He took occasional outings on his bike, but only because his doctors had advised it would be wise to do so for the sake of his heart. The agreement with C&A stipulated he had to work with the team by turning up at certain races, but it was not the best place for him, ‘in a world where I knew the riders, I was at the dinner table swapping stories with them, and it wasn’t really good for me’. On the 1978 Tour he could be seen applauding Jos Bruyère from a team car as his former domestique, now his team leader, defended the yellow jersey in the first long time trial. ‘MERCKX FOLLOWS BRUYÈRE AS HE DID BEFORE’ ran the headline in that July’s Miroir du Cyclisme, one of the first French cycling magazines I read as a teenager. That year’s Tour went to Bernard Hinault, the next great cycling champion. As the French say, the page turned rapidly.
Merckx’s career did not have to end in this way. He could have gone on, as Rik Van Looy, Jacques Anquetil and Rik Van Steenbergen did before him, milking the start money from criteriums and six-day races, eschewing the road races which would show his true standing in the hierarchy. ‘He had a proposition from Tuborg which would have involved some six-days and criteriums, and would have been well paid,’ revealed Patrick Sercu, who would probably have partnered Merckx in the track races. ‘But he didn’t want it if he couldn’t do the Classics and Tour de France. He could have done five years as a tourist, just being Merckx.’
But simply turning up for the money had never been Merckx’s style. Nothing less than being the best had been good enough for fifteen years, and, when he could no longer be the best, he no longer wanted to compete. Interviewed after his defeat in the 1975 Tour de France to Thévenet, he said that, when the decision to quit was made, there would be no compromise: ‘It will not be a matter of reducing my activities by cutting such and such a race from my programme. If I broke away from my normal schedule I would feel I was cheating the others and cheating myself.’
Lelangue feels, like Sercu, that Merckx could have gone on if he had been prepared to compromise, but wonders whether his sensitivity explains his decision to quit. ‘He stopped relatively early. He was afraid of being beaten, afraid of what people might say, the fans, the press, people at the races.’ Herman Van Springel concurs: ‘Actually he wasn’t that bad when he stopped, but he just wasn’t what he had been, all the time, and being just another rider wasn’t good enough. He had to be better than anyone else. Only that would do.’
Merckx had always intended to stop racing when he was thirty. In 1973 he reiterated that it ‘would be a mistake going on beyond that’. The reason why he made the ‘mistake’ and the greatest cycling career of all time ended with a whimper not a bang might seem puzzling to the outsider, but it was quite simple. From the day when he had opted to quit his studies at the age of fifteen, Merckx had spent seventeen years defying the ‘reasonable’, safe, rational view of things. It would have been ‘reasonable’ for him to finish school; safe for him to knuckle down alongside Rik Van Looy for a year or two rather than break out and move to Peugeot; logical for him to have ridden defensively during the stage to Mourenx – not to mention hundreds of other races – and sensible for him to have had three months off the bike after crashing at Blois. By 1976 or so, after so many years defying reason, it would have been impossible to expect a man to change.
When I met Merckx, he was nineteen years into retirement, and had spent seventeen years running his bike factory in the former pig farm at Meise, on the outskirts of Brussels. He felt he had created a reasonable substitute for the unity among his old cycling team among his thirty employees, who then included his former directeur sportif, Bob Lelangue, since retired. I was struck by two things. At 5 p.m., a little procession of employees came into the office of the kopman to say good evening at the end of the working day. That, and the paint sprayer who was delegated to drive me back to the airport: he had nothing but praise for his boss, who he believed was too indulgent, if anything.
Only the pictures on the wall, the trophies in the cabinet, reminded me that the avuncular, well-rounded figure in front of me in the well-appointed office was The Cannibal, the greatest ever cyclist. Merckx was happy to discuss cycling of the time. He didn’t like the trend in the 1990s for the stars to target only the Tour de France, wasn’t happy with the way that the world championship had been moved to October, felt the Hour Record was being devalued. Compared with other champions I’d met such as Hinault and Armstrong, there was far less edge to him, less combativity. I wrote then: ‘Merckx doesn’t talk about the racing past with the same dismissive arrogance as Hinault, but it doesn’t seem to hold that much interest for him, perhaps because it’s been ploughed over so many times.’ The only regret I could detect in him was the decision to finish the 1975 Tour, broken jaw and all. That was just a hint: he seemed a man happy in his skin.
