Winning was a kind of illness, a form of addiction that was stronger than Merckx’s better nature. Those who played cards with him on holiday noticed that he would be unhappy if he didn’t win, and would switch to something else. Michiels said that he would be seriously fed up if he didn’t win a race every week or so. ‘He would get to about four days, then start saying “do you realise, Guillaume, I haven’t won anything for a while?”’ Michiels recalled returning from a Milan–San Remo which Merckx had won; as they drove from San Remo to the airport in Nice, Merckx observed: ‘Now I’ve won, I am tranquil. J’ai ma course – I’ve got my race.’ De Vlaeminck observed that you could have a coffee with Merckx and a couple of hours later he would no longer know you when you were side by side on your bikes. There were times when he walked past close friends without seeing them, such was his ability to put himself in a bubble. He was not alone in becoming a man possessed when on his bike. It was the Italian Fiorenzo Magni who said, ‘When I start a race I forget about my wife and child.’
At home, Merckx remained quiet, utterly focused, unable to emerge from race mode. Claudine noted that he was never a talker: it affected his concentration. In the early days of their marriage, he was so silent that she wondered if she had done something wrong. Then she realised he was simply concentrating on everything that had to be done. ‘When he was grumpy and silent on waking up, it was a good sign.’ He would be annoyed by the smallest thing that affected his focus on a given race. On the way home from a major win, the talk would centre on the next race. After the race, the ritual would never change: a massage from Guillaume Michiels and a long discussion.
Roger Pingeon said he did not believe Merckx started any event determined to grind the opposition into the dust: ‘I believe it was stronger than him.’ Pingeon believed that it wasn’t about making other riders suffer or lose; the collateral damage was incidental, never premeditated. Merckx was never arrogant about a victory, was rarely quoted doing down the opposition. Only if he was provoked did he speak up. If he lost, he said why; some saw this as complaining, not realising that for Merckx winning was the natural state of affairs, any departure from that an aberration. ‘He was never angry if he lost because he was not the strongest,’ says Michiels. ‘But if he was the strongest and he didn’t win, he would be really upset.’ Mark Cavendish shows similar traits: unable to conceive of anything other than victory, totally locked into his own world when he gets a whiff of it, like a vampire that scents blood.
In 1973 Merckx did something that would be unimaginable now. He turned down the Tour de France. He had contemplated this before. Relations with the Tour organisers had been tense in the past; after the 1971 Tour, he had felt the public might be against him, and the Vuelta organisers were offering a small fortune. By now, he was beginning to cross the t’s and dot the i’s on his race record: there were events he had yet to win, and the Spanish Tour was one of them. Moreover, it was a further chance to rubber-stamp his superiority over Ocaña – on his rival’s home soil.
In the build-up, illness kept him out of Milan–San Remo for the first time since 1966, but he still enjoyed a remarkable spring, with four Classic wins in nineteen April days, to go with his second victory in the Belgian season-opener Het Volk. Four days after a narrow win over Frans Verbeeck in Liège– Bastogne–Liège, he was in Calpe, on the start line of the Vuelta. Amidst the April frenzy, Ocaña had managed to get the better of his old nemesis in the Catalan Week stage race, winning both the mountain-top finish and the time trial but the Vuelta was a different matter. It was an accomplished win, with Molteni dominant, and Merckx taking the points and combine awards in addition to six stages and the overall title. The first blow was struck in the prologue time trial, a second on the hilltop finish to Cuenca, where victory went to his teammate Jos de Schoenmaecker. Molteni won the team time trial, then, with the help of Victor Van Schil and Jos Huysmans, Merckx outpaced the sprinters en route to Ampuriabrava, and finished the race with three stage wins in three days: the individual time trial at Torrelavega, a mountainous leg to Miranda del Ebro and the final time trial in San Sebastián.
