Back home in Brussels, in between races, the daily routine was for Michiels to leave for Merckx’s house about 8 a.m., buying fresh rolls known as pistolets – pistols – from a local baker en route. While Merckx was having breakfast, he would prepare the bike and food for the day’s training. Then he would wheel out the motorbike, which Merckx had bought specially. There is a whole sequence in La Course en Tête showing Merckx and Michiels training with the motorbike, and many pictures of Michiels with Merckx in his slipstream. What is not widely known, however, is that Michiels was there to provide company and shelter. What he and Merckx did was not conventional motor-paced training, where the bike is used to replicate the intensity and speed of a race. ‘He never went fast behind the bike. The idea was not to ride alone, not to have to ride into a headwind by himself.’ The only time Merckx used the bike for motor-paced training rather than merely riding was in June 1969, when he had left the Giro prematurely and was short of racing.
Buzzing along, Michiels would keep the bike in third gear. ‘I would hit eighty kilometres per hour on the descents, twenty-five kilometres per hour up the climbs.’ They would cover huge distances in this way – he talks of outings to Namur, Huy, deep into Wallonia – often talking as they went, safe in the knowledge that no one could hear them over the buzzing of the motorbike. He has fond memories of those days. They would pass groups of amateur cyclists pedalling in the opposite direction, and then The Cannibal and his driver would play a little game. ‘They would stand up and point, say “it’s Eddy Merckx”, and I would keep an eye in the mirrors. They would turn in the road, I would say to Eddy, “they’re coming”. He didn’t like anyone to sit behind him as he rode so I would slow down a little and we would say “let’s see what they are made of”. They might get to twenty metres behind, then I would open up a bit. It would be “there is a strong pair here, they’re not giving up”, that kind of thing. Sometimes they would get to within ten metres, then I’d just go faster and faster until they cracked.’
The old soigneur has fond memories of a similar episode with the racing driver Jacky Ickx, who was one of the few permitted to accompany Merckx when he rode. Ickx did not like to ride in front of The Cannibal, for fear he might make him fall off; he ended up getting less shelter than he might otherwise have done. One day, Michiels and Merckx took him east, with the wind blowing from the side – making for tough riding – then turned south, towards Namur, with the wind on their backs. That meant a high speed on a road which rose and fell: soon they could see Ickx struggling. Soigneur and cyclist knew that when he fell apart, as he was clearly going to do, and as he eventually did, he would have to turn into the wind to go home. ‘He didn’t know where he was coming from. He had to call his wife to come and collect him. We had him brilliantly.’
Perhaps most telling of all is the point in the conversation with Michiels when I ask whether they did this kind of thing on rest days, or on training days. Modern cyclists might distinguish between the two, as might amateur cyclists: for Michiels and Merckx, there does not appear to have been one or the other. In between Merckx’s 120–150 races a year, they just rode, motorbike in front, ‘half man, half bike’ behind. Kilometre after kilometre, rain or shine, frosty weather or fine.
The core of Merckx’s team remained with him for 1974: Victor Van Schil, Spruyt, Huysmans, Bruyère, De Schoenmaecker. At the start of the season the leader dispatched Bruyère to win the Het Volk Classic; the team were as strong as they had ever been, but that spring was when the cracks started to appear in their boss’s carapace. For Merckx, it was a disastrous early season. He went without a single Classic win for the first time in his pro career due to a series of illnesses. In Paris–Nice he caught a cold, and came up against the Dutchman Joop Zoetemelk, who was in the best form of his career. (Zoetemelk’s purple patch ended early that summer when ‘the eternal second’ fractured his skull in a horrific crash in the Midi Libre, a pile-up that prevented him from giving Merckx a run for his money in the Tour de France that year.) Viral pneumonia kept The Cannibal off his bike on doctor’s orders for the best part of a month that spring, leaving him short of form at the start of the Giro d’Italia, where José Manuel Fuente was to enjoy one of the best races of his life, taking five mountain-top stage wins having, as usual, come straight from the Vuelta, which he had won that year.
