Who Punched Eddy Merckx? The Conclusion

After being punched on his way to the summit of the Puy de Dôme during the 1975 Tour de France, Eddy Merckx went to the changing rooms and put on his Molteni team tracksuit. Then he accompanied police officers back down the hill. He thought that he might recognize his assailant if he saw him.

It wasn’t difficult. Vigilante fans had surrounded the man and prevented him from making a getaway. At the time of the assault, Merckx had a good glimpse of him, and now he could see that, yes, that was him, in the beige jacket and white shirt. He didn’t look like a thug, and nor was he a young hooligan swept up in the anti-Merckx feeling that prevailed in France. He was a middle-aged man.

He was a local, a 55-year-old named Nello Breton. Merckx asked for charges to be pressed and, some months later, attended the court hearing in Clermont-Ferrand, a town in the heart of France that is only 10 miles from where the punch happened.

Breton argued that he had been pushed, and hadn’t meant to strike Merckx. Footage taken of the act contradicts this claim—he can be seen reaching, and once Merckx has passed, Breton’s arm remains outstretched and he looks off-balance, like a boxer who has thrown a punch. Merckx’s injuries—the bruising that appeared in the next 24 hours—also suggested that it had been malicious. The local judge dismissed Breton’s version of events, found him guilty and ordered him to pay Merckx damages—a symbolic one franc.

Neither of the two recent Merckx biographers, Daniel Friebe (The Cannibal) and William Fotheringham (Half Man, Half Bike), were able to track Breton down, or discover who he was, or what became of him. There’s a good chance he is no longer alive. If he is, he will be 95 now.

The Tour stage following the Puy de Dôme in 1975 was similar to one this year: Nice to Pra Loup, with a climb and descent of the Col d’Allos. This stage would prove fatal to Merckx’s hopes of a record sixth win—and he remains convinced that what had happened on the previous stage is what did him in.

The day immediately following Puy de Dôme was a rest day on the Côte d’Azur. The bruising on Merckx’s stomach, not to mention the pain, alarmed him. He consulted the Tour doctor, Philippe Miserez, who said that it was only superficial bruising; there was no need for an X-ray.

But the following day’s stage included five climbs: the Col de Saint-Martin, the Col de la Couillole, the Col des Champs, the Col d’Allos, and finally Pra Loup. Bernard Thévenet, who had destroyed Merckx at the pre-Tour Dauphiné Libéré and dropped him on the Puy de Dôme, attacked on the Col des Champs. Merckx fancied the descent of the Col d’Allos. Thévenet was a strong climber but a cautious descender.

When Thévenet began his assault Merckx began to suffer: He felt spasms in his stomach. He sent his teammate Edouard Janssen back to the race doctor for painkillers and tried to bluff, following each of Thévenet’s attacks, wincing every time from the pain in his abdomen. Then, as he had planned, Merckx attacked just before the summit of the Col d’Allos, hoping to get a gap before the twisting, technical 17km downhill—“the nastiest, most dangerous descent in France,” according to Thévenet.

Merckx began the 6.5km climb to Pra Loup with a lead of about a minute. Thévenet, who had felt the dreaded hunger pangs close to the summit of the Col d’Allos, had refueled and was reinvigorated. First Felice Gimondi, the suave Italian, bridged up to Merckx. Gimondi saw that the Cannibal was suffering and then Merckx did the unthinkable: He asked Gimondi to slow down. Gimondi was stunned.

Then came Thévenet, charging up the mountain, cheered every pedal stroke by fans who seemed to desire a Merckx defeat almost as much as a home win. They got their wish when Merckx cracked completely just 2km from the summit. As Thévenet told Friebe: “Suddenly, I see the Molteni car in front. But it doesn’t really register. I’m going so hard that I can’t really think straight. A moment later I’m with the car. Somehow, though, I’m still scared that he’ll see me coming, counter-attack and that’ll be the end of it. I get within striking distance on a bend with a strip of melted tarmac in the middle of the road, which he’s taken right on the inside, along the line of spectators. I tell myself that he’ll never dare to cross the melting tarmac—he’ll get stuck in it—so I go all the way to the other side, where I’m almost hidden in the spectators on the right side of the road. I try to pass and get clear of him as quickly as possible, so that he can’t respond. I see that he’s not following and somehow I’m not surprised. The euphoria drowns out every other feeling…”

Thévenet ended the day in yellow; Merckx, meanwhile, would never wear the jersey again. It was, said Thévenet, equivalent to “an earthquake for cycling.” The following morning, when the Frenchman opened his eyes and saw the yellow jersey draped over the end of his bed, he thought he must still be asleep and dreaming that he was in Eddy Merckx’s room.

