The impromptu nature of the Merckx record is shown in the debate over the schedule he was intending to ride, which remained in the air until late on. The original schedule would have seen him overcome Ritter’s record by a margin of about 240 metres, according to Albani, but according to the manager, ‘I advised him to attempt the ten kilometre and twenty kilometre records, because of his lack of references. The plan was that if he got past twenty kilometres and he had the form to go on and beat the Hour, he could continue; we could reduce his speed very slightly. I didn’t want him to risk embarrassment. We agreed this. Then overnight, the journalist René Jacobs, who was in charge of the schedule, had to rewrite the whole thing.’ The revised schedule was for 49.2 kilometres, far more ambitious than the first one.
Saludo Eddy Merckx said the electric scoreboard; he was greeted by trumpets as he entered the stadium – two thousand people were there, having heard a last-minute alert that had been put out on national radio. The spectators included King Leopold of Belgium, and princesses Liliane, Esmeralda and Marie-Christine. At the end of each lap, Jacobs rang the bell that indicated whether Merckx was ahead of schedule or not, while Albani ‘walked the line’, stepping forwards in the same direction Merckx was riding as he gained on the schedule, back again if he slipped. ‘I was walking forwards three to four metres per lap,’ recalls Albani. ‘He was constantly ahead of schedule.’
The fast start that Merckx made to his sixty minutes is the stuff of legend. It was probably always going to happen, but a change to a faster schedule made it more likely. So, too, did the decision to go for the two intermediate records. Each would have acted as a ‘carrot’, with his ultra-competitive nature doing the rest. From a standing start he went through the first kilometre in 1 minute 9.97 seconds – back then a time good enough to win a world championship medal at the discipline – and a colossal five seconds faster than Ritter. The second kilometre was even faster: 1 minute 9.84 seconds. He covered five kilometres in 5 minutes 55.6 seconds – in the world pursuit championship over the distance less than six minutes was respectable. By ten kilometres he was twenty-eight seconds faster than Ritter (11 minutes 53.2 seconds to 12–21.76), by twenty kilometres, the margin over the Dane was thirty-five seconds (24–6.8 to 24–42.19).
It looked more than promising: it was devastating. It could, however, have proved his undoing. Peter Keen, who trained Boardman to his three Hour records between 1993 and 2000, recalls that his protégé set the same time as Merckx for the first kilometre but that was en route to the best Hour ever: 56.375 kilometres, almost eight kilometres further than Merckx. Boardman concurs: ‘It’s mortal for the record, doing the time Merckx did. At altitude you never get over it.’ Boardman compares riding the Hour to bailing out a boat with a hole in it: the body is constantly producing lactic acid from the effort of turning the pedals, but there is only a certain rate at which the body can deal with it. ‘It’s like a balance between what’s coming in, and the speed you can get it out. If you push the boat quicker, more water pours in but you can’t bail it faster. If you overcook it even slightly it can take a significant time to recover. You have to ride below optimal speed for a considerable time.’
Keen, who is now Performance Director at UK Sport, says that Boardman’s ride was perfectly paced for his distance and agrees that Merckx’s start was simply way too fast. The aim in an hour, he says, should be to maintain a constant, sustainable speed for the full sixty minutes. ‘Not only did Merckx massively overcook the starting effort, hitting a speed getting on for six kilometres per hour faster than he could sustain, he did it at altitude where as a consequence you pay a much bigger price for what some still call an oxygen debt. The torture he must have experienced for most of the rest of the hour as a result of this error must have been considerable. If I had been track-side with him I’d have pulled him up after thirty seconds, got him on the rollers for thirty minutes and gone again – it was that big a mistake!’
