Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike

by William Fotheringham

  ‘There was war with Maertens,’ recalls Bob Lelangue, who managed the Belgian team. Maertens was Flemish, young and massively talented, meaning for some of the Flandrian press he was a more attractive prospect than the reserved, French-speaking Merckx. Another issue was the accommodation on offer from the race organisers: school dormitories. Merckx wanted to stay somewhere better; the organisers said there was not a hotel room in town, so Lelangue used his contacts to find a hotel ‘where all the stars had fallen off the sign’. The accommodation was not the only culture shock when the world titles were contested outside Europe for the first time. The team cars were massive pick-up trucks; the television cameras were carried on bizarre flatbed vehicles. The backdrop was new, but the picture of Merckx dominating was familiar.

  Only eighteen men managed to complete the course, and the medals were contested by a lead group of five: Merckx, the Italian Giacinto Santambrogio and three Frenchmen: Poulidor, Bernard Thévenet and the bespectacled climber Mariano Martínez. The French team were the biggest threat, with Thévenet making a lone move that lasted a hundred kilometres and ended only seven from the finish. When he was caught, Poulidor attacked, and Merckx accompanied him. Given the Belgian’s finishing speed and Poupou’s ageing legs, there was only ever going to be one winner in the two-man sprint. Merckx’s third world title put him level in the history books with two other greats, Alfredo Binda and Rik Van Steenbergen. It was not quite his final flourish, but it ensured that during his final brief spell of domination in early 1975, Merckx was wearing the rainbow stripes.

  Asked about retirement later that year, Merckx had this to say: ‘When the wind is favourable, that is not the time to stop sailing. I became a racing cyclist to express myself, so I must go to my own limits. What I have to avoid, above all, is hitting a decline, the beginning of mediocrity.’ There was no sign of impending mediocrity in the spring of 1975. Here Merckx pulled together his last great string of consecutive victories. In late March and early April he landed Milan–San Remo for the sixth time in nine years, Amstel Gold, and Catalan Week, but in that race he lost the services of Jos Bruyère, who broke his leg in a particularly unfortunate crash. Another rider asked Bruyère how many kilometres were left to the finish, Bruyère took his route card out of his pocket and was passing it over to him when he touched a wheel. The loss of his strongest domestique was probably fatal for Merckx’s chances of taking a record sixth Tour de France. Indeed, that spring Bruyère had been going almost as well as his master, winning the Tour of the Mediterranean and Het Volk and playing a key role in Merckx’s Milan–San Remo triumph. It was an epic victory, forged when Merckx, Bruyère and Jos Huysmans formed part of a nineteen-man group that escaped after a hundred kilometres. In the finale, Bruyère got away himself over the Poggio, with Merckx letting him go, before linking up to him when Francesco Moser counterattacked. Victory in the sprint enabled Merckx to equal Costante Girardengo’s record of six wins.

  Two days after his victory in Catalan Week came the Tour of Flanders, where Merckx made an early attack, as soon as the monts were reached. In weather as vile if not more so than when he had first won de Ronde in 1969, he finally went clear eighty kilometres from the finish with Frans Verbeeck, carving out a four-minute lead over the Mur de Grammont. He got rid of Verbeeck five kilometres from the finish; ‘the Flying Milkman’ was grounded, unable to get off his bike without assistance, in a state of complete exhaustion. Afterwards, Verbeeck had visibly aged. ‘I have to tell it like it is,’ he said. ‘He goes five kilometres faster than the rest of us.’ As far as Merckx was concerned, this was one of his best Classic wins: the gulf between him and the rest summed up by the photographs of him flying past lapped riders on the finish circuit in Meerbeke.

  In Paris–Roubaix Merckx was desperately unlucky, puncturing eight kilometres from the finish when the race was set to come down to a sprint between him, Marc De Meyer, De Vlaeminck and Ludo Dierickx. The other three didn’t wait for him, but he regained contact after a three-kilometre chase. Not surprisingly, however, he didn’t have enough left to beat ‘The Gypsy’ in the sprint. De Vlaeminck believed this was the best of his four victories in ‘Hell’. A week later, however, Merckx landed his fifth victory in Liège–Bastogne–Liège, a sprint finish after he had constantly attacked in the closing kilometres to tire out the younger, faster men.

