La course en tête also reflected another fact about cycling’s development, which Merckx himself had seen: the eclipse of specialist climbers such as Fuente and the pre-eminence of strong all-rounders such as himself. ‘Our sport has always called for huge amounts of stamina, but from now on physical strength will become all-important,’ he had said in an interview with Swiss writer Serge Lang in 1970. ‘We are in a time when average speeds have risen and bigger gears are used, which will exclude from the first rank riders who do not have certain physical size and athletic ability. We’ve already seen the last of the great climbers. Riders who possess the same basic qualities as Bahamontes or Jiménez still exist in the peloton, but with one essential difference: when they get to the mountains they have lost part of their potential because of having to use big gears in the flat part of the race. They may not be defeated in the mountains in the strictest sense but they are no longer able to create huge gaps.’
Of course Merckx could race defensively, and sometimes did, most notably in his duels with Fuente in the Giro, but the starting point was offensive racing. It was conjectured that the best way to beat Merckx might be to ride slowly deliberately, to make him lose patience with the bunch and waste his energy attacking fruitlessly. ‘I believe in hard racing for one reason,’ said Merckx. ‘If I do the work I am controlling the rhythm of the race and that is particularly valuable in the mountains. I wear down the others and am no more tired than they are at the finish. I avoid surprises and crashes.’
The post-war greats – Coppi, Anquetil, Hinault, Indurain, Sean Kelly, Armstrong – have always been able to race en tête on more days than the lesser men, but what set Merckx apart is that he could do it on so many more days than the other greats and on so many different terrains. Coppi had many off days, when his head simply failed him. Van Looy never showed his true worth in the Tour de France, because he was a man from a cycling culture in which the Classics were everything. Anquetil limited himself to what he knew best: time trialling, and his home Tour. The writer Roger Bastide said he felt that the Frenchman was probably worth fifteen minutes more than his opponents in the Tour de France but he would keep it in reserve for when he needed it. Merckx would get the fifteen minutes first up then try to get more.
Hinault was the best practitioner of la course en tête post-Merckx, but even he restricted himself to certain races. Indurain and Armstrong restrained their ambitions to the Tour de France, while Sean Kelly could be Merckx-esque in short-stage races and Classics – as his nickname ‘The New Cannibal’ suggested – but he was limited in the three-week Tours by his lack of climbing ability.
La course en tête can also be seen in a wider sense. Giving his utmost in every area, be it equipment, extra training or aggressive racing, was clearly a matter of duty for Merckx, which can only have stemmed from his upbringing. In the terms he put it to me, not making full use of the talent he had been given would have been bordering on the criminal. ‘I believe, sincerely, that I am better at my profession – I mean I do it more scrupulously, more methodically – than most of my rivals,’ he said in 1970. Like father, like son: think of Jules Merckx’s perfectionism, his Stakhanovite work ethic, his Victorian maxims.
La course en tête is the product of an obsessive nature. Claudine Merckx recalled that, before a major race, her husband’s mind would be relentlessly focused on whichever rival he perceived to be the most important. He would find the chink in the armour: Fuente’s inconsistency; Ocaña’s mental fragility; Thévenet’s lack of finesse on the descents. Nothing could be left to chance. Merckx’s first lieutenant Jos Bruyère recalled that he and Merckx must have gone up and down the Poggio, the last climb in Milan–San Remo, ‘hundreds of times, even though we knew it by heart’. The twist there is that Bruyère turned professional with Merckx in 1970, by which point he had already won the race three times and had already seen enough of the Poggio to last most cyclists a lifetime.
Watch the loving detail in the film La Course en Tête with which Eddy gently puts a transfer on his track bike; give a wry smile as time after time he checks his saddle height or adjusts the seatpost while on the move using an Allen key carried in his back pocket for precisely that purpose. There was only one occasion on which he forgot that Allen key, according to Guillaume Michiels, who was with Merckx for most of his career, post-Blois. It was a stage of the Tour of Belgium in Wallonia; Michiels had to find a bike shop, buy a new one and hand it up to The Cannibal with his race food in the musette at the day’s feed station.
