Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike

by William Fotheringham

  At the start of the Tour he told journalists that he was not confident about his form, and was worried he might relapse into the poor health that had stalked him in the spring. It was, wrote the journalist Joël Godaert, ‘another fear on top of all those that had haunted his tortured mind since he began racing’. He hung on in second place behind the German Dietrich ‘Didi’ Thurau – a talent as ephemeral as Merckx had been durable – for two weeks but the reason he managed that was because the race dipped into the Pyrenees in the first couple of days, then had a long, flat hiatus until the Alps in the final week. After stage two, when the race crossed the Tourmalet, Peyresourde and Aubisque, there was no major change to the overall standings until stage fifteen, the time trial from Morzine to Avoriaz.

  It later emerged that he and others in his team picked up a stomach bug later in this phase, which included a passage through Belgium and an air transfer to Freibourg in Germany. Merckx had struggled over the Tourmalet, and lost time as soon as the race entered the Alps, but confirmation that he was not going to feature in the race to win came the next day, on the stage to Chamonix over the Col du Forclaz. Merckx was dropped; he wasn’t far behind at the top, thought he might regain contact on the descent, but felt he had too small a gear. He accepted his fate with dignity, ‘too bad for lovers of melodrama,’ wrote Robert Silva in l’Equipe in a piece which sounded the end of the Merckx era. ‘No tearful scenes, no nervous crisis. A new life has begun for the champion who marked an entire era.’ He accepted he had lost the Tour – the only time in the seven he had ridden that he had been defeated so early on – and said his plan was that this would be his last.

  Tuesday 19 July, the stage from Chamonix to l’Alpe d’Huez, was the champion’s final ordeal. It was hot, six hours long and included the Col de la Madeleine, and the Col du Glandon. Merckx’s system had finally given best. He had barely slept the previous night due to food poisoning and, although he led the chase behind an early escape in his old style, he fell to bits on the Madeleine, vomiting as he rode. He came round a little on l’Alpe d’Huez, overtaking a fair few backmarkers to come in twentieth, more than thirteen minutes behind the stage winner, Hennie Kuiper of Holland. Underlining that this day marked the end of a generation, Ocaña was suffering as well, not far behind. It was one of the Tour’s most brutal days, a torrid stage when Lucien Van Impe sparked action from the off and the high speed meant thirty riders were eliminated. Afterwards, Godaert interviewed Merckx in his hotel room, where he delivered a monologue in which two sentences came up time after time: ‘I’ve never suffered like that’ and ‘I could not abandon’.

  The very next day, however, he was on the attack into Saint-Etienne, moving up to sixth overall, the position he held in Paris, twelve minutes thirty-eight seconds behind Thévenet.2 He had started seven Tours and never abandoned one. He said he would return to the Tour, and explained later: ‘I said it because I really believed it, I didn’t feel I was beaten on my true quality. I was ill. I was unlucky. I wasn’t convinced it was all over.’ What he did not understand was that he was getting ill and unlucky because he was aging – in cycling terms, after a twelve-year pro career – and his body could no longer keep up with the demands he made on it. In the context of the rest of his season – Did Not Finish in Paris–Nice, 5th in Catalan Week, 8th in the Dauphiné, 11th in Switzerland – 6th in the Tour was actually a decent performance, but it was not Merckx as the cycling world knew him, or as he knew himself.

  At the world championships in San Cristóbal, Venezuela, six weeks later – after a round of criteriums and track meetings that entailed racing twenty-two times in forty days – his old rivalry with Lomme Driessens and Flandria reared its head, with the man in the middle Sean Kelly. The Irishman had not been expecting to travel to Venezuela – the Irish Federation would not have dreamed of paying his fare – until Driessens, his manager at Flandria, phoned up a couple of weeks beforehand and offered to fly him out. Kelly travelled with the Belgian team, stayed with them and trained with them before the race.