  The results looked similar, but The Cannibal had changed. At Paris–Nice that year it was noticed that he no longer ‘ran’ the race. His mechanic Marcel Ryckaert explained: ‘You would need to be blind not to notice the change in Eddy. As far as technical stuff goes he’s always sought out the last little detail if something doesn’t quite work but he’s less demanding now. Now everything is always OK or nearly. He’s incredibly undemanding.’ Merckx himself said he was fed up with the way that the other leaders would wait for him to take on the race, let him get tired, then attack him. He admitted that he was more reflective, less willing to take risks everywhere to gain a few seconds. In other words, he had finally grown up.

  Merckx’s body had been feeling the strain the previous year, but that was not the only thing that was changing. To make life harder for The Cannibal stage race organisers were increasingly making their races more difficult by including summit finishes that favoured younger riders. There was also a feeling among race followers that mentally he might be tiring after ten years at the top, and after the incredible efforts he had to make to win so much in 1974, his best year in terms of Super Prestige Pernod points (the season-long points’ award which rewarded the best rider each year) since 1971. On the road, fresh blood was appearing in the peloton: Maertens was hitting his brief peak, as were his burly sidekick Marc De Meyer and the squat, balding third man in the Flandria trio, Michel Pollentier, while in Italy Francesco Moser had emerged. At the same time, rivals from the past such as De Vlaeminck, Verbeeck and Godefroot were still going strong. The other vital change was the loss of Jean Van Buggenhout. Although Molteni continued through 1975 and 1976, Merckx now felt personally under pressure to make sure his team sponsorships carried on, because there were twenty-five people earning a living from him.

  Later that spring, there was another hint that he was not as voracious as he had been. In the Tour of Romandie in early May, he refused to help Joop Zoetemelk defend his race leader’s jersey – the Dutchman was in a rival team so there was no reason for Merckx to make his team chase the moves – and the pair lost fourteen minutes in a curious stalemate. ‘When I refuse to work for the other guys, the race becomes a promenade,’ he said afterwards.

  Bernard Thévenet is a gentle man who always looks a little overwhelmed, something which is hardly surprising given that he has spent nearly forty years trying to live up to the events of one week in July 1975. Like Raymond Poulidor, he has apple cheeks that make it look as if he is permanently smiling. Like Poupou, ‘Nanard’ is a fixture at the Tour de France, having worked first as a directeur sportif when his racing career ended, then commentating for French television. Thévenet was never hard enough or political enough to be a great team manager; as a commentator he never quite matched Laurent Fignon – another double Tour winner – for incisiveness and opinionated wisdom. That matters little: now in his early sixties, the Burgundian has his place in cycling history. He will always be celebrated as the man who ended Eddy Merckx’s winning run in the Tour. He was, indeed, the first man to beat The Cannibal in a major stage race since Merckx rode his first Giro d’Italia in 1967. A modest person, he finds it a source of constant surprise that, thirty-six years on, people are still talking about the events of July 1975: even, that a journalist might call from England wanting his story.

  Thévenet was born less than three years after Merckx, in January 1948, and spent his early childhood on a small farm in a village appropriately called Le Guidon, the handlebar, a name commonly given to settlements at a turning in a road. He was inspired to race a bike after the Tour de France passed through his village in 1961, and recalled watching the mass of movi
ng toeclips shimmering in the sun, approaching from a distance for at least forty seconds. They were like stirrups on the horses of medieval knights, he said. He turned professional in 1970 and took Merckx’s scalp in one of his first races, up Mont Faron, the great hill that rises above the port of Toulon. It was his first victory, with Merckx second after a crash.

  ‘You would be honoured to be near Merckx in a race. It was admiring a film star, reading about them, seeing the pictures, then meeting face-to-face. I didn’t dare speak to him. I was happy just to be next to him.’ Nanard moved gradually up the hierarchy through the early 1970s, improving a little every year: fourth in the Tour in 1971, second in 1973 behind Ocaña, half a dozen stage wins along the way. He was a dogged man, who didn’t have De Vlaeminck’s panache, Gimondi’s elegant pedalling style, Fuente’s anarchism, or Ocaña’s manic-depressive willpower. He was ‘strong and self-willed, but not particularly adroit on a bicycle; he could climb efficiently, but on the descents lost time manoeuvring round the corners,’ as Geoffrey Nicholson said.