His incessant worrying would make him get out of bed the night before a race to check his bikes were properly adjusted and led to his obsession with his position and his equipment: the 110 spare wheels and 200 spare tubulars, each one seasoned for two years. At the 1970 Giro he travelled with eighteen bikes, all with components that he had personally drilled out for lightness. There were limits, however. Once, he was asked if it was true that he had dismantled a bike to see how many pieces it was made up of; that was not the case, but he had, he said, found out that a bike had 1125 individual components. Ernesto Colnago told me of one year when he supplied twenty-seven bikes, while two hundred hours went into the making of his Hour Record machine.
Guillaume Michiels recalls two examples of Merckx’s attention to detail. During a reconnaissance of the 1970 Tour de France route with Belgian television they looked over the finish of the innocuous stage to Châlons-sur-Marne. ‘There were four corners in the last kilometre, he rode it and said “if we are sprinting for first, I’ll win the stage. I’ll get going before that corner, and because there is another one two hundred metres later, they will never catch me.” He took that corner flat out, gained half a dozen metres, and that was that.’ There was a ruse the pair used on occasion, in hot weather, to supply Merckx with extra water bottles in the days when riders were not allowed to receive water from their team cars. For these secret roadside handups, Michiels would place his wife two hundred metres before a corner: she would shout to Merckx that a bottle was waiting, and he would drop back in the field so that he could not be spotted by the race referee sitting in a car in front of the bunch. Michiels, always shirtless so that he could be recognised, would hand up the bottle.
Sometimes his approach bordered on the masochistic, taking professional obligation to extremes that baffled his contemporaries. Patrick Sercu tells a story which he believes shows the level of Merckx’s obsession. ‘Liège–Bastogne–Liège was a race which didn’t have a course that suited me, so I rarely rode it. One year I had a call the day before from the team manager, Franco Cribiori, to say that Roger De Vlaeminck, the star of the Brooklyn team, was ill and wouldn’t start. That meant I had to race as I was the No. 2 in the team. I left Ghent on the Saturday afternoon with my father to drive down: a slow drive as there was no motorway. We were driving down the main road from Brussels to Liège, it was raining and snowing together, the worst possible conditions for riding a bike. A long way up ahead we spotted a cyclist on the road: we couldn’t work out who would be riding in such weather. It was so bad that there was no one else outside. When we passed the bike rider we saw it was Merckx: he was riding the hundred kilometres from Brussels to Liège, all alone, because he had not won Flèche Wallonne during the week. He won Liège– Bastogne–Liège the next day five minutes ahead of the second rider: I climbed off after forty kilometres.’
In the first week of the 1970 Tour de France Merckx was asked why he and his team had expended energy bringing back escapes by riders who were no threat overall. ‘I couldn’t let them gain half an hour on the field. What would they have said in Belgium? People worry too much about the energy that I expend. My teammates and I are here to work, to do all the work.’ And he responded to accusations that he won too much, leaving too little for the rest, with these words: ‘The day when I start a race without intending to win it, I won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror. I’m not saying that every time I race I go to the very limit of my strength. But when the opportunities appear I c
onsider it immoral not to take them.’
His willingness to shoulder responsibility was felt to have restored a certain purity to the sport, after a period when children of the pre-war era such as Van Looy, Anquetil and Van Steenbergen had seen the sport in far more commercial terms. It was said that Rik I would only win a Classic if Van Buggenhout was standing on the start line and pointed out that his contract value was dropping. As for Anquetil, in one criterium the organisers refused to pay him as he sat in and had done nothing to merit his fee. So the following year he returned, ripped the race to shreds and said, ‘See that? You can pay me last year’s fee as well as this year’s.’