  ‘The day before I remember Driessens said to me that if Merckx got in a break I should ride on the front, I wasn’t to get in a break with him, but if a group with Merckx got a few seconds ahead, I was to get on the front and ride. I think the feeling was that if Merckx was in the break no one from the Belgian team could ride, and if he got away with five, six, seven riders, it might be difficult. After halfway he went off the front with two or three riders, I put my head down and chased.’ There was nothing particularly irregular in Kelly’s action: he was sponsored by Flandria, they had paid his fare and expenses, so it was perfectly reasonable for him to do what his trade team director requested. Driessens’ manipulation availed his Flandria riders not a whit: the gold medal went to Francesco Moser of Italy. Merckx finished thirty-third and last, just behind Raymond Poulidor, who was riding the last race of his career.

  Thirteen days later, on 17 September, came Merckx’s last win in a road race – although no one was aware of it at the time – in the kermis at Kluisbergen, at the foot of the Oude Kwaremont climb in the heart of Flanders. A week after that, he raced the Classic Tours–Versailles – nowadays the event is run in the opposite direction, from the Paris area to Tours – where he attacked right at the start and stayed away alone for 113 kilometres in a break that no one believed would last to the finish, but that no one dared chase because the man in front was Merckx. In his book Eddy Merckx, La Roue de la Fortune, Joël Godaert, writer at the Brussels daily La Dernière Heure, described his feelings: ‘A few years previously, everyone would have raved about another Merckx exploit. Who thought that on this day? The initial reaction was curiosity. Why was he making such an effort, that everyone knew was in vain? Then the feeling was that the scene we were witnessing was pitiful. Some asked this cruel question: should we praise the attitude of an athlete refusing to capitulate or deplore the fact that a champion of Merckx’s stature was reduced to the kind of stunt usually reserved for those making up the numbers?’

  That solo escape across the plains north of Tours amounted to Merckx’s goodbye. As French cycling writers would describe it, it was his baroud d’honneur, the dying fighter’s last thrust of the rapier.

  Even though he refused to acknowledge it at the time, Merckx was burned out, both physically and mentally. That was hardly surprising given the rate at which he had competed and the pressures it created. The statistics are mindbending. For eleven years, 1967 – 77, he had raced between 111 and 151 races a season, totalling 1413 races. One estimate was that he trained for 15,000 miles a year, raced about 30,000, travelled by car, rail and air another 80,000. The constitution of an ox was needed to live at that pace. In his peak years, 1969 to 1973, he would usually begin racing in mid-February, most often with the Lagueglia Trophy in Italy or the Tour of Sardinia. After the Giro di Lombardia, he would push on with criteriums – or in 1972 the Hour Record – until the second half of October. Then there were the track meetings, the Six Days, and, in 1974, the odd cyclo-cross race in January and December.

  There is a telling breakdown of his road programme in Rik Van Walleghem’s book Eddy Merckx Homme et Cannibale. In 1969, after the Tour de France finished on 20 July, he raced ten times in the next nine days, and added another twenty-four races, mainly criteriums, in August. This was probably the occasion Guillaume Michiels cited when Merckx raced fifty-four times without a day off. He told the soigneur towards the end of the summer as he took off his shorts, ‘you realise I’ve spent fifty days with grease on my backside?’, a reference to the cream on the chamois leather insert in his shorts. His programme had not lightened noticeably by 1975.

  Part of the reason was that he was trying to reconcile demands from two sources. Jean Van Buggenhout was in charge of Merckx’s racing but he couldn’t prevent Faema or Molteni asking their leader to ride a heavy programme of Italian races. Van Buggenhout wanted him to ride criteriums and track races anywhere and everywhere for appearance fees, while his commercial sponsors would ask him
to race in Italy above all because that was their market. Unlike today, the Giro was probably at least as important as the Tour in terms of cash and prestige, because so many of the best riders raced for Italian teams and the Italian sponsors weren’t particularly interested in winning the Tour. Merckx had to ride the Giro and he wanted to ride the Tour. Hence his saturated racing calendar. Many of the other races were Belgian kermis events, which were local to him, but he still had to pin a number on and perform. And there were countless occasions when he pushed himself to a state of exhaustion, such as the 1971 Liège– Bastogne–Liège, after which he had to shower in a chair, because he could barely stand. He would come back too soon after injury and illness – think of 1972 and the broken vertebra, 1969 and the serious head injuries at Blois. ‘You start from the principle that it will be OK, there are no limits and that anything can be solved by willpower.’ But there is only so much that body and mind can take.

