Eddy Merckx apologises for his fractured English, but there is no need. He has just given German television an interview in German and spoken to an Italian journalist in Italian, all the while answering a stream of calls in Flemish on his mobile. When his English vocabulary dries up, he lapses into French. Le Cannibal was 60 last week and his appetite for life remains as voracious as ever. His bike factory in a converted barn on the outskirts of Meise has become a place of multilingual pilgrimage in recent years, which is still a source of wonder and flattery to cycling’s greatest champion.
“People still remember Eddy Merckx in England?” he asks. It is a pertinent question, given the absence of an Englishman among the 189 riders in this year’s Tour de France. Merckx’s legend strayed way beyond the narrow boundaries of his sport, like the Tour itself. So his birthday was honoured not just by his own country, which has granted him a barony and the accolade of Belgium’s greatest athlete, but by an international line of microphones and cameras. He began talking at 6.30am and finished at tea-time, the irony not lost on him.
“People are strange, you know,” he says. “Look at the popularity of Raymond Poulidor. He never won the Tour. Anquetil (Jacques Anquetil, five-time winner of the Tour de France) was the better rider, but Poulidor was more popular. After he stopped riding, people liked Anquetil more. I was more popular after I’d finished second in the Tour. Sometimes people don’t like it when you win too much.”
Merckx won more than anybody in the history of the sport. In a professional career that lasted less than a decade, he won 445 races, including five Tours de France and five Giros d’Italia. Between 1969, when he won his first Tour on his debut by 17 minutes, and 1973, he won 250 races from 650 starts. Lance Armstrong, who is seeking his seventh win when the Tour starts on Saturday, races a maximum of 70 a year and rarely wins more than 10.
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“If Merckx had taken his career at the same pace as Armstrong,” said the great French rider Bernard Hinault, “he would still be racing at 60.”
One journalist wrote memorably of Merckx in 1970: “He is half-man, half bike.”
Merckx denies that losing made him physically sick. His record, though, says otherwise. The phenomenon of Merckx was that he had a sprinter’s body and a climber’s mind. Miguel Indurain and Jan Ullrich, two heavily built Tour champions, could defend adequately in the mountains with the help of a strong team. Merckx barely needed his team.
His domination of the 1969 Tour was announced most emphatically on stage 17, a brutal ride over the Pyrenees and into Mourenx. Barring a disaster, Merckx’s first Tour was already won. But, sensing a weakness in his rivals at the top of the fearsome Tourmalet, he sped down the mountain at a suicidal speed to dismember the peloton. Instead of easing up and allowing his pursuers to make a race of it as etiquette demanded, he charged on to win by eight minutes. “Is this the vanity of a megalomaniac?” asked one writer. Merckx did not just win one Tour that day, he won five.
With his arching eyebrows now grey and his smile less chilling, Merckx forgets how intimidating he once was. He didn’t just ride a bike, he possessed it. A photograph from 1973 shows him and Roger De Vlaeminck, another Flemish rider, talking to each other during the Het Volk one-day race. Although riding for different teams, they are discussing tactics. De Vlaeminck looks suspicious, tired and frightened; Merckx is setting the agenda. The De Vlaeminck brothers, Roger and Eric, rode for the same team and tried to break Merckx. One retired, the other had to see a psychiatrist.
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“Since I was a kid I always dreamed of being a cyclist,” says Merckx. “I don’t know why -nobody in my family was a cyclist. But when it becomes a profession, you have to win. When Michael Schumacher starts a grand prix, he wants to win.
Otherwise...
“It comes from inside. If you do something, you have to do it in the best possible way.” In everything? “I hope so. I try also here in the factory. Twenty-five years ago we started with no orders; now we employ 30. I’m as proud of what we’ve done here as anything in my career. But you have to be humble too, that’s an important quality for a champion. Inside you have to think, ‘Yes, today I am the best and tomorrow I will be the best also’, but in front of other people you mustn’t think you are God. Some people thought I was too greedy for winning, some, a few.”
Some recognisable themes link him to another champion considered too greedy and too aloof. Merckx first met Armstrong at the Olympics in 1992 before the young American won the world championship riding a Merckx bike. He glimpsed something of himself in the cocksure Texan and therelationship strengthened through the years of Armstrong’s battle with cancer. A fortnight ago they were riding together again, the winners of 11 Tours de France pottering down the lanes of rural Belgium. Can Armstrong end his career with his seventh victory? “I hope the best man wins, and Armstrong is the best,” Merckx replies. “He has the best team, too, and he’ll be more motivated than ever because it’s his last Tour. When he was here, he said, ‘Seven weeks, Eddy, and it’s done’. I don’t see anyone out there with the mental strength to stay with him every day.”
Merckx refuses to be drawn into comparing generations. Different times, he says.
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On the central point, though, there is no hesitation. Could he have won seven Tours? “Yes, absolutely. I never planned my career to win the next Tour de France, I planned my career to win the most races. In 1968 I was riding for Faema, an Italian team, and I had to ride the Giro, and in 1973 I didn’t go to the Tour because there was a certain animosity from the public and the journalists. I was the first non-Frenchman who could beat Anquetil’s record of five Tour wins. In 1975 some crazy guy punched me. I crashed, my jaw was broken and I couldn’t eat, but I kept going. I didn’t like to abandon. But it was the biggest mistake of my career. I didn’t win so much after that.”
No less than Armstrong, Merckx’s dominance prompted suspicion. In 1969 he was disqualified from the Giro for a doping offence he strenuously denied. He took out his anger on the Tour the next month. “What can you do? If you are okay with yourself, that’s the most important thing. It’s unfair to be so suspicious of Armstrong. If you’re the best, people will always think there’s some special reason. No, you’re the best because first, you have the most talent, and second, you work harder. After cancer, I don’t think you can do things that are bad for your health.”
Merckx has stopped his regular visits to the Tour. Too many people, he says, wanting too much of his time. He might go to the start, a 19km time trial along the Atlantic coast on Saturday, and into the mountains where he was once the king.
He will follow the race through his son, Axel, an experienced domestique with the Belgian-based Davitamon-Lotto team, and receive the pilgrims at his front door.
“Most didn’t see me racing,” he laughs. “It’s the name, I suppose. I can understand in Belgium, where cycling is popular, but England and Germany? I’m just an old man who once rode a bike.”
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Le Cannibal of the Tour
After Merckx won the mountains and points jerseys in 1969, Christian Raymond nicknamed him The Cannibal. He spent 96 days wearing the yellow jersey and won 35 stages, making him the most successful rider the Tour de France has ever seen.
In 1975, he was heading towards a sixth victory but as he climbed to the top of the Puy-de-Dome, a French spectator assaulted him, leaving him with fractured ribs. Merckx carried on, but his race was run. While his rivals rested during the winter, Merckx continued to race. He was scarcely out of the saddle, and recalls that after winning the 1969 Tour, he competed for 34 successive days before travelling to Canada, where he became world road-race champion.