The crisis came, recalls Albani, between thirty-five and forty minutes, although the figures show that Merckx’s progress against Ritter slowed most dramatically between forty-two and forty-eight minutes, when he put in his slowest five-kilometre split. ‘It was ugly. I had been walking forward, but I went from a lap and three-quarters ahead, to just a lap ahead. Merckx said “I’m dead”, I told him to calm down, and said “If you’re travelling at forty-nine and a half kilometres per hour you must be alive.’ Inspection of Merckx’s kilometre times shows a dramatic slowing: after the storming first two kilometres the next eight are covered at between 1–11.28 and 1–12.15 (in other words, slower than that first kilometre, which included a standing start!). After ten kilometres the kilometre times slow a second time: for the next thirty-six minutes Merckx is generally hitting the one minute thirteen seconds mark. He speeds up in the final twelve minutes, once forty kilometres have been covered, running below one minute thirteen seconds for seven of his last nine kilometres. The last full kilometre is covered in one minute 11.76; the final complete lap – the 148th – in twenty-four seconds. Merckx’s memoirs record, ‘After a short period of stabilisation compared to my schedule, I began to gain again and finished very strongly’. Albani says, ‘the last five kilometres were the best of the lot, he finished in crescendo’. He covered the last two hundred metres in thirteen seconds and broke the record by 788 metres, the biggest margin since 1912. His distance of 49.431 kilometres was seen as ‘unbeatable’ for eleven years.
The Merckx Hour was, wrote the journalist Marc Jeuniau, the most intense experience in his twenty-five years covering sport. Describing the scene while Merckx was riding, he wrote, ‘the men intimately concerned with the champion’s performance were going through atrocious moments that they will never forget. The face of Jean Van Buggenhout was crimson. Old Piero Molteni was crying. Colnago, who was ready to run over if Merckx had a puncture, looked weighed down by the spare bike on his shoulders. Lucien Acou, the least confident of all of them, had trouble hiding his nerves, and, alone in a corner of the track, Doctor Cavalli was following Merckx with haggard eyes.’ Jeuniau underlined the risk that Merckx was running: ‘If he had fallen short, the public would have been quick to point out that he had failed where Coppi and Anquetil had succeeded. All his previous prestigious victories would have been pushed into the background and only the defeat would have stuck in people’s minds.’
After two laps’ warm-down, Merckx had to be carried away. His grimace as he gulped down a bottle of mineral water in the seconds after coming to a halt remains a defining image. ‘The pain was very, very, very significant’, was how Merckx put it. ‘There is no comparison with a time trial [on the road]. There you can change gear, change your cadence, relax even if it is only for a few instants’ respite. The Hour is a permanent, total, intense effort, which can’t be compared to anything else.’ Boardman is in a unique position to compare the two, being the only man since Merckx to attempt the record on both a ‘modern’ bike, with stretched-out ‘triathlon’ handlebars, and on one using a drop-handlebar position similar to that of Merckx. ‘I watched footage of Merckx being carried off afterwards and was laughing a bit, I thought it was showmanship, but I couldn’t walk for four days after the 2000 Hour. There is something about that position that does massive damage to you. It’s to do with riding on the drops.’ The difference, says Boardman, is that on drop handlebars the muscles of the arm, shoulders and back are supporting the body, whereas on stretched-out bars such as he used in 1993 and 1996, much of the strain is taken by the bones of the forearms. As for Albani, his final memory is this: ‘Merckx told me never to mention the Hour Record again.’
Merckx’s change to a more ambitious schedule paid off in one sense. In early November 1974 Ritter returned to Mexico for a wholehearted campaign to regain his Hour. At his second attempt he managed 48.879 kilometres, close enough to suggest to Albani that if Merckx had stuck to his original timings, the record might well have fallen just a couple of years after Merckx had taken it. Ritter himself felt
that he might have surpassed Merckx if he had not come under pressure from media and sponsors to attack the record sooner than he wanted. After that, the Merckx Hour was considered ‘unbeatable’, partly because of the massive distance that the Belgian had added, partly because of Ritter’s conspicuous failure to beat him, but mainly because of Merckx’s physical state when he got off his bike. If the record could do this to the greatest cyclist ever, who could possibly beat it? In the end, eleven and a half years later, it fell to Francesco Moser to take the record into a new dimension, but only after a comprehensive rethink of all the aerodynamic aids on the market, radical innovation in training and equipment, plus a special membrane laid on the track to make it super-smooth. And blood doping, which was not banned at the time, Moser confessed later.
