went decisively the Belgian’s way. In 1973 Merckx opted to miss the Tour de France and the Spaniard – having stopped racing at the end of the 1972 season while his lungs healed – won emphatically, winning six stages and dominating to such an extent that the French press speculated he might even have beaten the Belgian. Merckx himself said that he would struggle if he had to beat Ocaña to win a fifth Tour, but the rematch between The Cannibal and his understudy never happened. As their careers drew to a close, he and Merckx had long buried the hatchet. The two great rivals had found themselves sitting side by side on a plane travelling to Geneva for the A Travers Lausanne race at the end of 1973. It was Ocaña who broke the ice, asking Merckx: ‘Are we going to glare at each other for all our lives?’ A long drinking session and a hangover later, they were firm friends.
In 1974 Ocaña planned to race all three major Tours, but his health got the better of him – it appears he started the Vuelta with a lung infection – and the project was stillborn. Bic terminated his contract, he achieved no more major results and abandoned the 1975 Tour because of an abscess and tendonitis. He then came close to winning the 1976 Vuelta but retired in 1977, after a positive drugs test in that year’s Tour. After retirement, when Ocaña was trying to get his personal venture, a brandy distillery, under way, it was Merckx who helped him find buyers in Belgium. The man who had played a leading role in two of the greatest stages in the history of the Tour came to a tragic end, however: the Spaniard, volatile to the last, committed suicide in 1994 for reasons that remain obscure.
ANNUS MIRABILIS
‘I will never start one again’, Eddy Merckx after beating the Hour Record
TWO VOICES, TWO men nicknamed ‘Professor’, one shared experience twenty years apart. Speaking from his home near Monza, northern Italy, the crystal-clear Lombardian twang of Giorgio Albani belies his eighty-three-years. From the Wirral, Chris Boardman’s more nasal tones are scientific, analytical and passionate. Il professore, former contemporary of Fausto Coppi and direttore sportivo at Molteni, makes one thing very obvious when discussing the Hour Record set by Merckx in 1972. It was largely improvised, and that raised the stakes in the gamble that The Cannibal was taking with his reputation. Boardman comes at Merckx’s record from another angle: in today’s record books, which demand the same conditions as Merckx for what is now called the ‘Athlete’s Hour’, he is down as the man who beat The Cannibal.
The Hour Record is a sadly devalued concept now, after being revised and rejigged to the extent that no star of cycling has taken it on since Boardman in 2000, but in the early 1970s its mystiq
ue and prestige meant it had lost none of its lustre. Fausto Coppi and Jacques Anquetil in particular had helped to forge their reputations by taking up what was, at the time, seen as cycling’s greatest challenge. The task was simple: the cyclist rode alone and unpaced on a velodrome, attempting to cover the greatest possible distance in sixty minutes. It provided an absolute measure of what men could achieve on two wheels with the means available to them at any given time. It was a test of pure physical effort, unadulterated by tactical niceties, the presence of any other cyclists, or variables such as road surfaces and gradients.
This was where the purity of the Hour was to be found. There were no half-measures. There was no chance for compromise or debate. The outcome was either success or failure. And whether it was decided by a single metre either way, that success or failure could not have been more public. A cyclist attempting an hour record was on his own on the velodrome, and his progress could be measured against a schedule. Fall behind the split times, reduce the pressure on the pedals however slightly, and it was virtually impossible to regain the lost distance. If the cyclist went too hard, he risked overreaching himself and blowing up.
Riding an Hour, says Boardman, the athlete is constantly on the edge of collapse. ‘You have three questions going through your mind. How far to go? How hard am I trying? Is the pace sustainable for that distance? If the answer [to the third question] is “yes”, that means you’re not trying hard enough, if it’s “no” it’s too late to do anything about it. You’re looking for the answer “maybe”. It’s that crude.’ Fall or fly, it happened right there, in front of the crowd. There was tradition in the Hour, too, dating back to its foundation by the ‘Father’ of the Tour de France, Henri Desgrange in 1893. Its history included the romance of Fausto Coppi’s wartime attempt as the bombs fell in Milan, the intense battles of the 1930s and late 1950s, when one star after another added a couple of hundred metres at a time. But most importantly it was a simple concept that related to the common, shared experience of cycling, based on this fundamental question: how far can I go?
The record stood at 48.653 kilometres, set on 10 October 1968 by the Dane Ole Ritter, who had been the first man to attempt it at altitude, in Mexico City. A specialist in the Hour, he had no knowledge of the demands of altitude. He had added over half a kilometre to the distance posted by Merckx’s fellow Belgian Ferdinand Bracke a year earlier in Rome. Merckx had had the Hour Record in his sights for several years; together with the Tour de France, it had been an early dream. He had pondered it earlier in his career, but had abandoned the idea after the crash at Blois. In the spring of 1971, when Merckx opted to miss the Giro d’Italia for the first time in five years, he had told his new sponsors, Molteni: at some point before the end of 1972, he would attack Ritter’s record. ‘It was a bargain,’ Albani says, a straight swap for missing the biggest event on the Italian company’s home turf.