  ‘Heavy’ race programmes were the norm from the 1940s into the 1980s, when the culture of cycling gradually changed: primarily because wages increased, the riders became more selective in what they rode so the criteriums, kermis races and track meets gradually declined in number. But Merckx’s programmes were heavier than most and he started most events wanting to win, unlike today, when those stars who race all year will have periods when they back off, events they ride merely for the miles. Even in 1974 and 1975, as his physical powers started to wane, he did not lighten up – they were his ‘heaviest’ years, with 140 and 151 races respectively – so it was no surprise that in 1976 and 1977 he went downhill. Later, he felt he had been too malleable when managers asked him to chase appearance money here, there and everywhere. He accepted that he needed to race the criteriums to earn a living but later wondered whether his career ‘would have been longer or better without that’. Claudine, however, was not convinced that her husband truly regretted racing as much as he did. ‘When he wasn’t racing and was sitting in an armchair, he would be ill from not being on his bike.’ He needed to compete, and he needed to race flat out; so he did.

  The racing was not the only pressure. Success did not make The Cannibal’s life easy. Once he had become public property, the demands of media, fans, the whole cycling world, were immense. The writer Marc Jeuniau noted that it could take up to two hours to get through to the single open phone line in the Merckx house. (There was a private line for talking to his sponsors in Italy.) His number was available through directory inquiries; most of the calls were fielded by Claudine, who would filter media demands as well. The line usually received about fifty calls a day; Jeuniau counted seventy-five calls in five hours one day when he was with Merckx not long after his accident in Blois. The demands were multifarious, one example being a call from a woman a few days after the accident, with this to say: ‘I hope that now that Eddy is unwell he will have time to answer me at last. I want my son to be a professional cyclist and a message from Eddy would help.’ Further inquiries revealed the son was three and a half. There were continual requests for money, appearances, logistical demands.

  Merckx rarely turned away television crews who would turn up at his house. In 1970, between the Giro and the Tour he had signed a contract with Belgian television to look over a dozen of the Tour stages, a staggering commitment, at the same time as he was receiving intensive treatment on his troublesome left leg.

  Not all the contact with fans and media was pleasant. His garden was invaded time after time by souvenir hunters, who once stole his racing jerseys as they hung on the washing line. He was accosted in restaurants, his house was burgled, he was phoned up in the dead of night, received verbal and written threats – one clearly unhinged letter from 1971 threatened to cut the throats of his wife and child with a razor – and was accused of killing off the sport. Notoriously, he was photographed naked in the showers after a race by a photographer whose cameras ‘went off accidentally’ and who then published the pictures.

  ‘Physically I don’t believe he was in bad way when he retired, I think it was a mental thing. It was just very difficult for him in his head,’ says Jean-Luc Vandenbroucke. Merckx told me that he had become ‘saturated. It was all too much. Psychologically I couldn’t handle it, my nerves had blown a fuse. I had asked too much of myself. I wanted to train but I couldn’t. I had lived on my nerves for too long. When the wires are cut, you can’t repair them.’ He drew the contrast with Raymond Poulidor and Joop Zoetemelk, both of whom raced into their forties. ‘There wasn’t the pressure on them to make their presence felt all the time. If you are number one, you end your career more quickly.’ In the end, he said, the constant worrying had got to him. ‘I was worn out by it.’ On another occasion, he told me: ‘I was mentally exhausted. I was tired of always racing.’