  The Cannibal came into the 1975 Tour low on form after a bout of illness. His hitherto rude health had deserted him, a pattern which had begun in 1974 and was to continue from now on. He had caught a cold at a nocturne in Copenhagen and it had turned into tonsillitis. That meant he was unable to start the Giro, which he was planning to use as a build-up to the Tour. There was speculation that he was staying away because the organisers were fed up with him winning, but this seems unlikely since he had given his wife a list of things to put in his bags and had his team waiting for his arrival in Milan. Instead he had to ride the Dauphiné where he suffered as Thévenet flew up the mountains – one writer observed that he finished one stage ‘yellowish, livid in the face’ – then the Tour of Switzerland where De Vlaeminck was at his best, fresh from the Giro, and pushed him into second.

  Thévenet had begun to sense that there might be an opportunity after the Dauphiné: ‘I was getting better, he didn’t seem to be quite as good. I wondered if our trajectories might cross. But no one had beaten him before in a major Tour, and he was as competitive as ever. In Liège–Bastogne–Liège that April, when I was in the lead group of strong riders at the finish – with guys like De Vlaeminck and Godefroot – I attacked at a kilometre to go, thinking that the others would follow Merckx and that might inhibit him. But he managed to get clear of them, get ten metres on them, held it all through the final kilometre and beat me. He wasn’t just strong physically, but mentally and tactically as well. Psychologically it was impossible to be at his level.’

  When the Tour started ‘his rivals [were] moving out onto the high plateau of their season’s form, Merckx still grinding up the slope’ in Nicholson’s words. It was a route which was ‘sadistic’ in Jacques Goddet’s view, and it could have been designed for Thévenet: five summit finishes, no time bonuses for stage wins, and a serious climb inserted into the final time trial. Merckx had two key rivals: the Frenchman, who had dominated the Dauphiné, and Zoetemelk, the latter still recovering from his horrendous accident and illness of the previous year. Thévenet’s team manager at Peugeot, Maurice de Muer, came to him before the start with a piece of paper, on which he had written how much his protégé needed to gain at each of the mountain-top finishes: one minute at the Puy-de-Dôme and so on. The critical target was this: when the race reached the Pyrenees, eleven stages in, Thévenet needed to be less than three minutes behind The Cannibal.

  Merckx came second in the prologue in the south Belgian town of Charleroi, behind Francesco Moser. He then went on the attack in a typical improvised move on the Flandrian hills the next morning, taking with him the young Italian, Zoetemelk and Van Impe and stealing a march on Thévenet and Poulidor. That afternoon as the race headed from Belgium to France, Poulidor made his move and Zoetemelk lost time due to a puncture; within twenty-four hours, both Merckx’s biggest rivals had slipped behind. On the west coast of France, at Saint Jean-de-Monts, Merckx won the time trial, putting another fifty-two seconds into Thévenet with Zoetemelk even further behind.

  At Auch four days later, in another time trial, Merckx took what was to be his last individual Tour stage win, the 352nd road win of his career, but this time the Frenchman was breathing down his neck after Merckx had lost time to a puncture. By now Zoetemelk was almost five minutes back so the overall battle boiled down to Merckx, the Peugeot leader, and his old rival Felice Gimondi. As far as Thévenet was concerned, he had achieved his first objective: he was only two minutes thirty-five seconds behind Merckx. ‘I was in with a chance. It was do-able.’ On the key Pyrenean stage to Pla d’Adet, Merckx made two crucial errors: he asked his team to make the pace too early, on the Tourmalet; without Bruyère’s horsepower they wore themselves out, leaving their leader isolated in the final kilometres. He then made the mistake of trying to follow Zoetemelk’s attack on the climb to the finish. Usually, he followed the classic tactic of letting the climber gain a small advantage, then pulling him back gradually without going too deep. Staying with a climber as he makes his initial acceleration leaves a rider open to a counter-attack and on this occasion it came from Thévenet. Merckx lost two minutes eighteen seconds and with it the initiative, which passed to the Frenchman, who might actually have gained more time had he not punctured 400 metres from the line.

