Who Punched Eddy Merckx? Part 4

Richie Porte, the Australian on Team Sky, was riding to the summit of La Pierre Saint-Martin at the end of Stage 10 of this year’s Tour de France. Ahead of him, Chris Froome, also of Team Sky and wearing the race leader’s yellow jersey, had flown past on his way to the stage win. Porte then overhauled Nairo Quintana to make it a Sky one-two, a repeat of the first mountain stage, also in the Pyrenees, in 2013.

On the first of seven tough mountain stages in this year’s Tour, one of the favorites was stamping his authority. So much for the loudly trumpeted “big four” contenders—Froome, Quintana, Vincenzo Nibali and Alberto Contador—and the hopes of a close race. Froome was destroying them. In his ungainly style—crouched over the bike, back arched, head down, gangly limbs flailing—he left the other favorites far behind.

Perhaps that show of dominance explains the frustration of one spectator, even if it does not justify his actions. A minute after Froome whizzed past, one of the fans on the roadside reached forward as Porte approached and punched him in the side.

Incidents like this are so rare that we still talk about the punch Eddy Merckx received 40 years ago, close to the summit of the Puy de Dôme. As well as arguably costing Merckx a sixth Tour victory, it cast a long shadow over the Tour; and it is the subject of this series of articles for Bicycling.com.

Forty years on, the Porte incident was uncannily similar to the Merckx punch. It happened on a packed stretch of road, close to the top of a climb. And it brings the relationship between the fans and the riders, especially in the mountains, back into sharp focus.

A couple of days after that assault there were two more unsavory events. Froome said at the end of Stage 14 that a spectator threw urine in his face, yelling “Dopé!” The same day, his teammate Luke Rowe arrived back at his team bus at the airfield in Mende with a face like thunder. “Someone spat in my face,” he told the team’s race coach, Rod Ellingworth.

Porte suffered a further verbal assault on the way back down the mountain. “Doper!” a group of four fans shouted as they mimicked injecting their arms. Porte slammed on the brakes, stopped, and confronted them. “They immediately backed down and started apologizing,” said Porte. “It shows you the caliber of these people.”

A couple of days later, with rumors of further abuse, I went and found Porte at the stage start in Muret. He emerged from the team bus clutching his side. It was true, he said, he had been assaulted. “With 3km to go…I got a full-on punch,” he said.

Porte was wearing his helmet and a pair of shades as he talked. He stood with his head bowed, speaking quietly—it was a narrow street and a stage start that seemed open to the public. They crowded around the Sky bus, pressing in. Porte is small in stature but has a big, vocal personality. He has a volatile temper. I couldn’t see his eyes but I could hear the emotion and the controlled anger in his voice.

“It was sort of the same atmosphere on Alpe d’Huez two years ago,” he continued. “To be quite honest with you it’s getting to the point where some of these journalists whipping up all the rubbish need to be accountable for our safety as well.” In the French press, in particular, doubt had been cast on Froome’s and Sky’s performances. On French TV, former rider Laurent Jalabert said that Froome’s ride to win on La Pierre Saint-Martin made him uncomfortable. He was “on another planet,” Jalabert said.

“Do I deserve to be booed?” Porte carried on. “Does Chris deserve all this? I think it’s a disgrace. At the end of the day I’m just a kid from Tasmania who went to Italy to ride his bike. I’ve never taken any shortcuts. Just because this team’s got its act together, they do everything right…. It does get to the point that…you are human, you can only take so much.”

One of the Team Sky riders is Nicolas Roche, whose father, Stephen, has experienced rough treatment. In 1987, on his way to winning the Giro d’Italia ahead of his teammate and local favorite Roberto Visentini, Roche was regularly assaulted. He took to riding the mountain stages with a two-man security detail, his teammate Eddy Schepers on one side, his friend and fellow racer Robert Millar on the other. They acted as human shields.

One fear is that such an incident affects the outcome of the race as it did in 1975. Froome hinted at that when he talked of his own abuse on the road to Mende. It was a gamble to go public. When some Sky riders were assaulted on Alpe d’Huez in 2013 they didn’t speak out—at least, they didn’t go public with the full extent of what happened. “Our riders were hit, they were punched,” said one Sky insider this week. “Some had bruises on their sides after that stage.”

The Tour returns to Alpe d’Huez on Saturday, 24 hours before the finish in Paris. It could be a key stage—the Tour organizers certainly hoped so when they designed the route. It will also have the biggest, most excitable crowds of this year’s Tour.

Security will be tight. Since Mende, there have been as many as five police officers guarding the Sky bus at stage starts, but there is only so much the gendarmes can do on the roads.

If there is a common feature in the Porte incident and the one involving Merckx in 1975 it is that both apparently picked out their assailant. “I’m not going to say who it was,” said Porte, which suggests he knew who did it. But pressed on this, he said, “Not really.” His response suggests that he could identify his attacker not by name, but by some identifying feature. Maybe in that moment of realizing what is happening, the rider takes a mental snapshot: The shutter in the mind’s eye clicks, the image is frozen.

That’s what happened with Merckx. The crowds were more dense on the Puy de Dôme in 1975 than on La Pierre Saint-Martin in 2015, yet the Belgian saw the man who punched him, registering his face, his outfit, and exactly where he was standing.

Possibly this owed something to the fact that just moments before the punch another man, in a blue jumper and white cap, stepped out of the line of spectators, attempting to give Merckx a push. Merckx weaved slightly to the left to avoid a collision, but perhaps the incident heightened his senses and made him more alert in the seconds that followed: When another man, dressed in beige jacket, shirt and slacks, leant forward, clenched his fist, and drove it into Merckx’s side.

Winded after the assault, Merckx carried on his pursuit of Lucien Van Impe and Bernard Thévenet. He saved his yellow jersey, sprinting in 34 seconds down, then went to the changing room (there were no team busses in 1975) pursued by a phalanx of photographers much to the frustration of stage winner Van Impe—there was nobody left to record his moment on the podium. The most famous image of the stage is of the aftermath, in the changing room: Merckx, naked from the waist up, clutching his side, eyes closed, face contorted in agony.

Merckx reported the incident and, after re-emerging in his Molteni tracksuit, accompanied some gendarmes down the hill to the spot where it happened. There was the man who threw the punch: Merckx recognized and identified him. But perhaps that wasn’t so remarkable. The culprit had been surrounded by his fellow spectators, who saw what he did, and were disgusted.

“Fans of cycling are not thugs,” I was told by one spectator on the Col de Manse during Stage 16 as this year’s race headed into the Alps. “They support all the riders. The atmosphere is friendly.”

We glanced down the road. There were French and German flags, Dutch fans, Belgians, some Colombians, and lots of Brits drawn by the recent successes of Froome, Bradley Wiggins, and Mark Cavendish. They stand on open, public roads—15 million of them over the three weeks—with barriers covering only about five percent of the route. Fans are the lifeblood of the Tour and there is enormous trust placed in them. What would happen if somebody broke the pact that exists between the public and the race? “You wouldn’t stand there if you saw someone take a swing at someone,” said the fan. “I’ve seen people being ushered away.”

That may be true in some cases, but supportive fans could not prevent Richie Porte from being punched on Stage 10 this year, just as they could not save Merckx from his assailant. What some hope is the spectators can hold those willing to commit untoward acts accountable for their actions. That’s what happened in 1975.

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