  By the end of 1977 Merckx was raging against the dying of the light, but events were moving around him. FIAT had changed their strategy after the Tour: they wanted a young French team, which might have included Merckx, but that would have entailed sacking most of his older teammates, which he would not countenance. With Jean Van Buggenhout no longer at his side to manage his affairs, it was up to him to look for a sponsor to shell out the twenty million Belgian francs it needed to back him and his henchmen. That must have been humiliating for a champion of his stature, but it was also unfamiliar, stressful territory. Hitherto, all he had done was race and deal with things that related to competition, but suddenly he was plunged into the commercial world. Wilkinson razors appeared to have signed up, but they pulled out in December, when everything had been prepared, including getting jerseys made.

  Late in the day, in January 1978, the department store C&A agreed to sponsor him, after a chance meeting between their owner and Merckx at a football match between Anderlecht and Liège. But after the worry of putting his team together, Merckx admitted ‘mentally I was worn out’. His plan, initially at least, was to race the Tour de France, then hang up his wheels without a lengthy round of ‘farewell appearances’. Physically he believed he was in good shape, having ‘lived like a monk’ and won the European Madison championship along with Sercu. After quitting at Montauroux in the incident that made such an impression on Ian Banbury, he finished fifth in the Tour du Haut Var but that was as good as it got: shortly afterwards he set off with his team to train on the course of Het Volk, but had to stop after seventy-five kilometres, in a state of exhaustion. He was diagnosed with colitis, an infection of the colon. Haut Var was one of just two races he finished that spring. The second and last was on 19 March at Kemzeke, a kermis race in a suburb of Sint Niklaas, north-east of Ghent, where he came in twelfth. This was the day after Milan–San Remo, and he was there rather than in Italy: that in itself spoke volumes.

  If there was a moment when he finally accepted defeat, it was here, when he turned to the soigneur, Pierrot de Wit, and said it was his last race, in spite of De Wit’s protestations. After that, reality set in for the first time in seventeen years. He returned from training sessions worn out. He got one cold after another. He went on holiday to the Swiss ski resort of Crans-Montana, where he put in long cross-country ski outings. The rest availed him little: on his return, his training rides became shorter and shorter. He was at the start of the Tour of Romandie, but it was to sign autographs in a C&A store. On 8 May he was seen training on the course of the Grand Prix de Wallonie and watched the race pass. It was, Godaert told me, open knowledge that he would quit; the only question was when he would make it public.

  He announced his retirement at 4.08 p.m. on 18 May at the Brussels International Press Centre, the press having been summoned the day before. ‘We had been waiting for it since March. Everyone knew why we had been called there,’ Godaert says. ‘There were a lot of us; he was very emotional, everyone was a bit emotional. There was a massive silence as he read out his statement. He didn’t take questions; he repeated the statement for the radio reporters in Flemish, English, French. He said it was mental fatigue due to having to look for a sponsor all winter, rather than ph
ysical. But there is no doubt it was physical fatigue as well.’

  Merckx had set himself a deadline of 15 May to begin preparing seriously for the Tour but had realised that he could no longer recover from the slightest effort on the bike; Godaert also believes the delay was necessary for him to negotiate his exit with C&A, who had come into cycling to sponsor Merckx, not to watch him quit. In his statement, Merckx explained that the doctors had told him that he could not race and that meant he could not prepare for the Tour de France. Physically he could not do it anymore, which is pretty much what would be expected given his ability to push his body to places others dared not venture for far longer than any other cyclist had managed.

  Ironically, in view of Van Buggenhout’s assertion in 1969 that his protégé was already figuring out what to do after he stopped cycling, The Cannibal had quit the sport by the back door without preparing for what was to come. ‘The first weeks were appalling. I didn’t know what to do with my time.’ Claudine recalled going out in the car together and wondering what normal couples did on Sundays. ‘When I stopped cycling, psychologically I stopped too. I didn’t feel I fitted my skin.’