Fuente had good enough form to win that Giro, which would have matched Merckx’s double from the year before. Having taken the lead on stage three to Sorrento, El Tarangu turned the screw with two more stage victories, at the ski resort of Il Ciocco in Tuscany, and at Carpegna. That win came over the same climb, Monte Carpegna, where he had lost the Giro the previous year. Fortunately for the Belgian, the Spaniard was as inconsistent as ever and contrived to lose the race on a single day. Merckx pulled back time in the time trial at Forte dei Marmi in Tuscany and he found the opening on a rainy but otherwise innocuous stage up the Ligurian coast to San Remo two days later. His attack came not long after the start. ‘Everyone thought he was crazy, for sure, because there were still two hundred kilometres to go and [Fuente’s] KAS team would obviously chase him,’ recalled Patrick Sercu. ‘The weather was bad, rain and lightning: he hung on and won the Giro. Behind, we didn’t even know if we were on the right road.’
Fuente lost ten minutes, blaming his bad day on an attack of hunger knock. With the little Spaniard out of the reckoning, the Giro boiled down to a narrow fight between Merckx and the up-and-coming Gianbattista Baronchelli. Merckx would, however, remember it for something darker: the death of Jean Van Buggenhout. The manager had been close to him since his first pedal strokes on the Brussels velodrome and had also been his confidant and father figure. Merckx was told during stage sixteen to Mendrisio, and rode the rest of the race in a state of shock (there was a report that on one of the stages that followed, he barely noticed when he broke a toe strap). There was talk of abandoning but he decided to carry on as a tribute to Van Buggenhout.
Fuente made several attempts to regain the lost time, winning the stage to Mendrisio along the way and closing with the cliffhanging stage at Tre Cime di Lavaredo, two days out from the finish in Milan. Between the penultimate pass, Passo Mauria, and the start of the ascent to the Tre Cime, Fuente sprang out of the peloton in an attempt to close down his five minute nine second deficit on Merckx, who had no option but to chase together with Jos de Schoenmaecker. Three miles from the top, in between massive snowdrifts, it was Baronchelli who attacked, putting Merckx on the ropes. In freezing temperatures and the beginnings of a snowstorm, he hung on to his pink jersey by just twelve seconds, the narrowest victory ever in the race and the closest finish of any of his ten major Tour wins. He believed it was the hardest of all of them. Given the importance of the Tre Cime at the start of Merckx’s career, the comparisons have to be made. The Merckx of 1968 was a youth setting off to conquer the world, with all of cycling at his feet; The Cannibal of 1974 an ageing champion clinging on to what he could as the pure climbers did their utmost to unseat him. For Fuente, however, this marked the end of his three years trying to upset Merckx, as a kidney disorder was to end his relatively short career. In the following year’s Tour de France, he finished outside the time limit on the first day, his racing days all but over before he reached thirty.
Three days after the Giro, Merckx was in the Swiss town of Gippingen to start the second leg in a now-legendary triple: Giro, Tour of Switzerland and Tour de France, forty-three days of racing between 16 May and 21 July; three days recovery after the Giro, five between the finish of the Swiss Tour in the north-western town of Olten and the Tour de France start in Brest. The ten-day Swiss event – the hardest stage race on the calendar behind the three Grand Tours – was won in essentially defensive style, in which Merckx landed the prologue time trial, then rode tactically until the final time trial to seal victory by fifty-eight seconds from the Swede Gosta Pettersson. But he came out of the race with a sore backside, a small sebaceous cyst precisely where his crutch sat on the po
int of the saddle. Watch the old television footage and it’s no surprise, given the way that The Cannibal throws himself around the bike as he chases Fuente through the mountains in the Giro. He was to have problems in this area for the next couple of years, like Louison Bobet, whose career was ended by a crutch wound.
The operation to clear up the cyst took place the day after the Tour of Switzerland finished, 22 June; recovery was expected to take five days, precisely the interval before the start of the Tour de France on Thursday 27 June. Merckx travelled to Brest for the Tour start a day late because he was having his stitches out. When the race started, the wound was small, but it was still open, which did not bode well for a three-week event. All he could do was pray for dry weather. As it was, he could never get comfortable, and the whole thing reawoke the referred pain in his left leg dating back to the crash in Blois. He won the prologue with his shorts bloodied as the wound opened further; for the next three weeks it needed constant care, constant bathing, the application of cream and sterile plasters, and cushioning with bits of foam and bandages.