‘When Anquetil turned professional he understood that it was an excellent way of earning money. It was as if he had calculated in advance the number of pedal strokes it would take to earn a certain amount,’ wrote Pierre Chany. ‘Merckx, on the other hand, has set himself no limits. He rides for the pleasure of glory; praise from fans and media is sweet. He earns money but his soul has remained pure. Being acclaimed counts more for him than the money he may or may not make.’ In Eddy Merckx and His Rivals, François Terbéen struck a similar chord: ‘Eddy Merckx’s particular strength is his intransigence, his thirst for truth. Eddy gives no gifts to the opposition. In this way he has restored the most absolute rigour to the act of cycle racing, whether that race is a classic, a stage race or a standard criterium. This scrupulous honesty cannot be overemphasised, because it is the expression of an integrity which is perhaps without equal in the long saga of the Giants of the road.’
Claudine, had a more succinct way of saying the same thing: ‘Eddy was driven on by a power that was unique to him. He never looked for glory. He just wanted to be at peace with himself.’
1 In the 1990s Il Cippo was to be a favourite training ground of the legendary Italian climber Marco Pantani.
SERVING THE CANNIBAL
‘Merckx is like a feudal chieftain’, Geoffrey Nicholson, The Great Bike Race
WHAT JOS BRUYÈRE REALLY wanted to do was play football. That might seem like a strange admission from Eddy Merckx’s first lieutenant, a man who wore the yellow jersey for most of the 1978 Tour de France and whose record in the one-day Classics would stand up well thanks to two victories in Liège–Bastogne– Liège and three in Het Volk. But Bruyère now gives the firm impression that he became a cyclist in spite of himself. He was talented on a bike, good enough to win major races in his own right, and he played a key role in many of Merckx’s greatest wins. Even so, that was not enough for him to hang up his wheels and live comfortably. At sixty-three he is still working, in the Sports Service of the Province of Liège, and it’s obvious he would like to stop and live quietly on his pension, if that were possible. The reference book Gotha describes him as ‘a magnificent athlete’ but now he is not in the best of health – he is overweight and walks awkwardly due to a hip replacement operation dating back to a crash he suffered in 1975 – and he doesn’t seem overjoyed with the hand life has dealt him.
Bruyère’s father, a factory worker, took his son from their home on the Dutch border into the nearby city of Liège one Sunday morning in 1961. There was a vast market in the city centre, ‘La Batte’, the locals called it, and there Jos was bought a racing bike as a reward for getting a good school report. ‘I rode it home, and, once I had it, my brother said he would buy me some shorts, and so on.’ He began racing against lads ten years older, and held his own. A few years later, with his military service out of the way, decision time came: his father was ill, the family were short of money, his mother was working as a cleaner, and they wouldn’t be able to support a young racing cyclist for long. Joseph had a year to prove he could earn a living on his bike. He won seventeen races that season and, after his second amateur classic win, he had the offer that mattered: it came from Eddy Merckx, then twenty-four years old and building his own team at Faema. He would stay with Eddy until the end came for The Cannibal. Bruyère spent eight years in what he called a ‘twenty-five hours a day job, keeping him out of the wind, taking him to the front and using my elbows, then leaving him two hundred metres from the finish’.
Joseph was put in the Tour de France at the age of twenty-one. He gained a kilo by the end of the Tour, and that was enough to prove that he was suited to stage races: most cyclists come out of the three-week marathon far lighter than they go in due to the daily demands the Tour makes on the body. ‘I was always eating, eating. I was the first at the dinner table, the last to leave,’ he recalls with a smile. But you had to earn your crust with Eddy; it was not just a matter of eating what was on the table. There was a pool of twenty riders in the team, and the best eight or nine got to accompany their leader in the big races. The riders who rode the Tour would come home rich men, because Eddy would share his prize money with them. ‘I had a small contract but I rode the Tour de France and earned 120,000 Belgian francs.’ The riders who stayed at home went without. The upshot was that the riders fought among themselves to race at Eddy’s side. ‘You had to be in the ten best riders or the director would take someone else. I did the Tour de France so young because I absolutely had to be part of it. I needed to take money home, because the year before I had earned nothing. It was a fight to be in the team. It was like a soccer team where the best eleven players played every week and they would bring in a reserve from time to time.’