It had taken him a while to feel that way. Post-retirement, Merckx went into the doldrums due to the suddenness of the change, and only really re-emerged when he built his bike factory with the help of the Italian constructor Ugo de Rosa in 1980. De Rosa, who had built bikes for Merckx during his Italian years – as well as Colnago – taught him the basics and trained the staff at his factory in Italy. Even this was not without its difficulties: like many other ex-cyclists, he had trouble setting up in business – the bike company almost went bankrupt at one point, and he became embroiled in a tax repayment case.
He was helped, after retirement, by two friends from outside cycling: the footballer Paul Van Himst and the motor racing legend Jacky Ickx. Van Himst had retired at roughly the same time, and persuaded Eddy – a more than passable player in his youth – to join him in the Anderlecht veterans’ team. Initially, recalled Van Himst, Merckx was not keen, because he did not know anyone else; once playing, naturally, his sporting instincts took over. That began a strong link between The Cannibal and the Brussels star footballer. Van Himst was trainer when Merckx’s son Axel played in the youth teams. For several years, Merckx accompanied Anderlecht to European Cup ties as part of the president’s delegation. When Van Himst’s son Paul took up cycling, naturally he turned to Eddy for advice. More recently, Van Himst’s son-in-law took a job at Merckx’s bike factory, and Van Himst himself played a role in organising Merckx’s sixtieth birthday celebration in 2005. Ickx, six times a winner at Le Mans, and like Merckx and Van Himst one of the greatest Belgian sports stars of the 1970s, had been friendly with The Cannibal since the early 1970s, had ridden alongside him behind the motorbike driven by Guillaume Michiels, and got Merckx back on his bike after retirement, persuading him to go on cycle-touring trips in the South of France. Merckx protested that he wouldn’t ride a bike again, but eventually accepted.
Initially he didn’t want his new life to have much to do with the old, then he came to realise that was impossible. You could take the man out of cycling; you couldn’t take cycling out of the man. Gradually he became more involved. He had an eleven-year spell (1986–96) managing the Belgian team at the world road race championship. He put in time as race director at the Tour of Flanders and now works running the Tour of Qatar alongside the Tour de France organisers, ASO. His son Axel, born in August 1972, took up cycling after several years playing football – and the decision was a difficult one: not surprisingly, he was worried his father might not approve. Axel began at Motorola and forged a long and much more than respectable professional career – fourteen seasons – in spite of the obvious difficulty of being the ‘son of’. The highlights were a Belgian national title, a bronze medal at the Olympic Games in Athens in 2004 – an Olympic medal being a feat that eluded his illustrious father – a stage win in the Giro d’Italia, and tenth place in the Tour in 1998.
Merckx père briefly sponsored a youth development team of his own together with the CGER bank. It included Axel, but also such talents as Rik Verbrugghe and Marcel Aerts. The Grand Prix Eddy Merckx was organised from 1980 until 2004, as an invitation time trial run around Brussels in August or September, first as an individual event, then one for two-man teams. It su
ccumbed, ironically enough, to changes in cycling which went totally against the Merckx ethos: the stars were no longer prepared to race such one-off events. Merckx himself retired from his bike business and sold the majority of his shares in 2008. There are still connections: when I visited Guillaume Michiels in November 2011, he was working for a team named Mercator, which rode bikes supplied by his old boss.
It has taken a long time for Belgian cycling to get over the departure of The Cannibal and his generation: Godefroot, Maertens, De Vlaeminck et al. There was a constant search for the next Merckx, and the pressure scarred the careers of many notables in the 1980s and 1990s – Fons de Wolf, Eric Vanderaerden, Frank Vandenbroucke. Merckx is now close to the world no. 1 Philippe Gilbert, with whom he spends time in Monaco and to whom he gives the occasional nugget of advice. If Gilbert displays ‘cannibalistic’ tendencies at times, perhaps that’s no surprise.
It is also hardly surprising that the most voracious champion of recent years, Lance Armstrong, should become close to the great man. Like Merckx, Armstrong was unmatched for the depth of his competitive obsession, or rage de vaincre, as the French term it; from 1992 to 1996, Merckx supplied bikes to Armstrong’s Motorola team, and the pair remained close when Armstrong was struck down by testicular cancer in 1996. Armstrong insisted that The Cannibal accompany him when he went out on his first bike ride after leaving hospital. Later, Merckx was one of the few who told him he was capable of winning the Tour. In terms of style, however, Merckx told me in 2005 he felt he had been more aggressive than Armstrong. ‘I would attack more often. He waits for the other guys, then counter-attacks. [He] races more in the style of Jacques Anquetil or Miguel Indurain.’