Ocaña’s challenge came on the Puerto de Orduña en route to Miranda del Ebro, but it was the same scenario as so often in 1972. The Spaniard opened a gap, Merckx didn’t panic but reeled him in very slowly, overhauling him seven kilometres from the finish, and then winning the sprint. Afterwards, there were complaints from Ocaña and his camp that the race had been structured to suit the Belgian, with time bonuses on hilltops as well as in finish sprints. ‘Using his finish speed, with no real sprinters present, Merckx was able to gain 3min 46sec on Ocaña without ever really dropping him,’ wrote one biographer. The Spaniard himself said that ‘three decent mountain stages’ would have been enough to make a difference.
No one, at that time, had won the Giro in the same year as the Vuelta, because the gap between the two races was a week or less, as it remained until 1995. With only four days to draw breath, then, Merckx was at the start of the Italian Tour, although he was not actually in Italy. That year, the Giro started in Belgium, at Verviers, then travelled through Holland, Germany, Luxembourg and Switzerland, using the Mont Blanc Tunnel to get back into Italy. This was the race immortalised in Jørgen Leth’s film Stars and Watercarriers, and was enlivened by another duel between Merckx and José Manuel Fuente. The race seemed destined for the Belgian after only the second stage in Italy, where Fuente lost time due to stomach cramps. In classic style, however, the little Spaniard never gave up, putting in continual attacks over high passes that were frequently little more than dirt roads through mountain meadows. The race boiled down to him and his little Spanish climbers against Merckx and his rouleurs.
After a prologue win for Merckx, teamed with Jos Swerts in a two-man team time trial, the Belgian added stage one to Cologne, but this was mere manoeuvring. The race was effectively won nine days in after the ascent of Monte Carpegna, a monster of a climb with slopes between one-in-four and one-in-five, on the border between Emilia-Romagna and Marche, known locally as Il Cippo.1 With Fuente attacking continually, Merckx is seen in Leth’s film constantly at the head of the field. Most often he seems to have two men in his slipstream, Gimondi and Giovanni Battaglin, the latter by coincidence the only other rider who would achieve the Vuelta– Giro double before the 1995 calendar change. ‘Merckx churns on and on,’ says Leth’s narrator as the piano soundtrack plays.
The only occasion on which Fuente managed to make one of his attacks stick was late in the race, on the final Dolomite stages to Auronzo di Cadore, and by then the outcome of the race was no longer in question. That reflected Merckx’s iron control of the whole three weeks. By the finish The Cannibal had become the first rider to lead the Giro from beginning to end in the post-war era; the only previous riders to manage the feat were Alfredo Binda and Costante Girardengo, campionissimi both. He had also managed a run of four Classic and two Grand Tour wins in less than ten weeks. It is safe to say that this feat at least will never be equalled.
Txomin Perurena, who raced for KAS throughout the years of the duels with Merckx, recalls that relations between the Spanish and the Belgian were close in spite of Fuente’s constant refusal to give in. On the final stage of that Giro, he says, as the race headed towards Trieste through a series of tunnels, the Spaniards in the field, including Fuente, agreed to ride around Merckx together with the Molteni domestiques to protect him because ‘he was afraid of certain riders … and he was worried they could cause him to crash’.
Merckx and Ocaña would never again go head-to-head in a major Tour, but their soap opera had a couple more twists yet. In Merckx’s absence, the Spaniard managed a dominant win in the Tour – a victory so absolute that the French press inevitably hinted that he might even have beaten the Belgian. Once again Merckx was left with a point to be proved. One opportunity was a post-Tour criterium where the pair were both down to ride. Merckx trained hard, turned up at the very last minute so that none of the other starters – and part
icularly Ocaña, obviously – would have the chance to tell him to take it easy as convention demanded. Just before the start, the Spaniard made a vague attempt to ask the Belgian to ride steadily, but too late, as Merckx recalled in the book Homme et Cannibale: ‘I pressed the pedals down violently. You should have seen it. They were all over the place. Ocaña abandoned. I won.’ Point made.