Merckx wondered later whether he suffered so much on Pra Loup because the painkillers had worn off. It also emerged that he had taken an anticoagulant medicine before the start in Nice. So even if the punch wasn’t directly responsible, could the mixing of the medicines have played a part in his downfall?

Then again, one of the surprises about Merckx is how vulnerable and insecure he appeared to be. His fragility manifested itself in his fastidiousness about his equipment—he was forever tinkering with his saddle height, and even on the Pra Loup stage changed bikes three times before the first climb—and, says Friebe, in his tendency to “whinge” about his physical state. As Thévenet, who liked Merckx, said: “The only issue I had with him was the way he was always complaining about some injury or ailment. It got tiresome, because he’d say that then win anyway. So it became like the boy who cried wolf. We just used to roll our eyes. ‘I’m hurting here. I’m hurting there…’ ‘Yeah, sure you are, Eddy…’”

William Fotheringham, the other Merckx biographer, wonders if it wasn’t the psychological effects of the punch that hurt Merckx more than the physical pain. “He got a huge amount of hate mail,” says Fotheringham. “Horrible, blood-curdling hate mail, from France, mainly, but also from Belgium.

“It was because he dominated and because he didn’t smile a lot. It surprises people to learn, but he was very vulnerable and insecure. And psychologically, imagine, if you’re not used to violence, how being punched would affect you. With Bernard Hinault it wouldn’t have had an effect, but he was brought up in a violent environment. Merckx was a mummy’s boy. He was soft.” Yet there was nothing unusual in Merckx’s response, says Fotheringham. “Any normal person would be upset after being punched by someone.”

Friebe thinks that the punch merely hastened Merckx’s decline, rather than being a catalyst for it. “His career had been slowly, imperceptibly almost, sliding since 1970. He had probably raced too much, he had won too much, and put himself under too much mental stress to keep winning. The elastic was about to snap.

“If the punch had affected him that much I think he would have come back and won another Grand Tour. But he never did. Even that day on the Puy de Dôme, when the assault happened, he had already been dropped.

“His insecurities were fuel for incredible performances. And the anti-Merckx feeling was nothing new: He was getting death threats in 1971.”

There were echoes of the anti-Merckx feeling in the 2015 Tour with Chris Froome and his Team Sky teammates booed, insulted, and even assaulted. Richie Porte alleges that he was punched, and Froome claims that he had a cup of urine thrown at him. The reason for their unpopularity, according to veteran French journalist Francois Thomazeau, is the same as with Merckx in the 1970s. It was because the riders are winning, and doing so with what is perceived as ruthless efficiency.

“I’m afraid France doesn’t like winners much,” Thomazeau told me at this year’s Tour. “Deep down in our psyche there’s a love for swashbuckling panache, for French flair, rather than efficiency. Miguel Indurain was not very liked, even Bernard Hinault wasn’t liked, nor was Jacques Anquetil. The most popular French cyclist of all time is Raymond Poulidor, who never won the Tour. We like sport to remain unpredictable and poetic.”

When Lance Armstrong’s unpopularity was at its height, it had less to with the doping suspicions, says Thomazeau, than with the manner of his domination. “The reason why French people hated Armstrong was more because he was a winner.” If it was the doping, asks Thomazeau, then why does Richard Virenque—a central player in the Festina doping affair of 1998—remain so popular?

Twelve million people are said to line the roads over the three weeks of the Tour de France, the atmosphere more like a family picnic than a sporting event. But in the mountains it is rowdier, and occasionally that spills into aggression and hostility.

Violent incidents are rare, though. Which is why, 40 years later, Nello Breton’s assault of Eddy Merckx remains one of the Tour’s most infamous tales. Other riders have been booed, spat at and even hit. But never has an assault had such an impact on the outcome of the race.

Or did it? Perhaps only Merckx himself truly knows.

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