Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal Read Online Free PDF Page A

Van Bug had learned of Géminiani’s overtures and was furious. He stormed into Merckx’s room. ‘You ugly monkey, you’ve gone and signed for Gem, haven’t you?’ he raged. It took minutes to convince him otherwise, and for Van Bug to calm down. Needless to say, on their return to Belgium, the idea of Merckx pairing up with Anquetil had become no more palatable, and a deal was duly signed with Peugeot and its manager Gaston Plaud in the autumn of 1965.
    The choice seemed a good one when Merckx rode brilliantly at Paris–Nice in March ’66 to win one stage and finish fourth overall. If Solo-Superia adopted the same, all-for-one ethos that Van Looy had imported from Italy and Faema, Peugeot under the fine-dining Gaston Plaud was a much more ad hoc affair. In Tom Simpson and Roger Pingeon, they had two of the most coveted riders on the international scene – but neither came with the same entourage or ego as Van Looy. Had, indeed, that been the case, it’s highly unlikely that Merckx would have been allowed to shoot out of the peloton just after Capo Berta in Milan–San Remo, then win an 11-man sprint on the Via Roma to take his first major victory.
    While Gianpaolo Ormezzano of
Tuttosport
, the journalist who had tipped Merckx after Paris–Nice, rubbed his hands, others in the press-box began a frantic forage for biographical nuggets, anything beyond the amateur world title in Sallanches two years earlier. ‘He knows Latin – so says a Flemish colleague,’ was the best
La Stampa
’s Gigi Boccacini could come up with. Naturally he didn’t check with Merckx, who would have told him that his Latin translations were in fact so ropey that he’d had to retake his exams in his penultimate year at school before giving up altogether a few months later.
    What Merckx did admit was that his victory had surprised him as much as anyone. ‘I didn’t consider myself one of the favourites because I had no idea how well I could do,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know my rivals, but I’d have played my cards in a sprint anyway. I tried and it turned out well. I’m as happy today as when I pulled on the rainbow jersey in Sallanches. No, actually, I’m even happier.’
    It wasn’t only the journalists who now began monitoring rather than just noticing Merckx. Fellow riders gathered information, quizzed Belgian colleagues, scrutinised Merckx in the bunch. On 9 April, he took to the start line for his first Tour of Flanders, already a marked man.
    It wasn’t long before he had made a lasting impression. On the rutted, cobbled road heading out of Berchem towards Kluisbergen and on to the first
berg
or climb of the race, the Kwaremont, a filthy scrap for position ensued.
    ‘The cobbles there led on to a cinder cycle path, and there was always a huge fight to be near the front,’ recalls the Yorkshireman Barry Hoban, at the time a member of the French Mercier team. ‘I was in a good position when suddenly I felt something hit my back wheel. I stayed upright and kept going but then it happened again. I looked around and saw that it was Merckx. “
Passen!
” I said – pay attention. No sooner had I turned around than he’d hit me again and we all came down. He’d caused one of the major crashes in the Tour of Flanders that year.
    ‘You could see he was this enthusiastic young lad, but he was a bit impetuous,’ Hoban continues. ‘You wanted to pull him aside and say, “Look, lad, you’re an apprentice. Learn your trade!”’
    Merckx had paid for his overzealousness with a smorgasbord of cuts and grazes and an abandonment in his first Tour of Flanders or
Ronde
. Those three weeks straddling San-Remo and Flanders would set the tone for his 1966 season: by the end of the year there were 20 wins, mainly in minor races in Belgium, moments of inspiration but also many a time when, in Merckx’s own words ‘my inexperience or ignorance was mercilessly exposed’.
    At the second major Classic of the Belgian spring season,