Merckx’s crutch was the biggest threat to him in that Tour. Ocaña was absent, having been sacked by Bic; Zoetemelk was recovering from the meningitis that had followed his crash; Fuente was resting after his efforts of April and May; Lucien Van Impe had a broken wrist; and Bernard Thévenet was off form after a series of crashes in the Tour of Spain. Poulidor was to be Merckx’s principal rival, although he was now heading for retirement at thirty-eight, while Fuente’s teammates at KAS threatened sporadically. Merckx rode strongly from the off, and so too did Bruyère: third in the prologue time trial behind his master, then part of the stage-winning escape en route to Saint-Pol-de-Léon in Brittany on the first stage. That earned the domestique the yellow jersey, not that he really wanted it. Typically for a team man, he felt he had risen above his station; he recalls that after being given the maillot jaune, he covered it up with a Molteni jersey. ‘I was embarrassed to wear it, because I had taken it off Eddy Merckx.’ He held the lead for three days, through the brief transit to England for a stage in Plymouth, before giving up the jersey – one suspects with considerable relief – to his leader.
Much like Bernard Hinault in the 1985 race, Merckx was riding with his aura, his reputation and his experience as well as his head and his legs, bluffing the opposition that he was stronger than was actually the case. From the very first intermediate sprint of the race he was out to snatch every time bonus he could; that was the early pattern. Hence a superb late attack to take the flat stage to Châlons-sur-Marne, sweeping into the town’s main square a few yards ahead of the bunch, taking the right-angled bends with his bike leaned to perfection and the entries and exits calculated to the inch. It was his twenty-sixth stage win: he was now ahead of the record held by André Leducq. He was riding more conservatively than in the past and the Alpine stages were essentially a defensive operation against the KAS trio of Vicente López Carril, Francisco Galdós and Gonzalo Aja.
On the Col du Télégraphe, the day after the rest day in Aix-les-Bains, Bruyère put the field to the sword and Merckx dislodged Poulidor on the Galibier en route to Serre-Chevalier. The evergreen Frenchman lost five minutes and that effectively decided the race, with Merckx’s only other rivals Aja and López Carril, that day’s stage winner. He was climbing out of the saddle most of the time, to avoid putting pressure on his crutch; it was a handicap but it did not alter the outcome. Twenty-four hours later came the Ventoux, where it was De Schoenmaecker who did the work, with Merckx controlling the opposition in classic style: the climbers attacked, he kept at his rhythm and limited his losses. It was what Anquetil had done before him, what Hinault, Indurain and LeMond would all do in Tours to come. Jos Spruyt won that day’s stage to Orange; three days later, his leader landed the first Pyrenean stage over the Envalira to Seo d’Urgel in Spain, and then came the finish at Pla d’Adet.
It was the first time the Tour had climbed up the steep mountainside to the ski station above the town of Saint-Lary-Soulan and the finish immediately earned a place in Tour history. It remains celebrated for the rebirth of Raymond Poulidor, who took his first stage win since 1967. Merckx’s team had finally fallen apart by the time the race arrived at the climb, and it was ‘Poupou’ who made the running together with the Spaniards. Merckx’s old leg and back injuries were playing up, and he had to change his bike. ‘The yellow jersey holder looked awful, his head lolling and nodding, obviously suffering …’ said one account, adding, ‘he finished in as near a state of collapse as made no difference.’ Poulidor took his first Tour stage win for eight years, twelve months after quitting the Tour due to a life-threatening crash, and France was in ecstasies. Merckx, however, had the Tour won. The French press were more interested in Poulidor’s second youth, ten years after his epic duel with Anquetil on the Puy-de-Dôme, than the state of Merckx’s undercarriage.
