Forget Lance Armstrong and his tidy seven victories in the Tour de France. Between 1961 and 1978, Eddy "the Cannibal" Merckx won 525 races, including five Tours de France, four Giros d'Italia and three world championships. He began his season in February and ended in October, a mess of saddle sores and cracked vertebrae. Unlike Armstrong, Merckx never saved himself for a particular event. If he went four days without winning a race, he would become depressed and say to his trainer: "I haven't won anything for a while."
The son of a grocer in a Brussels suburb, Eddy was a shy and sensitive boy. He cried when his younger brother and sister told him that Père Noël did not exist; he cried when his teammates mocked him for liking rice pudding with flavoured syrup; and he cried when he discovered that the world of professional bike racing was rotten to the core. In the closed shop of Flemish riders (to be precise, riders from West Flanders), he was an outsider: a Flemish boy who had grown up speaking French. This is why he later became an icon of Belgian national unity and was often seen knocking back a few beers with his friend King Baudouin I.
Even ignoring the syringe-wielding soigneurs who stuffed their protégés with amphetamines a subject almost totally absent from William Fotheringham's admiring biography the cycling establishment was as ruthless as a dogfighting cartel. In 1964, young Eddy was diagnosed with a heart defect and dropped from the Belgian team competing in the world road championships. The problem, it turned out, was not his heart but corrupt selectors and dodgy doctors.
His solution was to win races so convincingly that no one would dare to leave him out. Anyone who enjoys the three-week-long soap opera of the Tour de France, and the complex meshing of tactics and personalities, would do better to read Fotheringham's fascinating biography of the British rider Tom Simpson, Put Me Back on My Bike. Merckx's style of racing could be summed up in two rules: 1. accelerate; 2. keep going and don't look back. Expert analysis of the Merckxian philosophy provided by Fotheringham's many interviewees amounts to this: "Mostly, he relied on pure power," "There were no tactics with Merckx". He would escape from the peloton with 100km to go, powering off into the sleet and the wind, elbows flailing with the effort, and not be seen again until the podium. Sometimes, the gap was so huge that the rider who came in second thought he'd won the race. In the Marseille stage of the 1971 Tour de France, spectators and camera crews were eating lunch, looking forward to the afternoon's entertainment, when "the Cannibal" shot across the deserted finish line, 90 minutes ahead of schedule.
This needless annihilation of his rivals, according to Fotheringham, was a result of Merckx's insecurity. He could never be absolutely certain that the gap was big enough. A puncture, a stray dog, one of the thousands of spectators who hated him for winning everything any microscopic event might prevent a victory. To a fan who follows his favourite's nail-biting defence of a 10-second lead, this might sound perfectly sensible, but it is highly unusual in professional cycling. People who race down icy mountain roads at 70mph with a broken collar-bone tend not to be worriers. Merckx left nothing to chance. He was one of the first riders to take a "scientific" approach to racing. In those days, it didn't take much to be seen as a velocipedal Einstein. Even today, there are professional cyclists who couldn't change an inner tube or realign a brake block. Merckx was widely admired for carrying his own Allen key to make small adjustments to the height of his saddle. He obviously loved the machine on which he spent most of his life. He was said to have dismantled a bicycle just to find out how many components it had (1,125).
Fotheringham's aim in writing this book is to answer two questions: "How?" and "Why?". He comes closest to answering the first in a stirring description of the 1971 Tour de France. The Spanish rider Luis Ocaña had opened up an apparently unassailable lead of almost nine minutes. For the next few days, Merckx continued to claw back the seconds as though he expected Ocaña to crack. Every evening, he made mildly disparaging remarks about his rival to the press. Then came the Pyrenees. Descending the Col de Menté in a thunderstorm, both riders crashed. Merckx leapt back on his bike with a bruised knee, crashed again and finished the stage. Ocaña gave up. There was nothing seriously wrong with him, but, as he later wrote: "My fear became panic, and I felt I was dying." Merckx went on to win his third Tour.
This devastating combination of muscle and manipulation is strongly reminiscent of Merckx's friend Lance Armstrong. A small number of cyclists seem to have such a will to win that they wear down the opposition simply by existing. Which leaves the second question, "Why?". Fotheringham quotes various opinions expressed by cycling sages in that Homeric, comic-book style once beloved of French journalists: "He rides for the pleasure of glory He earns money but his soul has remained pure"; "He is going to sleep in the purple cradle where living Gods are born". The most convincing answer comes from Claudine Merckx, wife of the taciturn, grumpy champion: "Eddy never looked for glory. He just wanted to be at peace with himself."
Writing a biography of Merckx is something of a sporting feat in itself. The endless string of victories leaves Fotheringham panting in the tyre tracks of his hero, and he has little more to offer at the end of his scrupulously researched book than exhausted clichés: "The like of Merckx will not be seen again. Cycling and sport may well be the poorer for it."
Merckx is evidently a courteous and generous man. When Fotheringham interviewed him in 1997, "the greatest cyclist in the world" went to meet him at the airport and waited "for my delayed flight with no sign of impatience, let alone annoyance". For anyone who had known "the Cannibal" in his hungry prime, it might have been a disappointment. Few sights in sport are more horrible than a cyclist at the end of a hard race: "When he got off his bike, his jerky gestures, livid skin, strangely focused look, his eyes sunk too far into his skull and the tic on one cheek twitching gave him the look of a madman. He was frightening to see."
Graham Robb's The Discovery of France is published by Picador.