  Gimondi, however, had slipped to five minutes behind and was out of the picture, so Merckx’s strategy switched to marking Thévenet. His plan was to wait, then make his attack on the stage through the southern Alps to Pra-Loup, which came eight days from Paris. On the summit finish at the Puy-de-Dôme, the day before the rest day – thirty-six hours before Pra-Loup – he had only to control the race and that is what he managed to do until five kilometres from the summit, when Thévenet and Van Impe attacked. There was no need to panic; he had been in this situation with both Fuente and Ocaña in the past. He maintained the gap at about a hundred metres but, as he was about to sprint 150 metres from the finish line, the incident that defined the race took place. A spectator, Nello Breton, emerged from the packed crowd and slammed his fist into Merckx’s lower back.

  He crossed the line thirty-four seconds behind Thévenet, who closed to just fifty-eight seconds behind overall, but that was the least of the damage. The punch left him with a bruise on his side close to his liver; as he got his breath back, he vomited bile. As he was going down the mountain escorted by police he identified his attacker. Breton claimed he was pushed forward, but it doesn’t look like this from the television footage. His right arm can be seen emerging from the crowd as Merckx passes through the tight corridor of spectators – Merckx rides into the arm and a few pedal strokes later he is clutching his side. It doesn’t look as if Breton is simply pushed off balance, because he seems to strike Merckx with some force. Merckx sued for damages and several months later he travelled to Clermont-Ferrand for a court ruling which awarded him a symbolic one franc.

  Merckx’s explanation was that the French press had been stoking up the opposition to him. ‘It was a conscious gesture,’ he said. Merckx’s popularity is now taken as such a given that it can be hard to appreciate or understand the strength of feeling against The Cannibal among some cycling fans. It’s easier, perhaps, to translate into a modern context if we remember the comments, slogans and spittle that were directed at Lance Armstrong in his later years of dominating the Tour. To start with, the press had mixed feelings about Merckx’s domination, torn between admiration for it and a desire to see him laid low. The public disliked the fact that he never courted their popularity. As has been established, he did not play to the gallery. Astonishingly, a film-maker interviewed spectators at the Tour and found that nine out of ten disliked Merckx ‘because he is the only one who ever wins’.

  There were others who had stronger feelings, however. Belgian journalists on the Puy-de-Dôme stage had felt that the crowd was incredibly hostile; their cars had been walloped by spectators and insults shouted. The journalist Théo Mathy published a series of letters from
a Frenchwoman received by Merckx during the 1971 Tour. The woman, apparently from Lorraine, was an admirer of Poulidor. She attacked Merckx’s ‘pride’ and ‘pretensions’, related her joy upon hearing him being whistled during the stage finish in Nancy (‘I would have whistled at you myself if I had been there’). She wrote: ‘I hope that one day, you crack beautifully, because Bobet, Coppi, Kübler and Koblet all cracked in their time.’ She described her delight at his loss of time on the Puy-de-Dôme – ‘I danced the Twist when I heard’ – and amidst her gloating over the defeat at Orcières-Merlette she admits, ‘I like you a bit more now that you have shown you are not superhuman, a sort of God … cycling was losing its interest.’

  Merckx was examined during the rest day at Nice and found to have mild inflammation around the liver area – he had to be given a blood thinner before the start of the next stage. But he was confident enough, having limited his losses. The Pra-Loup stage, immediately after the rest day, was the one where he reckoned he could win the Tour – four cols, each with a brutal descent, followed by a climb to the finish which is easier than either the Puy-de-Dôme or Pla d’Adet. On the third col of the day, the Col des Champs – sixteen kilometres, 1053 metres in altitude, very steep at its foot and a typical exposed, bleak southern Alpine col – as a selection of ten riders was forming, Merckx felt pain in his right side where the punch had landed. He asked his teammate Ward Janssens to slip back to the Red Cross ambulance and get an analgesic. At which point Thévenet began to pile on the pressure. ‘I went five or six times, but he got me every time,’ recalls the Frenchman. ‘It annoyed me, because I had thought I might get some time on him.’