On the other hand, the world championship on the Montjuich circuit in Barcelona – on Ocaña’s home soil – was a disaster, and gave rise to lasting controversy. Gimondi won in dazzling sunshine on a course that should have suited Merckx, and a new rival appeared. Freddy Maertens was in his second professional season and only as yet showing hints of the talent that would blossom spectacularly and briefly in the mid-1970s. He had finished second to Eric Leman at the Tour of Flanders and had won the Four Days of Dunkirk. He was faster than Merckx in a sprint and could time-trial at least as well, although he climbed as if he was pushing a barrel of brown Belgian beer in front of him. Merckx raced Montjuich in his usual style, throwing caution to the winds in the final hundred kilometres, dislodging the entire field bar Maertens, Gimondi and Ocaña, but it was Maertens who responded to his teammate’s most incisive attack, on the final lap – bringing Gimondi and Ocaña in his wake.
There are several different versions of what actually happened. There were unfounded accusations that Merckx might have come to a deal with Gimondi to keep the emerging Belgian rival in his place, but the most likely explanation has Maertens offering his services to Merckx in the finale, then realising belatedly that his leader had run out of steam and just failing to get to Gimondi himself. Viewing the television footage today, that’s certainly how it looks: Maertens leads out the sprint, constantly looking at Merckx, driving harder and harder, but at the critical moment his leader simply cannot come past him. Merckx was bitter about the fact that Maertens had pulled the other two up to him, and noted that something similar had happened in the amateur worlds in 1971. He was completely devastated when he returned to the Belgian pits, where he sat with his head in his hands for half an hour. Maertens felt he himself should have won: he visited a restaurant not far away a few years later, and, on seeing a picture of Gimondi in the rainbow jersey, he said ‘that jersey is mine’.
Merckx’s version of events was as follows: ‘I attacked and Maertens chased me down two or three times, then told me to stop attacking as he’d lead me out in the sprint. I wanted to save him a bit as he is a young rider. Coming up to the sprint he launched the sprint too hard instead of leading it out normally; I lost a couple of lengths, tried to make up the ground but Gimondi passed me.’ ‘Merckx tried too hard, he gave too much of himself’ was the verdict of the Italian manager, Nino Defilippis, the old pro from the 1950s who had been at Vincenzo Giacotto’s side when he had tested the Belgian out for Faema in spring 1967.
After that disappointment, Merckx filled in two more gaps in his palmares. Having won his first and only Vuelta, he added Paris–Brussels – which finished near his home after going over the little hills to the south of the Belgian capital – and the Grand Prix des Nations. The celebrated time trial, that year run at the Vendée resort of Saint-Jean-de-Monts, presented another opportunity to put Ocaña in his place. The Spaniard finished two minutes forty-eight seconds behind at the end of the eighty kilometres: a crushing defeat. Merckx closed the season with five wins in a week, following the Nations with victory in both legs of A Travers Lausanne and a criterium.
Or it would have been five wins if he had not been disqualified after a stunning win in the Giro di Lombardia thanks to a positive drugs test. His team doctor, Angelo Cavalli, took responsibility: he explained that it was down to a mistake with cough medicine, sold under the name Mucantil, but including a small amount of the stimulant ephedrine, something of which he had been unaware. Merckx was not the only rider of the time to whom something similar happened; with the more lenient climate then prevailing, and given that ephedrine was very much at the light end of the drugs spectrum, the explanation of human error seems reasonable. Unlike after Savona, there was no benefit of the doubt this time and the test remained on Merckx’s record.
At the start of his career, Merckx had stated his ambition to achieve something new every season, to give his fans fresh pleasure. He managed that until 1974, but 1973 was the end of the peak of his career. It was the last of the four consecutive seasons in which he managed more than fifty victories, the last in which he won both Classics and major Tours. It was the last of his truly great years; the following season he would show unprecedented physical vulnerability as he nudged up against the limits of what his body could stand. By the end of 1973, now twenty-eight, he had set the standard for his career and had changed the entire way in which fans and press viewed their sport. He had become the first rider to dominate three-week Tours, consistently, day-by-day; the first and last rider to dominate for so long, on so many terrains, without a break. The Tour triumphs of Hinault, Indurain and Armstrong are sometimes compared to those of Merckx or considered greater, but the Merckx wins have to be seen in the context of domination of an entire season.
