Who Punched Eddy Merckx, Part 2
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The King of Belgium made an appearance at the Tour de France in Seraing, a suburb of Liège, before Stage 4 of the 2015 race. But there was only so much fuss around Philippe, King of the Belgians. The real King of Belgium had been at the race the day before: Edouard Louis Joseph, Baron Merckx, also known as Eddy Merckx, the greatest cyclist in history. The greatest Belgian in history.
Even now, having recently turned 70, Merckx, the winner of 525 professional races, cannot move without a crowd forming around him. Perhaps especially now. It has been 39 years since a Belgian won the Tour and there is no one on the horizon to end the wait, which means that Merckx continues to carry the burden. And it does look like a burden. His sad eyes give him a mournful expression.
At the top of the Mur de Huy after Monday’s third stage, Merckx chatted to his fellow five-time Tour winner, Bernard Hinault. The French rider has aged better (then again, he is a decade younger), but both still have an aura about them. Hinault, whose jaw appears clenched even when he smiles, is still unmistakably Hinault. Merckx, with his prominent cheekbones, is still unmistakably Merckx.
After chatting to Hinault, Merckx strolled away, his portly figure moving slowly, heavily. He was with an entourage: a group of smartly dressed men all with official Tour accreditations hanging around their necks. They walked alongside and behind Eddy—but not in front, as though this would have been a breach of protocol. He is the unofficial King of Belgium, after all.
Earlier that day the Tour visited Meensel-Kiezegem, a village about an hour from Brussels and, more importantly, Merckx’s birthplace. It was at kilometer 47 on the day’s route, but just before the race arrived there was a ceremony: the unveiling of a statue of the town’s most famous son. Later that night, Merckx would attend a belated 70th birthday party in his honor, which he hosted himself, treating his guests to some of his 2,500-bottle collection of wine.
The other notable anniversary is that it has been 40 years since Merckx’s penultimate Tour, and the last one in which he was a major force. Coincidentally, the route for this year’s is almost a tracing-paper replica of 1975, starting outside France (then in Belgium, this year in the Netherlands) and following an counterclockwise circuit around the country.
In 1975 they raced across the north, with a stage finish in Roubaix that, oddly, avoided any cobbles. Forty years later, the riders of the 2015 Tour were not so lucky, tackling seven sectors of the dreaded pavé on Stage 4, passing Charleroi en route—where the Tour began in 1975 with a prologue in which Merckx suffered a rare defeat, finishing second to Francesco Moser.
Few would have predicted then that the Merckx era was close to its end. He had dominated the Tour in 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1974, missing the 1973 race to win the Tours of Spain and Italy instead. Merckx’s crushing superiority had been creating a problem for the Tour organizers since as far back as 1970—only his second year competing in the event. At a L’Equipe editorial meeting, Jacques Goddet, the Tour director who also worked as a columnist for the newspaper, banged the table in despair. “Gentlemen, this is a catastrophe!” he said as Merckx gobbled up seven stages plus the prologue and arrived in Paris with a lead of more than twelve minutes. A year later, on the eve of the 1971 race, the front page of Paris Match asked: “Merckx—Is he going to kill the Tour de France?”
Merckx transcended his sport. “He is cycling’s Muhammad Ali,” says Charly Wegelius, a sports director with the Cannondale-Garmin team, which is riding the 2015 Tour. There was a period of more than a decade when it was impossible to write about the sport without mentioning Merckx. Which created something of a challenge for Sam Abt, an American reporter who began covering cycling for the New York Times when he moved to Paris in the 1970s.
“The New York Times told me, ‘Never again write about any rider whose name ends in ‘ckx’ – we just don’t get it,’” Abt recalled. “I said, ‘Well the name of the greatest rider in the sport ends in ‘ckx’, how can I not write it?’
“They said, ‘Well, what is he?’ I said, ‘He’s a Belgian.’ And they said, ‘But we don’t have any Belgian readers.’”
It was almost unimaginable that Merckx would not win the 1975 Tour, despite missing the Giro with illness, despite being beaten in the Dauphiné Libéré by Bernard Thévenet in June. Thévenet, who is also on this year’s Tour, working for ASO, was a talented rider with a reputation for inconsistency. And the omens didn’t look good when, on the day before the prologue, the man from Burgundy—from a village called Le Guidon (the handlebar)—collided with a teammate and crashed heavily.