The Hour was in Merckx’s mind in the August of 1972 – he told a journalist he was going for it after a criterium at the end of the month – but the final decision was not taken until late September. The idea was simple: finish the season flat out on the road as per usual and hope the form translated on to the track. For once, Merckx took a break at the height of the criterium season, ten days rest, to enable a minor inflammation on his hindquarters to heal. The break worried him – he was afraid his form would evaporate – but it probably ensured that he was relatively fresh going into September. Meanwhile, Ernesto Colnago had constructed him a road machine with the same measurements as his track bike so that there would be less discomfort when he took to the track. At his first outing on the bike, the Giro del Piemonte on 9 September, he attacked sixty kilometres from the finish: the plan not to win, but to practise riding flat out in the same position he would use for the Hour. It was one of his less celebrated victories but the battle lasted for fifty kilometres, with a small chase group – Gimondi, Franco Bitossi, Gianni Motta and Wladimiro Panizza, marked by his teammate Herman Van Springel – a few hundred metres behind. When the four chasers cracked in the final ten kilometres, the margins grew to one minute twenty-six seconds on Gimondi and three others; a staggering ten minutes five seconds on the next group.
There were other indications that Merckx was in his best form: a win at record speed in the Montjuich hill-climb at Barcelona, a dominant first place in the Giro dell’Emilia, where only Fuente’s teammate Santiago Lazcano could stay with him when he made his move fifty kilometres from the finish, and a spectacular solo victory in the Giro di Lombardia on 7 October. The following morning he was racing A Travers Lausanne, where he broke the record for the first stage, a road race uphill through the city, and caught Ocaña, who had started one minute ahead of him, in the time trial which followed. Three days later came the Baracchi Trophy team time trial, where he tested his leg strength with a massive gear – 54×13. Accompanied by Roger Swerts, he pushed his victory tally to fifty for the year.
There was pressure from Molteni for him to attempt the record on the Vigorelli velodrome in Milan. It was partly history, as this was where Coppi, Roger Rivière and Anquetil had set their records, and also a matter of publicity on home soil for the sausage makers. But when Merckx visited in early October the wooden surface was sodden and slow after heavy rain. Instead he opted for the Agustín Melgar outdoor track in Mexico City, a 333-metre velodrome built for the 1968 Olympic Games, where Ritter had set his record that year. Mexico offered the advantage of altitude, where the thin air means less resistance – literally, there are fewer air molecules to have to push the body through.1 However, it raised the issue of racing in an atmosphere with less oxygen to power the muscles. Body performance in hypoxic conditions was then a new, relatively unexplored area. The Mexico Olympic Games had shown that endurance athletes suffered in these conditions, while the messages from the most recent Hour attempts were mixed. Ritter had broken the record by a decent margin, having headed for Mexico in order to take advantage of the publicity around the Olympic Games. In 1969 on the other hand, Merckx’s fellow Belgian Ferdinand Bracke had tried to regain the record from the Dane in Mexico but had had to give up the attempt due to poor adaptation to the hypoxic air.
At the end of September, with the decision over the location of the record yet to be decided, Merckx had undergone physiological tests at the University of Liège, and in Milan by Professor Ceretelli, whose work with the Italian expedition to K2 made him an expert on the body’s potential adaptation to altitude. Ceretelli was, says Albani, suitably impressed. The decision was taken to put Merckx on a hypoxic training programme in between races, and assess his physical reaction using a primitive pulse monitor. This meant training at home using a facemask to replicate the effects of thinner air – he had thirty canisters of air with a reduced oxygen content and trained six times a day on static rollers while breathing in the thin air, with four doctors looking on as he rode. The only glitch came when one of the canisters exploded, injuring one of the doctors and making Merckx believe, for a moment, that his house had blown up. The doctor in charge of the operation, Professor Jean-Marie Petit, said he was 99.9 per cent confident that the record was possible, but that Merckx should have started preparation sooner.
Albani says this: ‘Because of Merckx’s racing calendar, there were no tests, nothing on the track, only the physical exams that we did with Ceretelli.’ In other words, Merckx set off for Mexico with only his personal conviction to guide him. He was adept on a track, having raced on the boards since his teenage years. He believed he could race 49.5 kilometres in the sixty minutes. He was in the form of his life, as his end-of-season races had demonstrated. But there was no hard, scientific evidence to confirm that when he flew out on 21 October. He did, however, have the best bike he and Ernesto Colnago could dream up. As was customary at the time, they had looked for weight reduction in all areas. The machine weighed 5.9 kilos. It had been two hundred hours in the making, and included titanium parts, at a time when this exotic metal was rarely used. Every possible c
omponent – the cranks, the chain, the seatpost, even the handlebars – was drilled full of holes to reduce weight. Ironically in view of the controversy that has dogged modern attempts at the record, Merckx’s bike was a standard one in its shape only.
Once on the ground – after the longest flight Merckx had taken since he rode the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1964 – the issue was timing the record attempt to get the best of the weather. At that time of year the wind tended to rise later in the day. On some days there were tropical deluges. On an outdoor track such as that in Mexico, either was disastrous. The first day’s training was encouraging: the track was fast, and he opted for a higher gear than planned, 52×14 rather than 52×15. The next two days were ruined by rain. One morning, he greeted the journalists who had accompanied him from Belgium by joking that it looked as if they would be celebrating Christmas in Mexico. It was an attempt at humour to disguise his nerves: in his memoirs, he confesses to being ‘terrified’ by the waiting. By day three, 24 October, the track was beginning to dry out, and first thing in the morning of 25 October he decided to go for the record; he breakfasted before seven, and eventually got started at 8.46 a.m.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 19