Now, the Hour has changed completely. Like Merckx, Moser was considered to have put it on the shelf. The 1990s, saw its last flurry, with seven attempts in four years, prompted by the innovation of the Scot Graeme Obree and the science of Boardman and Keen. Indurain was the last Tour de France winner to attack it, in 1994, while Boardman achieved the definitive record, 56.375 kilometres, two years later. After that, cycling’s governing body muddied the waters when they decided to create two records. One with any scientific aids available such as those attempts by Moser, Boardman et al. was dubbed the Best Hour Performance. For the other – the Athlete’s Hour – the cyclist had to use a bike similar to Merckx’s, which is the record Boardman broke in 2000.
This rewriting of the sport’s history means that, whereas in Merckx’s day it was clear that the Hour belonged to the fastest man under the conditions prevailing at the time, now it is no longer clear what it means. Every attempt post-Merckx has been devalued. Merckx himself seemed unhappy with it when I asked him for his thoughts. ‘Riders must be able to beat the Hour under the same conditions as their predecessors. I went to Mexico because Ritter did, and there was an advantage. It’s as if they had said [afterwards] I couldn’t go to Mexico. It’s hardly another planet.’
Whatever the debates since, Albani believes that Merckx’s record closed an era, as ‘the last one to be done by craftsmen’, whatever the advantages and the flaws that that may imply. Boardman has a more dispassionate view, having beaten Merckx’s record on a similar bike in 2000, by only a few metres. ‘Some of what they did was advanced, some was very crude. You look at Merckx riding a treadmill with an oxygen mask at 16 per cent, hypoxic training, and that’s quite thought through, pretty scientific. Despite the way he actually rode it, I’m always impressed with how far he went. Doing an Hour is about bringing everything you have together and seeing where it gets you. Merckx’s nerves got the better of him and he attacked it full on. But if you look at the disadvantages, it’s still as fast as we did with all the knowledge that we had. It shows what an athlete he was.’
In the view of Albani, the vagaries of the Mexican weather prevented Merckx from going even further. The window of time available was small, and the demands of altitude meant that the record had either to be tackled soon after arrival, before his health began to decline, or after a month’s adaptation. Ritter, he points out, spent a month in Mexico during his Hour attempt. ‘The plan was to do it on the third day, but it rained, so we put it back to the fifth.’ By then, he believes, Merckx’s form had begun to decline – Merckx himself said afterwards that he was only having an ‘average’ day – and that in turn meant when The Cannibal eventually did get on the track, he was nervous, knowing that this was his only chance. ‘I’m convinced that if he had gone for it on the third day, he would have beaten fifty kilometres,’ says the Italian. Keen agrees that Merckx might have beaten fifty kilometres, but for a different reason. ‘Had he opened with a one minute thirteen seconds first kilo he would have comfortably surpassed fifty kilometres per hour and probably not reflected on the experience in the way he did.’
Merckx’s willingness to chance his arm should be seen in a wider perspective. Of the fuoriclasse who have attempted the Hour since the war, only Miguel Indurain went for the record at the height of his power; like Merckx, he did so at a time when the record was in a state of flux, although by then it was clear that it was the province of specialists. Anquetil and Coppi attacked it at the start of their careers (Anquetil did try a second time, taking the record in 1967, but the distance was not validated because he did not undergo a drugs test). The crucial point is that Bernard Hinault, Lance Armstrong, Louison Bobet and Greg LeMond never even tried. There were good reasons for this: firstly, the risk of damaging their reputations if they failed was too great, secondly, the logistical demands in terms of planning, cost and training. This underlines that the Hour was the biggest gamble of Merckx’s career, perhaps one of the biggest gambles taken by any great of the sport. He could not afford to fail. The view of his wife Claudine was that he simply had no option but to beat it. He either went further than Ritter or fell on his face.