The only man Merckx had to watch was Vicente López Carril. After losing a little more ground to Poulidor, he added the Bordeaux time trial and took the stage to Orléans with a surprise attack ten kilometres from the finish – gaining one minute twenty-five seconds on the bunch in a move that nowadays would be unthinkable by a Tour leader, and even then earned him accusations of leaving nothing for the minnows. He was then awarded the final stage win on the Cipale velodrome in Paris after Sercu was disqualified for moving off his line in the sprint. It was his fifth Tour win out of five starts, with another eight stages added to his total of thirty-five along the way. That remains the record. While The Cannibal’s body may have been on the edge of surrender, his mind was as competitive as ever. He had no need to compete in the final sprint, just as he had had no need to attack at the finish in Orléans, but he did so nonetheless, with the spirit of Mourenx alive and pulsating in his veins.
TWILIGHT OF THE GOD
‘He is a prisoner of his persona, of his legend, a victim like every star of the reputation he carved out for himself. He has to win all the time and keep the public happy every day. His personal tragedy is that he is incapable of saying no, really saying no’, Théo Mathy
Via Roma, San Remo, 19 March 1976
JEAN-LUC VANDENBROUCKE HAS GOT rid of all the press cuttings from his racing career, apart from one that tells the story of a race where he came second, a race he did not expect to be in a position to win. Milan–San Remo 1976 was a race the rider from West Hainaut considered as good as a victory, because he came second to Eddy Merckx. At the age of fourteen, he had asked for Merckx’s autograph at a criterium after his victory in the 1969 Tour de France; back then, he had never imagined that he would end up here, in this position.
Vandenbroucke was a new professional with the Peugeot team, wearing a jersey with the same chequerboard design as the one on Merckx’s back when he won this race in 1966. By the time Milan–San Remo came round, he had been on the road for six weeks solid, travelling to one race after another. His wife was lonely back in Belgium, and was expecting their child. He was so desperate to get home that he had spent 10,000 Belgian francs – two-fifths of his wage – on the last place on a charter flight after the race.
En route to San Remo, he survived the initial sort-out among the massive field, over 250 of them. He made the cut when the final selection was made over the capi, the little headlands between Alassio and San Remo. And when Eddy Merckx finally forced himself clear of the leaders, in extremis, as The Cannibal was no longer as strong as he used to be, and the host of Classics specialists in the lead group were not willing to let him go, he chased hard to get to Merckx’s wheel.
He hung on as Merckx did his best to dislodge him on the Poggio – ‘it was terrible, because I didn’t know the climb, my effort to get to him was so brutal, and there were still two kilometres left’ – and fought back grimly each time a gap opened as the great man drove hard through every corner on the descent. If Vandenbroucke did not expect to be in a position to beat the great man, it was typical of Merckx that he feared the youngster might manage it. He told
Vandenbroucke of his fears many years later, but the upset did not happen. The new-pro – who had been tipped as a possible successor to Merckx during his prolific amateur career – did not sprint. ‘I led him to the Via Roma. I didn’t try to beat him. Second to Merckx was a victory to me.’
In the finish photograph, he is a distant figure, hidden among the motorbikes several yards behind Merckx as The Cannibal punches the air in obvious delight. As good as a victory it may have been for Vandenbroucke, but it was also a milestone for Merckx, the last major win of his career. It came ten years after he had sprinted up the Via Roma ahead of Herman Van Springel to claim his first major professional victory. His years of dominance closed just where they had begun.
Merckx’s decline was gradual at first. The Giro–Switzerland– Tour de France treble in 1974 gave the impression that the nonpareil was still superhuman; a few cracks had shown but the edifice remained unassailable. The world championship in Montreal in September 1974 did nothing to dispel that. Merckx led perhaps the strongest Belgian team there has ever been, including seven possible winners such as himself, Van Springel, Freddy Maertens and Roger De Vlaeminck. But team support mattered little on one of the toughest courses ever: twenty-one laps, each including two climbs. Merckx had to take matters into his own hands, making one definitive attack late in the race, escaping with Raymond Poulidor after being closely marked by the Italians and the French for most of the race.
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 24
