From 1972 onwards, that directeur sportif was most often Bob Lelangue, burly, balding and round-faced, a former professional only five years older than Merckx and another Bruxellois. They had trained together when Merckx was a young amateur riding with the local professionals, they had raced together at Faema, briefly, and Merckx had asked Lelangue to join him as team manager for the first time in 1968. Shortly afterwards Van Buggenhout imposed Driessens on his protégé but in 1971, as Driessens’ star waned during Ocaña’s incredible Tour, Merckx again approached his fellow Bruxellois. Lelangue had retired and was working as a press driver, but from the following season he became a key part of Molteni.
Lelangue’s priority was to sharpen up the organisation. Cycling in the 1970s had hardly moved on from the 1960s in that the directeur sportif was a factotum, a one-man operation running every aspect of the team. He booked flights, sorted out bikes and clothing, hired and fired the riders and ran the team on the road, all the while managing the budget, and probably doling out training advice. It was no surprise therefore that in many teams travel arrangements were often primitive. Riders might drive from Brussels to Paris for a 9 a.m. start, leaving at three or four in the morning. They also frequently preferred to buy their own kit and bits because team issue was not always to be relied upon. There were occasions such as the one Lelangue remembers from his racing days, when, being the eighth rider back to the team car to ask for a cape on a rainy day meant there was no cape: the manager had brought one too few.
There are still performance gains to be made in cycling teams from a tighter focus on the logistical side, but, in more primitive times, the potential advantages from getting certain basics right were even greater. So at Merckx’s Molteni the hotels had to be just right, the travel arrangements precise, and the riders had to be punctual, because the leader hated to be late. Lelangue recalls one Paris–Nice when a fellow Belgian team manager whose squad were staying in the same hotel asked if he could follow Molteni to a start somewhere in Burgundy, as he had no idea where it was. The agreed departure time was 10 a.m., Merckx was in the team car on the dot ‘tapping his fingers’, but the other squad was nowhere to be seen. Molteni did not wait. The other team got lost, never found the start and were out of the race.
There were other details Lelangue worked on. It was customary in those days for riders to use their own wheels as well as those supplied by the team; many bought their own tyres and got local wheel builders to make what they wanted. To avoid mix-ups, and make sure that all the kit was of a guaranteed standard, Molteni’s riders brought only their bikes to a race, leaving their wheels at home: they raced team issue wheels, meaning the tyres and gears could be compatible. That mattered: if Merckx needed a wheel from a teammate during a race, he knew exactly what he was getting.
Lelangue echoes Bruyère: tactics weren’t an issue. Interviewed by Stéphane Thirion in the book Tout Merckx, he went further: ‘There were no tactics with Merckx. He was so strong that he would improvise during a race and his teammates had to be prepared to back him up in every decision. He was like an artist, a filmmaker or a painter. You could guess which way the work of art was heading but you didn’t know quite how he was going to get there. He just followed whatever inspired him on the day.’
The directeur sportif only had a tactical role in special circumstances, for example on the afternoon when Bruyère ended up winning his first Liège–Bastogne–Liège, in 1976. If the domestique was to be given his head, he had to be in the company of the right rival – not too strong, not too fast – and Merckx, the eternal worrier, had to be certain that Bruyère would win, otherwise a potential victory was going to waste. ‘I was shuttling up to the break and back to the bunch time after time in that race,’ recalls Lelangue. ‘Eddy kept asking me, “is he strong, is he going to win?” so I had to keep going to look, then going back to tell him.’
Where the manager’s job got demanding was when Merckx’s perfectionism took him to extremes. There was one occasion when they were racing in Switzerland, not far from Basle, when the leader dropped back from the bunch to the team car and specified that he wanted two new frames that were hanging in his cellar in his house near Brussels. ‘He gave me the measurements, I always had a wallet with change in it just in case, so I stopped at a phone box and phoned a local mechanic, gave him the measurements so he knew which ones they were, he wrapped them up, took them to Sabena, got them sent on the next flight to Basle-Mulhouse airport.’ At the feed zone Lelangue swapped cars with the soigneur, Guillaume Michiels, who drove the team car for the rest of the day while he drove hot foot to the airport to collect the frames. Basle-Mulhouse has a French side and a Swiss side, and the Swiss customs man would not surrender the frames without seeing Lelangue’s documents. ‘I had no documents, so he refused, I waited until he was reading his newspaper, went out and came in from the other side and took the frames.’ He is not actually sure whether his team leader used them. ‘He was happy, but two days later he would change again. It’s hard to tell if it was all in his head or not.’