Finally, consider what came before. When he travelled to Mexico to tackle Ritter’s record, Merckx had taken a second Giro d’Italia–Tour de France double, with ten stage wins along the way, and pushed his record in the Tour to four consecutive victories. He had taken a fifth win in Milan–San Remo, then added the Ardennes Weekend of Liège–Bastogne–Liège and Flèche Wallonne. He had achieved all that while wearing the rainbow jersey of world champion (figuratively if not literally while he had the maglia rosa or maillot jaune on his back in the Giro and Tour); the rainbow stripes have never been honoured in such complete style. Although he had not defended his world title, he had added a second consecutive victory in the Giro di Lombardia and had also laid to rest the spectre of Ocaña’s near win in the 1971 Tour de France with a comprehensive defeat of the Spaniard.
The Hour marked the culmination of what was probably the greatest season of racing any cyclist has ever produced, or ever will. Most tellingly of all, on the road at least, fifty victories notwithstanding, that last race of 1972 ended with the sight of Merckx throwing his bike down in disgust after the finish of the season-closing event at Putte-Kapellen, after Gustav Van Reysbroucke had outsprinted him for what would have been win number fifty-one. That image underlined that, no matter how much The Cannibal won, he remained insatiable. Eight days later the Hour made it clear that, by this stage of his career, Merckx’s only true opponents were himself, and Time.
1 There is some debate about how much of an advantage is actually gained by riding at altitude, because, although the air is thinner, this is counteracted by the fact that the air tends to be colder, which slows things up to some degree. This was not known in the early 1970s.
LA COURSE EN TÊTE
‘You become a superstar if, having won, you are never completely satisfied’. Fausto Coppi
BOB ADDY, A BRITISH professional of modest reputation, was racing an obscure Belgian kermis race as part of his build-up to a world championship in the early 1970s. He attacked early on and built a decent lead. In the peloton behind him, Eddy Merckx learned that the advantage was two and a half minutes; he went to another British cyclist, Barry Hoban, and asked ‘what is the Englishman up to?’ ‘He’s just training for the world’s’, was Hoban’s answer. In other words, Hoban told Merckx that Addy wasn’t trying to win, he was merely putting in a big effort to test himself. ‘The lead is too much,’ said Merckx and put himself on the front of the bunch. ‘Suddenly the lead went from two and a half minutes to nothing,’ Addy would relate, before pointing out that ‘it was only a little race.’
Addy’s training event might have been ‘only a little race’ in the great scheme of a calendar including Classics and Tours, but on its given day it mattered to Merckx. This kermis event in Nowhere-in-Particular was not a race where he had anything to prove. This was not the toughest mountain stage of the most important race on the calendar six weeks after an unjust doping ban. It was not Mourenx. Above all the victories, the massive winning margins, this is still one of the things that puts Merckx in a different category from all the other greats of cyc
ling such as Bernard Hinault, Fausto Coppi, Jacques Anquetil, Rik Van Looy. As Hoban famously said, whenever a flag was waved by the roadside Merckx would sprint for it.
It didn’t matter what the race was. Merckx was seen to throw away his bike in disgust on various occasions after being beaten in a kermis race. Patrick Sercu recalled a national Madison championship in 1967 when he and Merckx lapped the field nine times driven partly by the public’s yells of disbelief at what they were seeing, but also by reports that the other riders might combine against Merekx. Guillaume Michiels told the story that on reading in a newspaper that Roger De Vlaeminck had a higher victory count one season, Merckx’s response was to grab a copy of the racing calendar and seek out a race to go and win. Bob Lelangue remembered a criterium ‘of no importance’ where Merckx asked him to lead him out. Lelangue couldn’t see Merckx sitting on his wheel and was worried they might give the race away, so he sprinted and won himself. Merckx was not happy.
Winning small races was a matter of professional obligation, Merckx told me. There was always a reason to get focussed for a major event: a previous defeat to be avenged, a point to be made, another little bit of history perhaps. ‘For a big race like Milan–San Remo or Paris–Roubaix, it’s normal to be motivated. As for less important races, the fact is that you are paid to do something and to do it well. If people come and pay to see a criterium they want to see you win, not just participate. It’s part of being a professional. People work to earn the money to see you, you mustn’t disappoint them. You have to be conscious of being a professional.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 20
