Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal Read Online Free PDF Page B

my eggs in the same basket and gambled everything on cycling. It was one of the blackest moments of my career.’
    Fortunately for Merckx, his own prodigious physical gift was becoming irresistible to even the minor weaknesses he did possess. A susceptibility to cramps at the end of long races had also been rectified. When the familiar aches scuppered his hopes of a first professional world champion’s rainbow jersey at the Nürburgring in September 1966, Merckx had been so distraught that it took all of Jean Van Buggenhout’s powers of persuasion to coax him on to the set of
Lundi-Sports
for a live television debrief the following evening. It turned out to be a wise decision, as within hours of the programme airing, an 85-year-old viewer had called to recommend a miracle pomade that would cure his cramps forever. With it, another obstacle to perfection suddenly vanished.
    For the most part, though, Merckx was creating his own luck, and was the architect of his own inexorable advance on the Felice Gimondis, the Gianni Mottas, the Walter Godefroots and the Roger Pingeons who had mistaken themselves for the next anointed ones. In an age when the first significant racing in a season took place in March, and many riders barely started training before February, Merckx was hardly off his bike, competing and winning on the track throughout the winter. His Belgian teammate at Peugeot Ferdinand Bracke was flabbergasted by his work ethic. ‘It’s extraordinary – he trains with the same intensity in November as in January,’ Bracke told
Miroir du Cyclisme
. ‘People come up with all sorts of statistics about Eddy, but I’d be curious to know how many hours he’s spent on his bike between races and training. I’m not far off thinking that he spends more time in the saddle than he does in his bed. This man is made of a metal tougher than steel.’
    No one, though, was suggesting that all a rider needed to do was train longer and further than the rest to be the best, if indeed that’s what Merckx did. The 125 kilometres he rode on average per day, 365 days per year, were remarkable, mind-boggling. But he wasn’t the only rider covering that kind of distance. Gimondi, for one, knew and could follow the recipe of hard graft at least as well as Merckx.
    No, there would have to be something else, something even beside his dauntingly powerful, God-given engine. Because even on that score, and even allowing for the fact that he was still growing in 1967, Merckx was outstanding, but not to the extent where major tour and Classics victories could be considered an inevitability. His lung capacity was at a good but not exceptional 5.9 litres, as compared with the Italian rider Marino Basso’s 6.7 litres. His resting heart-rate was in the high 30s, but everyone knew that constituted no gauge of athletic potential. His VO2 Max, a measurement of the body’s capacity to transport and use oxygen during exercise, today considered the ultimate gauge of athletic potential, was inferior to that of the best cross-country skiers. One of his most valuable endowments may in fact have been what looked like a morphological imperfection, his disproportionately long femur bones. According to Roger Bastide in his
Eddy Merckx, Cet Inconnu
, published in 1972, ‘this creates a longer lever, and the rider gains power, as the angle of the pedal-stroke is less open’.
    Bastide, though, followed this potentially crucial information with a disclaimer: the French rider Jean-Pierre Parenteau also had long thighs and short calves, but nothing like the success of Merckx.
    There was, in truth, already something very different, unique about Merckx as the 1966 season ended and 1967 began, but it remained easier to discern than define. ‘Hunger’ partially covered it, but only partially. For all his pragmatism, his champagne-quaffing and alleged philandering, Anquetil was also ravenously ambitious – but in a way that couldn’t have been more starkly juxtaposed