The team would take seven or eight frames for Merckx to the Tour or the Giro, all of them subtly different – five millimetres here or there, a fraction of an angle between the tubes – carrying one on each of the two team cars just in case. Additionally, Lelangue’s team car was crammed with spare parts: half a dozen stems of slightly different lengths fitted to handlebars of various dimensions, all fitted up with brake levers and cables (the gear changers being on the downtube of the bikes in this prehistoric era). ‘My favourite episode was one day in the Tour of Italy. It was early in a mountain stage, pretty quiet as usual, all the favourites down the back talking. Eddy came and asked us to swap the stem and the bars between his race bike and his spare.’ It had to be done on the spot: Lelangue believes it took him and the mechanic Julien De Vries – later famed as spanner-man to Greg LeMond and Lance Armstrong – less than three minutes to swap the bars around, including loosening, undoing, rerouting and refixing the brake cables. Their boss’s immediate reaction was anger: he could not imagine them carrying out his orders so quickly, and assumed they had merely pretended to do it.
Merckx was intimately involved in the day-to-day running of the team, who rode which races. The Tour de France team would be selected early in the year, and would ride a different programme from that of their leader, because, says Lelangue, if they had tried to keep up with him they would have found it physically too much. He would keep tabs on their form, for example making Lelangue push Jos Bruyère to ride the Tour of Switzerland against his will in 1974 (Bruyère had just got married and his wife wasn’t keen on the idea). Bruyère had attempted to pull out; Lelangue had to make him an ultimatum: I won’t replace you, the plane for Zurich leaves tomorrow, you can be on it or not. Merckx’s idea was that, rather than staying at home and putting on weight, Bruyère needed to race himself fit. So it proved, as he pulled on the yellow jersey in the 1974 Tour, and helped Merckx to his fifth win.
The team system in cycling had moved on since its foundation by Fausto Coppi in the post-war years. Coppi and his successors would have a bevy of humble gregari or domestiques devoted to their service, but in the great days of the campionissimo these were most often obscurities who had no interest in winning. Those who had ambition would often leave because there wasn’t room for them. Co-leaders tended to be foreign stars such as Louison Bobet or Raphael Geminiani, hired on a very occasional basis for certain races. Merckx’s predecessor Rik Van Looy had refined the system by bringing in riders who were capable of winning in their own right and persuading them to subordinate their interests to his. The argument was simple: they would earn more as part of his ‘Red Guard’ helping him win large numbers of races, and using his contacts to get lucrative appearance deals, than they would in their own right winning one or two events. Merckx used a combination of both systems: a bevy of good riders, most of whom were capable of winning, all devoted to his cause.
Lelangue, who rode for Van Looy and managed
Merckx, believes that Faema and Molteni were far more cohesive than Van Looy’s ‘Red Guard’. The transformation from the days when Merckx was fighting for position alongside Van Looy, Simpson and Pingeon was rapid, and took place the day he moved to Faema in 1968. He ended up heading the most expensive team in the world: Molteni had a monthly wage bill estimated at about one million Belgian francs, and an annual budget put at twenty-five million. There were complaints that Merckx’s system killed off individual initiative, but this was not quite the case. There were teams that tried to emulate Faema/Molteni – Ocaña’s Bic being one example – but most squads had more than one leader, because no other kopman could race as much as Merckx, all year long. Although Hinault, LeMond, Indurain and Armstrong would continue the phenomenon of the sole leader surrounded by gregari, other systems were being developed even as Merckx was at his best. At TI-Raleigh, the former ‘Red Guard’ member Peter Post was already formulating a more modern team structure, with a variety of strongmen who would decide leadership as a given race dictated. This in turn would be built on by legendary managers such as Cyrille Guimard, Jan Raas and Giancarlo Ferretti.
