Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal by Friebe Daniel

Author:Friebe, Daniel [Friebe, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781448146680
Publisher: Ebury Publishing
Published: 2012-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

12

deplumed

‘For the first time, I was dictated to by a stronger rider than me. Now I think it’s all over.’ EDDY MERCKX

FOR THE SECOND time in little over two years, Eddy Merckx lay in a foetal position on a hotel bed, his bottom lip quivering. The role fulfilled in turns in Savona by Vincenzo Giacotto, Italo Zilioli and Martin Van Den Bossche now fell to the Dutchman Rini Wagtmans.

‘It’s over. This Tour, me as a rider…it’s all finished,’ Merckx sobbed.

‘Come on, don’t be ridiculous,’ Wagtmans told him, paraphrasing the words expressed in manifold ways, in manifold languages, in the thousand or so telegrams that the Tour postman had just delivered to Merckx’s bedroom. ‘Remember what I told you under the podium this afternoon. Remember what I saw. I tell you, it’s not over…’

Almost a year to the day earlier, during the 1970 Tour, Merckx had sent Jean Van Buggenhout to meet Wagtmans in a hotel car park in Pau and offer him a ride with Merckx’s new Molteni team the following year. Wagtmans had immediately given Van Bug his word and his signature – if he remembers correctly, ‘on the back of La Dépêche du Midi newspaper’. The idea had been for Wagtmans to enter the fold of Merckx’s disciples, but until a few days ago he felt that, alas, Merckx had given him a lot more help than the other way around. A fast-talking, even faster-descending livewire of a rider, Wagtmans was also something of a maverick. His nickname, the ‘Witte Bles’ or ‘White Blaze’ referred both to the shock of white which struck his hairline like a lightning bolt and to his speed going downhill, but there was also something luminous and volatile about his whole approach to riding his bike. At a time when Merckx spent much of the winter competing in Six Days and racking up thousands of kilometres in training, Wagtmans consigned his bike to the garage in October then barely touched it again until March. Usually, within weeks, the sparks would be flying from his pedals, and Wagtmans would have fireworks prepared for the only race that mattered to him: the Tour. But not this year. Still desperately short of fitness in May, he had become so demoralised and downbeat about his prospects of making the Molteni Tour team, that it had taken a phone call and a stern pep talk from Merckx to bring him around. ‘Rini, you can’t train a thousand kilometres in three months and expect to be good. You wonder why I’m so good, but I ride more than two hundred kilometres most days…’

Previously, Wagtmans had thought that Merckx ‘trained like a foolish man’. As the Tour approached and he finally discovered his sparkle, Wagtmans realised that there was logic in the lunacy.

Now, though, in Marseille, he watched Merckx writhe, listened to his moans and briefly reverted to his old assessment. If Merckx thought that he was finished, that the 1971 Tour de France was over and Luis Ocaña had won, ‘foolish’ really was the only word.

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