Without Armstrong and Merckx’s influence in the noughties and the seventies, the sport of cycling would now have a totally different look about it. While Armstrong turned cycling into a celebrity-driven sport focused on a single event, the Tour de France, Merckx, on the other hand, has done more to define this single sport than any other champion, because of his ubiquitousness. There is only one major race in the calendar that does not have his unique imprint – Paris–Tours – and even the ‘sprinters’ Classic’ could be said to be in a class of its own because Merckx never won it.
Every bit of ground covered regularly by the sport’s monumental events has its associations: Tom Simpson and Mont Ventoux, Eugène Christophe and the Tourmalet, Louison Bobet and the Izoard, Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali on the Galibier, Coppi at the Stelvio and Madonna del Ghisallo in Italy, Ocaña on the Col de Menté, De Vlaeminck, Moser and others on the cobbles of Paris–Roubaix. But the whole of cycling’s topography can be seen in reference to Merckx: his imprint is everywhere, from the Côte de Stockeu, near Liège, where his statue stands, to the Ventoux, and the heel of Italy. Every race in the cycling calendar that has any history refers back to Merckx. If there is an irony, it is that as the calendar is being globalised, the European events that are being downgraded and are disappearing are ones where Merckx built his legend.
Merckx’s legacy is not one of innovation. He did not create anything new in terms of the technical side of cycling, compared, for example, to Francesco Moser or Greg LeMond, both of whom pushed the boundaries of the sport in terms of going faster. The bikes he rode didn’t look very different in 1978 compared to how they looked in 1965. That came later. But you don’t have to be a great innovator to be a genius.
What Merckx has given the sport can be seen in the way bike racing on the road has been perceived since his retirement. La course en tête as Merckx forged it remains the benchmark for the entire sport. The way he raced is the gold standard to which all professional cyclists and all their victories are compared. Today, whenever journalists and fans criticise a star for not racing aggressively enough, or praise an offensif such as Thomas Voeckler or Jens Voigt for attempting to defy the odds or seizing on a perfect moment to attack, the benchmark – conscious or subliminal – is one man: Merckx. The touch of Merckx was there when Bernard Hinault raced in the snow from Liège to Bastogne and back in 1980, when Sean Kelly raced the final kilometres of the 1991 Giro di Lombardia like a man possessed, when Miguel Indurain put the Tour de France field to the sword in the Ardennes in 1995, when Lance Armstrong won an Alpine stage into Le Grand Bornand in the 2004 Tour de France, simply because he could, not because he needed to. The ultimate accolades for any cycling champion are Cannibalesque, Merckx-esque. The former is an attitude to racing a season in which the cyclist tries to win every prize on offer; the latter an individual victory that has echoes of the mastery Merckx showed. These are traits suiveurs have admired, at various times, in Hinault, Kelly, Laurent Jalabert, Armstrong, Gilbert.
‘Never in my life have I met another man like him, a man who constantly wanted to be the best, wanted to be the first,’ wrote Jean-Marie Leblanc, who encountered Merckx first as fellow racer, then as a journalist, and later went on to run the Tour de France. ‘You may say: Hinault? But there were times when Hinault would let a break go, as all other cyclists do. When a move went and he was five minutes behind he would take a reasonable view. But Merckx never saw it in a reasonable light.’
The purpose of this book was to explore how and why Merckx remained ‘unreasonable’ from his teenage years until March 1978. There is no single ‘why’, but a variety of influences and character traits which combine to create that ‘why’. The list would begin with an upbringing that indoctrinated young Eddy with a sense of duty and a work ethic. The list would include the following: guilt at subverting these by dropping the studies that meant so much to his mother; the chronic fear of failure; the addictive joy of winning, the habit of winning and the many ways of winning all acquired young; the threat that every victory might be the last after the body blows of Savona and Blois; the pressures from a hostile press and adoring fans.
The ingredients of the ‘why’ can be thus identified. What cannot be explained is how all those elements combined in one man’s mind, how that mind happened to exist in a body that could support the demands of that mind, how they came together at the time that was most propitious. What can be said, however, is that it is unlikely to happen twice. The likes of Merckx will not be seen again. Cycling and sport may well be the poorer for it.