‘Merckx is like a feudal chieftain,’ wrote Geoffrey Nicholson in 1976. ‘He is the sole leader and all the other members of the team are there to support and protect him. They have few complaints for they live very well on the spoils he wins them.’ The philosophy of la course en tête also meant that they had chances to win. A domestique had to feature in every escape if possible, and that created openings. The best of Merckx’s teammates tended to win races in their own right. Bruyère explained to me, ‘It would happen that Merckx had everyone sitting on his wheel, so I would get ahead to oblige the others to ride and Eddy would wait behind. Then, if they worked in the chase, Eddy would win, and some days I won.’ It was classic cycling team tactics: a decoy out front, a teammate behind monitoring the chase, ready to take advantage of the chasers when they tired or when the junction was made. For the opposition it was the stuff of nightmares: big strong Jos out front riding away, the strongest rider in the world watching them chase, albeit with a worried frown rather than a smile on his face.
The flipside of the iron discipline was that sometimes Merckx would positively try to ensure a teammate won, and according to Bruyère, ‘if I won, Merckx was just as happy as if he won’. Merckx had learned early on at Peugeot that a good leader doesn’t take it all for himself, so he took what he wanted – which was most of what there was – and gave the occasional handout. One example came in spring 1970 when he tried to engineer wins in Flèche Wallonne and the Polymultipliée circuit race for Bruyère, neither time with any success. There were occasions when it simply did not fit in, though. Merckx was not happy when his great friend Italo Zilioli rode his socks off to take the yellow jersey early in the 1970 Tour. The issue was not that Zilioli had upstaged him, but that he had ridden so hard so early in the race although Merckx had a plan to keep the Italian at his side in the mountains so that he could push for a place in the top three.
In the early 1970s, Bruyère was offered twice his Molteni salary to ride alongside Ocaña at Bic, but he turned it down. ‘It never came into my head to be the leader at another team. I was very friendly with Eddy so I didn’t look at the money. It was about friendship first of all, but you can’t live off friendship. He liked me riding for him, and I think he preferred to have me riding for him rather than against him.’ Not everyone saw it that way. ‘Merckx is appallingly professional,’ said Guido Reybroeck. ‘With him, all that matters is cycling and racing. He talks of nothing else.’ Van Springel complained that in Merckx’s teams life was ‘cold and professional’, for example the champagne did not flow after a major win, and that contact with the leader was ‘superficial’.
Bruyère does not remember it as being like that. ‘There was good team spirit – we laughed, we joked, we were good friends. If anyone felt competitive [in their own right] they put it to one side.’ The riders all had their own tricks for keeping up morale during the long spells away from home with no communications to distract them. Bruyère’s speciality was to pretend to hypnotise one of his teammates, turning off the lights and rubbing a finger across a plate that had been blackened using soot or burned cork or ink, then drawing the finger across the victim’s face as he worked his ‘magic’. At the end of the session the ‘hypnotised’ teammate’s face would be black. He did the trick once or twice a year, and each time the response would be similar: the plate would end up on the floor once the victim realised he had been taken in.
‘He doesn’t treat his teammates as domestiques. He tries to make friends of them but doesn’t always manage,’ said Jean Van Buggenhout of Merckx. He went on to explain that being the boss didn’t come naturally to Merckx, because until he emerged as a star he had never had to direct anyone else. He found stardom at an early age, and as Van Buggenhout said ‘being authoritarian is not his way. He likes to be understood, to be helped, but without having to intervene himself in an abrupt way.’ The point was that service was on Merckx’s terms, and loyalty had to be absolute, as Martin Van Den Bossche discovered. The lanky climber worked tirelessly for Merckx during the 1969 Tour, and was given the right to look after himself at one point to improve his overall placing. The trouble was, he had decided to leave Faema. Merckx had no problem with that, but was offended that Van Den Bossche had opened negotiations during the race, which was why he did not let him win the Tourmalet prime during the stage to Mourenx. Tellingly, when his closest friend in the bunch, Italo Zilioli, opted to go to Ferretti in 1971 rather than moving with Merckx to Molteni, Merckx had no problem with him taking the higher offer.
