Even in his pants and old men's socks up to just below the knee, this man exudes a historic aura - at least that's how a Dutch colleague felt when talking to perhaps the greatest cyclist of all time. Largely undressed, Eddy Merckx had a massage on a lounger at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Doha, Qatar, last spring. The reporter - three decades younger than Merckx - sat next to him and interviewed the Belgian. Right at the beginning, the journalist wanted to know whether it was appropriate to name Merckx in the same league as Muhammed Ali and Pélé. "Absolutely," Merckx replied, "not to be arrogant, but I am the best racer of my generation."
This is an attempt by someone born later to reflect on this celebrity, who is now 70 years old. Of course we, the under-50s, are aware of the enormous role played by this exceptional sportsman. He is a living monument. From 1968 to 1975, Merckx dominated the entire discipline. He united the kingdoms of the cobbled classics, until then under Rik van Looy's reign, and the grand tours, characterised in the 1960s by Jacques Anquetil. His first Tour de France came to symbolise his entire aegis: six stage wins and a 17:54 minute lead over Roger Pingeon in second place overall. Tour de France director Jacques Goddet celebrated him as "Merckxissimo" in his newspaper L'Equipe - and the daughter of a team-mate invented the Belgian's eternal nickname: Cannibal.
Merckx, the cannibal, still resonates for anyone interested in road cycling today - even for people like me, born in 1976, who were barely born when the champion ended his career. And yet it is difficult for non-witnesses to develop a healthy feeling for the achievements of the three-time professional world champion. Can we, can we, should we admire him after everything that has happened in the almost five decades since Merckx's first Tour victory?
Merckx stands for a foreign era in which cyclists were revered as heroes - and most people still recognise his name today. It was he himself who opened up the sport beyond the working classes in his home country, inspiring large sections of the population with his triumphs. His Tour de France victory in 1969 was a national event for Belgium. Merckx paraded through Brussels in an open convertible and the King and Queen welcomed him and his team-mates. The era of live TV broadcasts had only just begun, and this man with the black hair and long sideburns became an icon. Like the pictures of Muhammed Ali and Pélé, Merckx photos are part of our cultural heritage.
For my generation, Generation Y, at the latest, the picture is blurred, it is no longer really tangible what inspired enthusiasm decades ago. Anyone who watched Jan Ullrich fight Lance Armstrong and then followed what cycling did to itself and how it was dissected by the media - which made his status possible in the first place - needs a lot of imagination to view the heroic deeds of Eddy Merckx without asterisks, without cynicism, without question marks. The name Armstrong acts like a filter.
But it is also the name Armstrong that shows us how incredibly far removed Merckx and his deeds are from the present day. One day after the Belgian's first Tour de France triumph, the American Neil Armstrong became the first man to set foot on the moon. Mankind marvelled and celebrated its most distinguished heroes. For us today, who consider mass protests against a railway station or power lines to be the norm, this epoch-making step seems like science fiction. But once upon a time, there really were people who went that far to push the limits of humanity. Merckx's sporting feats seem to mirror these adventures in space. So are they heroic deeds?
In his biography of Merckx, British cycling journalist Daniel Friebe, himself a posthumous cyclist, reports on the dilemma faced by Belgian journalists after the moon landing. They had to weigh the news from space against Merckx's first Tour victory, which was celebrated by Flemish and Walloons alike on Belgium's bank holidays. It was a historic achievement. Many journalists, writes Friebe, had decided in favour of sport. Merckx, a pioneer of TV heroics.
We live far away from this Merckx and his time. Can we still imagine Vincenzo Nibali being photographed with a glass of beer or Chris Froome with a cigarette in his hand? It doesn't take much imagination to visualise the outcry that would sweep the sporting world. Yet we have a curious longing for this time, as TV series such as Mad Men show. Jacques Anquetil once posed for an advert for the Champigneulles beer brand - and Eddy Merckx was convinced by the R6 brand of cigarettes. They were "the intelligent choice", he said, "for me it's the first low-nicotine, low-tar cigarette with so much flavour".
It is worth mentioning: According to contemporary witnesses, Merckx and his sporting competitors lived just as professionally as cyclists do today. Merckx was not a smoker. But he was an advertising figure for a public that was unaware of many of the doubts that we have deeply internalised today. Just imagine the image of Marcel Kittel sprinting across the tarmac without a crash helmet. And Merckx, as Daniel Friebe discovered while researching his book, won the 1968 Giro despite suffering from a life-threatening, highly acute heart condition.
It shouldn't be too steep a thesis: Merckx could never become the hero for our generation today that he became in his day. He tested positive for doping three times in his career. The first time was in 1969, just two years after the death of Britain's Tom Simpson, at the Giro d'Italia. "Savona was the moment when Merckx lost his innocence, when the sport that gave him fulfilment and deep joy revealed its darker and more devious side," writes William Fotheringham in his biography "Merckx: Half Man, Half Bike". In Savona on the morning of 2 June 1969, Merckx, wearing the pink jersey, was surprised in his room by his own sports director, the Giro director, a TV camera crew and Belgian journalists. The day before, according to the news, Merckx had given a positive urine sample, fencamfamine had been found, a stimulant. Merckx reacted with devastation and later maintained his innocence. There were wild rumours of manipulation. Had someone else planted something on Merckx?
