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Extract Chapter Two:
‘Eddy Merckx was the main attraction. Next to him we were only bit-part players.’
Frans Verbeeck
To find yourself on the starting line of a book devoted to the greatest race cyclist of all time is a monumental adventure, the heady feeling of embarking on a world tour from a time when cycling still really meant something to people.
From the 1960s to the 1970s, Eddy Merckx left his mark on nearly every race he was in. The statistics indicate he took part in 1800 races, with 525 victories. It’s a formidable return from a 14-year career. It’s a performance made all the more remarkable by the fact that at that time and in every way, the opposition was significant, giving rise to some fascinating duels. It is amazing that Merckx, the most voracious ‘Cannibal’ that cycling has ever known, breathed the same invigorating air as Roger De Vlaeminck, Walter Godefroot, Freddy Maertens, Roger Rosiers, André Dierickx, Frans Verbeeck, Patrick Sercu, Jan Janssen, Felice Gimondi, Luis Ocaña, Gianni Motta, Lucien Van Impe, Joop Zoetemelk, Bernard Thévenet and Rik Van Looy.
A list of his many achievements would give you enough material to write a beginner’s guide to cycle racing. From Vilvoorde, his first success (11 May, 1965), to Kluisbergen, his last (17 September, 1977), newcomers to the sport would learn all about many of the most iconic locations in cycling’s international heritage. The Poggio, Muro di Sormano, Passeo del Ghisallo, the Grammont Wall, the Oude Kwaremont, the Trouée d’Arenberg, the Carrefour de l’Arbre, Stockeu and the Côte de la Redoute are just a few. And there’s a special mention for Woluwe-Saint- Pierre, the part of Brussels where Merckx grew up, and that he put on the world map.
Perhaps because Belgium had been desperately waiting for a successor to Sylvère Maes – their last winner of the Tour de France, in 1939 – the arrival of Eddy Merckx to the international cycling scene was akin to lighting the blue touchpaper on a firework. He rapidly became a riding – and winning – machine. Day and night, constantly crossing international borders, Eddy did not rest from one year to the next. He would start with a criterion in Brussels in the morning, fly to Lisbon and win a second crit in the late afternoon, then fly to Milan and end the day with a Madison at the Velodromo Vigorelli. According to former journalist Rik Van Walleghem, during his journey in professional cycling, ‘Eddy the Explorer’ would have circumvented the globe around 12 times. ‘In his own way, he conquered space on a human-propulsion machine,’ said Jean-Baptiste Baronian.1 It is a thought echoed by Frans Verbeeck, another classy consumer of cobbles: ‘Eddy Merckx was the main attraction. Next to him we were only bit-part players.’
Peter Post, directeur sportif of the Raleigh team, put it another way the evening after Merckx’s display in the 1973 Paris–Roubaix: ‘Why on earth does the Belgian Prime Minister Vanden Boeynants need to buy Mirages or F16s when he already has Merckx?’
You can’t take anything away from the huge seasons he raced, some of which had more than 160 days of racing. And this should be taken in context with some of his other outstanding feats: Mourenx-Ville-Nouvelle, Tre Cime di Lavaredo, Mendrisio and Mexico are the places legends were made. In fact, Merckx’s career should be looked at as whole, as one would look at a Flemish landscape by Brueghel or Rubens, complete with mountains, snow, thunderstorms, gusts of wind and cobblestones.
Evoking the ‘god of gods and his Babylonian prize list’, Baronian quotes French playwright Alfred Jarry, who long before the birth of the monstre sacré (sacred monster), had already asserted that ‘cycling, this sport at the limit of sport, is one of the Beaux Arts.’ The artist Merckx thus elevated his work to be with the greatest of all time, in the image of his illustrious predecessors such as Binda, Coppi, Bartali, Bobet and Anquetil, as well as those of the generation that followed: Thévenet, Hinault, Induráin, Froome and Pogaˇcar. I’m tempted to add that the Belgian champion had something that none of those others did: he made a reality of the fantastic. ‘Because he had one immutable thing: a truly extraordinary degree of willpower. It was a guiding principle for him,’ says the cycling historian Pascal Sergent, author of many books on cycling in Belgium from that decade.