Van Den Bossche apparently did not like the atmosphere of conformity that surrounded the leader: ‘when he ordered a Trappist beer, everyone ordered one. You lost all your personality alongside Merckx. I didn’t want that.’ There was simply no room for a co-leader or a personality that even began to look as if it might be as large as Merckx’s, as Van Springel found out. He signed for Molteni in 1970, only to find out that Merckx was coming too. Assurances were given that he would get openings but he feels they never really happened: ‘You had to race Merckx’s way. It was an honour, but I never felt good there. I was capable of riding the Giro d’Italia but Merckx wanted to ride it. It was the same with the Tour de France.’ Van Springel, for one, went his own way, as did Patrick Sercu – until the end of both their careers – and there were some riders who turned Merckx down, for example Johan De Muynck. He was asked to join in 1971 but refused because he didn’t want his liberty curtailed.
The money they earned was not outstanding. Bob Lelangue said of his time at Faema that the wages were so meagre he might as well have paid the team to let him race. But cycling was a poorly resourced sport: in the late 1960s and into the 1970s there were plenty of riders on zero contracts, riding for a bike, a jersey, and expenses if they were lucky. Roger Swerts raced with Merckx from 1968 to 1973, earning 25,000 Belgian francs a month, ten months a year, a big increase on his wages as a new pro at the French team Mercier: 8000 Belgian francs. At Faema all the gregari earned the same basic wage to avoid jealousy, and their salary was bumped up with win bonuses. Van Buggenhout refused to increase Swerts’s money, Gimondi offered him 50,000 after he placed twelfth at the 1971 Giro and he accepted. Merckx wasn’t happy and eventually arranged for the transfer of two Italians to Gimondi’s team, so he could keep Swerts at his side.
Merckx was no easy taskmaster, but his teammates accepted his demands partly because of the rewards, partly because he appreciated their services, but also because he was equally hard with himself, if not harder. ‘He got the best out of us thanks to a bit of whipcracking and his personal example,’ said Swerts. ‘He kills us because he constantly wants us to make the running at the front, and to smash any attempts by our rivals to take the initiative,’ said Victor Van Schil. ‘But he is well able to smile and let us off the hook when we are worn out. So he ends up doing the bulk of the work himself, to the point w
here we actually feel ashamed about it.’
Teammates and managers came and went, but there was one constant presence throughout most of Merckx’s career: the burly figure of Guillaume Michiels. During his brief career as a professional – his three seasons were roughly average for a métier that takes in new men and spits them out constantly – Michiels had put up television aerials and made coffins for a living. He had also worked on the 1967 Giro as a factotum at Peugeot: in 1969, he mentioned to Merckx that the aerial-installation business was going to decline as companies used cables instead, so Merckx suggested he take a massage course and help him out. From 1970 he was employed directly by the great cyclist, an unusual arrangement: clearly Merckx felt the need to have someone at his side who could be trusted absolutely and who would ensure that he had only to think about training and racing. The right man was worth a little investment.
Michiels’s brief was a wide one. It started with driving: Merckx had to get from kermis to kermis, and, particularly after the Tour de France, from criterium to criterium. Forty years later, he can still rattle off the after-Tour schedule. The distances they covered in The Cannibal’s Mercedes were immense, and this in the days before the motorway network had spread around Europe: 60,000 kilometres in one year, 2700 kilometres in one weekend, Friday to Monday morning. They would leave races in France late in the evening – after the start fee had been collected and a meal eaten – then drive through the night to Brussels, crossing the centre of Paris via the boulevards, getting home at dawn. Additionally, Michiels went to all the bigger races as a soigneur, where he worked alongside the other soigneurs in Faema or Molteni making food, giving massage and doing anything else that was needed. The teams would reimburse Merckx for his service on the races. It was a task of epic proportions, requiring considerable sacrifice: in 1970, recalls Michiels – not without a certain amount of pride – he spent 340 days on the road in the service of The Cannibal.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 23