1 The ‘Merckx meeting’ at the Eastway circuit in Temple Mills, London, is a legendary British cycling occasion, on a par with the ‘Fausto Coppi meetings’ at Herne Hill in the late 1950s. The Glenryck Cup was put up by Barrett as part of a brief promotional push into cycling, and also included stars such as Poulidor and the winner, Dietrich Thurau, as well as professionals from the British scene. The Eastway circuit is now buried under the London Olympic park.
2 The stage win was not awarded as the two riders who finished first and second, Joaquim Agostinho and Antonio Menendez, both tested positive. Merckx was not given the victory as he had not been tested.
EDDY MERCKX’S MAJOR VICTORIES
1964 World amateur road race championship, Sallanches, France
1965 (team, Solo-Superia, professional from 1 May)
69 races, 9 wins
1966 (Peugeot) Milan–San Remo (20/3); stage of GP Midi Libre (14/6); overall Tour de Morbihan + two stages (11–14/8); Baracchi Trophy (with Ferdinand Bracke, 4/11)
95 races, 20 wins
1967 (Peugeot) World professional road race championship, Heerlen, Holland (3/9); Milan–San Remo (18/3); Ghent– Wevelgem (29/3); Flèche Wallonne (28/4); two stages of Giro d’Italia (31/5+2/6); two stages of the Tour of Sardinia (4+5/3); two stages of Paris–Nice (9+13/3); stage of Paris–Luxembourg (17/9); Baracchi Trophy (with Ferdinand Bracke, 4/11)
113 races, 26 wins
1968 (Faema) Paris–Roubaix (7/4); stage of Tour of Belgium (3/4); overall Giro d’Italia + four stages (20/5–12/6); overall Tour of Sardinia + two stages (24/2–1/3); overall Tour of Romandie + one stage (8–12/5); overall Tour of Catalonia + two stages (8–15/9); stage of Catalan Week (28/3); Tre Valle Varesine (10/8); Lugano GP time trial (20/10)
&
nbsp; 129 races, 32 wins
1969 (Faema) Milan–San Remo (19/3); Tour of Flanders (30/3); Liège–Bastogne–Liège (22/4); four stages of Giro d’Italia (18/5–30/5); overall Tour de France + six stages (28/6–20/7); overall Tour of Levant (Spain) + three stages (3–9/3); overall Paris–Nice + three stages (10–16/3); overall Paris–Luxembourg + one stage (5–6/8); stage of Tour of Majorca (1/4)
129 races, 43 wins
1970 (Faemino) Belgian national championship, Yvoir (21/6); Ghent–Wevelgem (1/4); Paris–Roubaix (12/4); Flèche Wallonne (19/4); overall Tour of Belgium + two stages (6–10/4); overall Giro d’Italia + three stages (18/5–7/6); overall Tour de France + eight stages (26/6–19/7); two stages of Tour of Sardinia (23–26/2); three stages of Paris–Nice (11–16/3)
138 races, 52 wins
1971 (Molteni) World professional road race championship, Mendrisio, Switzerland (5/9); Milan–San Remo (19/3); Het Volk (25/3); Liège–Bastogne–Liège (25/4); Henninger Turm (1/5); Giro di Lombardia (9/10); overall Tour of Belgium + three stages (11–15/4); Tour de France + four stages (26/6– 18/7); overall Tour of Sardinia + three stages (27/2–3/3); overall Paris–Nice + three stages (10–17/3); overall Criterium du Dauphiné + two stages (18–25/3); overall GP Midi Libre + two stages (3–6/6); GP Baden-Baden (with Herman Van Springel (26/9)
120 races, 54 wins
1972 (Molteni) World Hour Record, Mexico (25/10) 49.431kilometres; Milan–San Remo (18/3); Liège–Bastogne–Liège (20/4); Flèche Wallonne (23/4); GP de l’Escaut (1/8); Giro di Lombardia (7/10); overall Giro d’Italia + four stages (21/5– 11/6); overall Tour de France + six stages (1–23/7); three stages of Paris–Nice (9–14/3); Fleche Brabanconne (26/3); Giro del Piemonte (9/9); Giro dell’ Emilia (4/10); Baracchi Trophy (with Roger Swerts, 11/10)
Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike Page 28