Moreover, he had raced in a new way, always attacking, taking every race on from start to finish. He had adopted an approach that brooked no compromise, no matter where the race, what its context, and no matter the weather. This was what became known as la course en tête, the term immortalised in the film of that name, produced by Joël Santoni. There is no English equivalent that completely captures the sense of the term, but the one that comes closest is ‘racing from the front’. That is shorthand for a tactical approach to racing in which the entire focus is on what happens at the front of a given race. That is not as simplistic as it sounds. It is possible to race defensively. For example, a team with a strong sprinter might do so in a one-day race or a stage of a Tour, permitting an escape to gain a certain margin before pulling together to reunite the field in time for the finish. In a tough stage race, defensive racing is the norm: traditionally, the prime objective is not to lose time on the other contenders, while waiting for an opportunity on two or three target stages. For Fausto Coppi, Bernard Hinault or Lance Armstrong these would be mountain stages or time trials; for Jacques Anquetil or Miguel Indurain they would only be time trials. Once the lead has been acquired, it is defended, from behind.
As practised by Merckx, la course en tête turns that on its head. As a way of racing, it is pro-active. It is centred on the premise that as much physical and mental energy is used in chasing down moves as is spent in making them. Attack becomes the best form of defence: you need to crack a climber such as Fuente, so you harass him on the flat then frustrate him in the mountains; you have to beat a sprinter so you burn him out beforehand. A star’s team is there not merely to control the race but to destroy rivals’ minds and bodies before the leader puts in the coup de grâce, or to be sent up the road to act as decoys: the leader bridges to them when he makes his move or forces the opposition to tire themselves out chasing. La course en tête calls for resourcefulness, inventiveness, complete determination, total concentration.
It also calls for presence: the leader has to be constantly in view at the front of the bunch, to demonstrate physical mastery, even if on occasion he may be bluffing. ‘I remember in one Paris–Nice watching Anquetil jump from one echelon to the next to get to the front,’ said Walter Godefroot. ‘That would never happen with Merckx because he would always be in the front echelon.’ In fact, it was impossible for Eddy to be anywhere else. Patrick Sercu recalled that, during one Tour of Italy, he and Rudy Altig made an attempt at showing Eddy life at the back of the peloton, where on occasion even the best riders would spend a little time to relax and save energy. ‘We tried and tried to get him to drop back by talking to him and distracting him so that he wouldn’t notice as we slipped back down the line. But it was useless. Every time he got to about twentieth in the bunch, he would whizz back to the front to see what was going on in the race.’ Other leaders such as Raymond Poulidor or
Bernard Thévenet were far less vigilant.
The hallmark of Merckx was constant presence of mind, readiness to use anything that might destabilise the opposition to launch an attack. ‘With Eddy, you never knew when the racing would start: he might escape in a side wind, on a cobbled section, after a big crash or just the minute the flag dropped,’ said one opponent. ‘You’d be waiting to see when he attacked. Many times you’d be almost hoping that he would wait as late as possible, but he was unpredictable.’ Merckx felt his philosophy was that nothing could be left to chance – the course, the weather, the opposition’s teams. ‘In a race I tried to be everywhere at once, wherever an opportunity appeared, when the weather changed suddenly, when echelons formed, when an unexpected hill appeared. There are a lot of things in a race that you can’t control although you have to be aware of them. The main thing you can count on is yourself. And that’s what I always put emphasis on.’
It helped that his domination produced a by-product. Merckx won so much that his rivals were more concerned with salvaging what they could than with actually beating him. ‘It wasn’t easy to work out why Merckx, so superior and with the team he had, would attack two or three mountain passes from the finish, or with a hundred kilometres to go,’ said Txomin Perurena. ‘Perhaps he would whittle it down to three or four riders, and they would cooperate, because they knew that way they would make second or third, which was a lot better than nothing, and then next day he’d go off again with another three or four and they’d work with him again because they’d want that second or third place. It was divide and rule. Logically we should have all ganged together and tried to beat him. But that never occurred to anybody because he was so superior all we wanted to do was finish second.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 21