Thévenet was popular. He was strong in the mountains (he “ran riot” in the Dauphiné, wrote one reporter covering the race), he rode with panache, and he was French. He could be the man to stop Merckx, whose dominance—and the way he snaffled up wins, never seeming to slake his thirst—made him admired rather than loved. In general the crowds by the roadside in 1975 expressed their love of Thévenet rather than any antipathy toward Merckx; or at least the former outweighed the latter. Thévenet appreciated the support: “It was a kind of moral doping,” he said. “Their encouragement gave me wings.”
But Merckx was still the man. “I know that in his heart of hearts he wants always to be the best, and to build a mountain of victories that no one will ever surmount,” wrote the French journalist Marcel de Leener on the eve of that year’s race. “There is only one cloud on the horizon and that’s the weakness of his Molteni team.”
The 2015 Tour has gotten off to an explosive start, with the four big contenders—Chris Froome, Alberto Contador, Vincenzo Nibali, and Nairo Quintana—all required by crosswinds and cobbles to be aggressive. But in general we have grown accustomed to overall favorites biding their time in the opening week, riding cautiously and conservatively, keeping their noses out of the wind. Merckx wasn’t like that, and the way he raced would be anathema to most overall contenders today. On Stage 1 in 1975 he attacked for the first hill prime; he was second on Stages 1a and 1b, which were held on the same day and looked routine on paper. During Stage 2 to Amiens, where Stage 5 of this year’s race finished, he punctured and had a slow wheel change, “unloading a lot of abuse at his mechanic,” reported the British magazine Cycling Weekly. Then, with the help of his teammates, he closed a gap of a minute in four-and-a-half miles.
He won the Stage 6 time trial, just 16km long, by 27 seconds, “with silk tyres and jersey to match” and “a 56-tooth chainwheel,” the magazine wrote. It meant he was back in the yellow jersey with the mountains to come: the Pyrenees, Puy de Dôme, and the Alps.
Thévenet’s luck hadn’t changed after the prologue; he punctured in the time trial. But he was confident about the mountains. On the first day in the Pyrenees he attacked on the Col du Soulor, but Merckx responded immediately. “That evening, in the Hotel Colbert in Pau, I got my teammates together to put them in the picture,” Thévenet said later. “I told them that from the next day I would be putting everything into winning. I wouldn’t be going for second or third place in this Tour, but for victory. Either I would take the yellow jersey in the mountains or I would drop in the attempt. I told them, ‘All I need is your complete support. Of course you will have all my prizes, that goes without saying, and you have my word on it.’
“I knew it was up to me,” Thévenet continued. “I had never felt so strong in any stage race before. It was to be this year or never.”
Next day, to Pla d’Adet, Thévenet attacked, escaped with Joop Zoetemelk, then felt his back tire softening on the final ascent. Zoetemelk won the stage but Thévenet pulled back 49 seconds of his two-and-half-minute deficit to Merckx.
The race moved east, to France’s third mountain range, the Massif Central. And on the Puy de Dôme chinks appeared in Merckx’s armor. While Lucien Van Impe “climbed like he was on air,” Merckx labored. He was dropped by Van Impe and Thévenet. He fought to limit his losses and keep the yellow jersey, hugging the side of the road. That was when a spectator—a respectable looking gentleman who was one of the 100,000 on the mountain that day—reached out and punched him with so much force that he was thrown back. Merckx clutched his side and although he veered left, his rhythm hardly altered. It would be later that the effects of the punch became apparent. It did worse than wind Merckx: It ruptured the fragile pact, the bond of trust that exists between the riders and the public.
This was a question for the Tour, one as pertinent today as ever. At the time, the question for cycling’s Muhammad Ali after the assault was whether the 1975 Tour would be his Thrilla in Manila—a fight, also in 1975, that the victorious Ali described as “the closest thing to dying”—or a humiliating defeat, because for Merckx any defeat seemed to be a humiliation.
At the summit of the Puy de Dôme, the greatest cyclist of all time was bent double in agony—the punch had connected with his lower right abdomen. He had hung on for third on the stage behind Van Impe and Thévenet. He still had the yellow jersey. But he was on the ropes.
CONTINUED: Who Punched Eddy Merckx, Part 3
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