‘Here as elsewhere (apart from at bike races) he is always late, but his twenty “domestiques” don’t go to the dinner table before he gets to the dining room,’ wrote Marc Jeuniau in Face to Face with Eddy Merckx. ‘They don’t get out of their seats until he rises and they only get on their bikes when he finally turns up, always the last.’ Life in the team was straightforward, Bruyère recalls, as long as you were in the Praetorian Guard around Merckx. ‘Everyone knew how to do their work, that’s why I learned so fast.’ That was reiterated by another of the inner circle, Jos Huysmans: ‘Merckx wasn’t that bothered by tactical considerations. Anyway, we knew what we had to do. It was fairly obvious. Everything was decided around Merckx. And as he never stopped winning, we never wondered about it.’ There would be a briefing from the directeur sportif in the morning before the race with some details of the route, but there was no real need for a tactical plan. ‘We made sure there was always a rider in every break, so it would be easier for those of us behind. If we were in the break and any of the other guys were dangerous we would soft-pedal, if they weren’t dangerous we’d ride with them.’
The riders were constantly at the front of the bunch, because that was where Eddy spent the race; as their leader was usually the strongest in the race, there was no need to go into much detail beforehand. There was no need for a capitaine de route, the senior rider some teams appointed to watch what went on and decide the tactics. It was a small world, so the riders knew all their colleagues by sight without memorising their race numbers. They knew how they rode, their style on the bike, whether their shoulders moved as they pedalled, whether one leg or the other stuck out. When the attacks came and riders sped away from the bunch, it was clear who was ahead. The team manager, Giorgio Albani or the Belgian Bob Lelangue, might fill in the details when they dropped back to the team car for water bottles; they would pick up the rider numbers from the race’s internal radio system, look at the standings and confirm that the rider who had broken away was twenty minutes down on the overall standings, so he wasn’t dangerous, for example, but by and large Merckx’s men knew what was happening. That was their job.
An account of how Merckx and his teammates could dominate a race is given by Léon Zitrone’s description of the Ballon d’Alsace stage in the 1969 Tour. Faema took up station at the head of the bunch well before the climb, giving rise to what Zitrone described as ‘a strange and fascinating spectacle. On roads which were still flat, the selection of the strong and the weak took place through a series of little chopper blows. For a few minutes, one of the Faema team would ride in front. Everything went as usual. Merckx, hands on the bars, spun
his big gear. But each time he moved to the front of the bunch to take over from one of his teammates and “pushed”, someone, behind, would show signs of distress, and, having gone as fast as he could go, would suddenly give in, and sit up as if the line joining him to the bunch had been cut, defeated, with no chance of remission.’
The team’s tactical plan was relatively simple even on a mountain stage of the Giro or Tour, explains Bruyère. ‘There were the Spanish climbers, who would attack constantly so we would always ride at the same steady tempo to keep them within reach then bring them back. Over the last two cols of the stage Merckx would attack and for us the race would be over then. We just had to get to the finish within the time limit.’ There were times when the team’s strongest climbers, Bruyère and Jos de Schoenmaecker, would be ordered to set the tempo on the climbs to discourage the opposition and to soften their legs up. As they rode, Merckx would whistle from behind if the tempo was too high. But once their leader had delivered the coup de grâce, their work would be over, and it would be a matter of surviving until it all began again the next day.
Sometimes things went wrong, and then there would be a reckoning. ‘On the road, Eddy is a demanding and authoritarian leader,’ wrote Roger Bastide. ‘He’s been seen, sometimes, to lose his temper spectacularly while gathering his lads around him to get a chase going. In the evening, at the dinner table, he criticises each one without skirting around the subject. But when it’s all been said, the slate is wiped clean and the discussion often ends with a few bottles being opened.’ ‘If things hadn’t gone well, it would be sorted out quickly afterwards because we needed to get it out of the way; some days it didn’t work out and things needed to be rectified,’ says Bruyère. He notes that it was always Merckx who took the lead in the discussions. ‘It was always Eddy. The directeur sportif would always follow Eddy.’
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 22
