Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal Read Online Free PDF

Liège–Bastogne–Liège on 2 May, Anquetil had underlined just how far Merckx needed to progress with a consummate performance, almost desultory in its power and grace. Usually uninterested in the Classics, ‘Master Jacques’ had allowed himself to be goaded by his team manager Géminiani and a remark about Felice Gimondi’s capacity to win not just the Tour de France but also Paris–Bruxelles and Paris–Roubaix. As much as Merckx would never quite understand how Anquetil seemed to pick and choose his objectives like canapés at a dinner party, it was clear later that the Frenchman’s procession in the ’66 Liège had left its mark on him. ‘I’m sure that Anquetil could have won Paris–Roubaix, the Tour of Lombardy or a world championship, with the class he had,’ he told Marc Jeuniau in the 1971 book
Face à face avec Eddy Merckx
. ‘He only needed to get annoyed one day to win Liège–Bastogne–Liège. But [winning everything] didn’t interest him. He’d decided to organise his career differently.’
    At the Grand Prix des Nations time trial at the end of 1966 Anquetil would highlight another facet of Merckx’s riding, besides his temperament, that needed work by inflicting a three-minute defeat. Although undeniably powerful, Merckx’s pedalling style looked too untidy to be effective against the clock and the pacing of his efforts too ragged. Not that his performance in the Nations wasn’t rich with promise; third behind Anquetil and Gimondi but ahead of Poulidor and Pingeon was no disgrace. Jacques Augendre later wrote in
Miroir du Cyclisme
that, ‘A lot of observers noted, not without astonishment, that Merckx was good against the clock as well as in sprints.’
    Some seemed to think during his first 14 months at Peugeot that there were other areas of the Merckx skillset that required more urgent attention. At the Tour of Sardinia, his first stage-race of the 1967 season, more than Merckx’s two stage wins, the Italian Giancarlo Ferretti remembers his crash on an unchallenging descent. ‘People had been talking him up in the press, but it was the first time I’d got a good look at him in the flesh,’ Ferretti recalls. ‘We were going down and I saw him coming, this flash of his black and white jersey, and he just went straight off the road. I thought to myself that he couldn’t be that good if he was crashing there.’
    Ferretti wasn’t the only one who noticed Merckx’s vulnerability on descents. Marino Vigna, who had seen Merckx struggle whenever the road climbed in his first ever pro race, the 1965 Flèche Wallonne, now made the same observation as Ferretti when Merckx went downhill. ‘He was a bit stiff, rigid,’ Vigna confirms. Merckx certainly hadn’t been flattered by the comparison with Tom Simpson’s feline efforts while descending at the 1967 Paris–Nice. He would later admit to learning a lot just from watching his Peugeot teammate sway and slide effortlessly through the hairpins.
    Italo Zilioli, who would later strike up a bond with Merckx after their brief encounter near the summit of the Blockhaus in the 1967 Giro, disputes that Merckx was ever a poor descender, but concedes that this was one area where his head could rule his legs. ‘He wasn’t the instinctive descender that, for instance, I was. When he had to descend fast, Eddy could, whereas I would get carried away in the moment and do things that perhaps weren’t very sensible.’
    So, on that evidence, bike-handling posed Merckx no problem. What could bother him was the same anxiety which often caused him to throw up before races in his junior and amateur days, and which early in his pro career manifested itself in assorted forms of psychosomatic pain. ‘Around the age of twenty, I suffered with terrible pain in my kidney for several months,’ he revealed years later. ‘The doctors I went to see couldn’t find any cause…and it turned out to be a nervous thing. I was in the pit of despair, having put all of