To this day, doubts remain as to whether Merckx really used a drug himself. However, the anti-doping policy of the time was unbelievable. It was not only the technical handling and the doping test process that would not meet today's standards. The aftermath of the affair is even more astonishing: Merckx should actually have been banned for a month. However, the Tour de France began on 2 July 1969 - with stages in Merckx's home country. So the professional riders' association decided to rule in favour of Merckx "in case of doubt". Fotheringham is convinced that Merckx wanted to show the cycling world what he was made of: "He felt obliged," writes the biographer, "to make absolutely sure that nothing could rob him of the victory he wanted for so long."
What seems incredible to us today, perhaps even suspicious, but at least completely unreal, is Merckx's unique position. If someone wins two classics in the spring, that's sensational. Teamwork is also a must on the bike, teams act as one. In our differentiated world, it is no longer conceivable for any rider to win 54 times in 120 starts in one year. Merckx set the standard in 1972: Milan-San Remo, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, Flèche Wallonne, Tour of Lombardy, Giro victory, Tour de France triumph and the world hour record in Mexico - all victories from this one year.
Merckx was a superior force that was not tackled by the majority of the peloton. "Moreover, the riders who dared to do so usually had to exert themselves so excessively that it permanently shortened their careers," writes Dutch sociologist Benjo Maso in "The Sweat of the Gods": Luis Ocaña, José Manuel Fuente, Bernard Thévénet and Cyrille Guimard tried it during the grand tours, there were no more riders - "and it is certainly no coincidence," writes Maso, "that none of them were able to stay at the top for long." Guimard had to fend off Merckx in 1972, using Novocain, before abandoning the Tour exhausted. Merckx had such a prominent role that sponsors were reluctant to turn their attention to other teams. Other riders like Joop Zoetemelk and Lucien Van Impe hoped only for mistakes, while still others joined Merckx's team directly. Competition between teams, as we take it for granted today, did not exist back then. One man dominated everything. An alien concept.
Merckx's exceptional position was due to the fact that there was still room for a superior individual back then - and he had the physical prerequisites and the irrepressible will. This is astonishing, because the author Daniel Friebe is not the only one who considers Merckx's contemporaries to be illustrious, but Merckx "overshadowed them, practically obliterated them" - although they "formed a constellation the likes of which cycling has never seen brighter." The TV broadcasts brought him a mass audience and unprecedented sponsorship contracts. Today, in globalised sports and attention capitalism, there are many highly professional organisations that send athletes into competition with well-balanced plans. Too much dominance would kill the quota. In 1970, Ulfert Schröder wrote in DIE ZEIT that Merckx was the first rider after Coppi to win the Tour de France alone against all competitors. For Merckx, victory was a drug. "And he always wanted it completely, indivisibly, incontestably and as clearly as possible. And that is why it is no exaggeration to claim that Merckx not only destroys his opponents, but also the sport of cycling," the author wrote in the weekly newspaper.
In fact, this accusation is often made during Merckx's time, and it has often been described that many fans no longer wanted to see the Belgian because of his growing dominance. But Pierre Chany, the legendary French cycling journalist, countered this criticism: "Has anyone ever asked themselves whether Molière harmed the theatre, Bach harmed music, Cézanne was bad for painting or Chaplin ruined cinema?" Anyone who wants to subject themselves artistically to the rider should indulge in the images of his time, and the film "La Course en Tête", an opulent documentary about Merckx from 1974, is particularly recommended.
It is a paradox that Merckx completed his triumph over his time in his first defeat at the Tour de France. In 1975, Merckx fell flat on his face at the foot of the Col du Télégraphe. He rode on, over 225 kilometres and chased down the leader Thévenet. After the stage, Merckx was diagnosed with a double fracture to his cheekbone and jaw. Merckx did not listen to the doctors and continued the Tour on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Merckx later regretted it from a medical point of view, but as the athlete who struck down his generation, he had to carry on. He would probably never have forgiven himself if front-runner Thévenet had made another mistake and Merckx had not been given the chance. Guardian author Fotheringham sees this defeat as the event that sets Merckx apart from all the others. Only here did what had been overlooked for all those years and triumphs come to light: "A professional conscience, an all-encompassing dedication, a reluctance to submit to the dictates of fate, an almost blind love for his profession, a fear of doing something he would later regret: he revealed all these things to the public on those six days." And so, in the end, Merckx was more popular than ever before when he lost his first stage race.
People like me only know this time from stories, from music, from wild films. It was a time when our western world was changing, when young people were revolting, when art and music were euphoric for the masses and everything was shifting. It was at this time that Eddy Merckx became the star that he remains today. A star, it will be noted, the likes of which we can no longer imagine today. It was his luck that he was born at a time when icons could still emerge. It was not luck, however, but his iron will that made him an icon. During his solo ride through the Pyrenees in the 1969 Tour, the cycling world didn't know how to react to him. Even for those of us born later, this remains a difficult task.
