# The Man



## tarwheel2 (Jul 7, 2005)

Great article in today's New York Times about Eddy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/27/s...racing-and-winning.html?_r=1&ref=georgevecsey


August 26, 2011
Appetite for Racing, and for Winning
By GEORGE VECSEY
When the greatest champion of any sport comes to town, it seems like a good idea to take a look at him up close.

Babe Ruth isn’t coming around any time soon, as far as we know, and Michael Jordan is pretty ubiquitous from videos and commercials, but here was Eddy Merckx, the most successful cyclist of them all, just a few subway stops away.

The first thing that needs to be known about Merckx is how he got his nickname, the Cannibal. Actually, all cyclists look ferocious, with their formidable prehistoric-looking mandibles jutting below the wraparound sunglasses and new-age helmets.

Merckx, 66, rode before shades and helmets — riders swooped down mountains leading with their foreheads — and the naked look emphasized his insatiable eyes. From the mid 1960s to the mid ’70s, Merckx entered every race there was, from lowly midweek criterium to the major three-week tours. From 1970 through 1973, he won more than a third of the races he entered, a staggering percentage.

How did he get that nickname? Merckx flew in from Europe just for the party on Thursday evening celebrating the 50th birthday of Bicycling Magazine; he is a friend of the Rodale family, which owns the magazine. He showed up at the soiree in SoHo — barrel-chested and broad-shouldered, still looking like the 6-foot, 163-pound beast who dominated cycling for a generation.

Speaking in English, Merckx recalled how he got his nickname in 1969, after his first Tour championship, when he also captured the green jersey for points leader and the King of the Mountain jersey (white with large red circles). An admiring Peugeot teammate, Christian Raymond, told his 12-year-old daughter that Merckx would not let anybody else win a single franc.

“Daddy, he’s a cannibal,” the girl said. The nickname grew after his retirement, when Bernard Hinault and Miguel Indurain matched Merckx and Jacques Anquetil with five championships. Then Lance Armstrong won seven straight, from 1999 to 2005. They are very close, Merckx and Armstrong. When Armstrong was recovering from cancer, Merckx visited him in Texas.

“When you put down résumés of our careers side by side on two pieces of paper, his successes were incredible,” Armstrong told Alastair Campbell of The Times of London in 2004. “They were so diverse: Tours, world championships, one-hour records — he was an animal.” Armstrong did have one caveat: the quality and depth of riders are greater today, he said.

Armstrong, who has never officially tested positive for doping, is currently the target of a grand jury for his testimony about drugs. Merckx was disqualified from the Giro d’Italia in 1969 for using a stimulant and tested positive several other times.

The definitive word on this sport still comes from the offhand remark by Anquetil of France, who once asked, “Do they expect us to ride the Tour on Perrier water?”

Asked about the long history of drugs in cycling, Merckx said that in his day there were “products that made you a little less tired.” Nowadays, he said, there are products that “make you better.”

What does he think of the epidemic of positive tests in the last generation?

“It comes from the doctors; they make money,” he said.

He praised the upgraded testing in recent years and said the sport was now cleaner than many others.

For all that, cycling remains a compelling sport. Armstrong gained his desire from a hard childhood. Asked what made him tick, Merckx said his father was one of 11 children, his mother one of seven, and the parents ran a grocery store outside Brussels and raised three children.

“We were not rich,” he said. “We did not go to the Cote d’Azur or skiing. Our only vacation was to the North Sea. I had to pay for my bicycle every month, but we always had food.”

He was hungry in the way champions often are — the seething drive of Jim Brown, the bland glare of Gordie Howe, the cut-your-heart-out look of Mia Hamm. Merckx was always in motion somewhere. Whereas Armstrong and his team could spend an entire year preparing for the Tour de France, Merckx raced everywhere.

The lucrative Tour today is laced with arcane courtesies — popular racers win stages in their home regions; French riders (it has come to this) do well on the Quatorze, Bastille Day. Win the Tour, with a fantastic team around you, and you have had a great year. Not so in the time of Eddy Merckx.

“The smaller races were where you made your money,” he said the other day.

From 1969 through 1972, Merckx won the Tour de France, but he did not enter the race in 1973. The other day he explained: “I had the opportunity to win in Spain and Italy” — which he did — “and we only had 16-17 riders on our team, so it was not easy for them.”

Plus, as a thoroughly bilingual Belgian — who does not take sides in the schism between the Flamands and Walloons — he was most emphatically not a French citizen. So in 1973 it seemed prudent to abstain. The next year he won his fifth, and probably would have won a sixth, except that near the end of a mountain stage in 1975 he was sucker-punched by one of the thousands of spectators who clog the narrow mountain climbs.

“He hit me in the liver,” Merckx said, patting his right front abdomen. (Some stories claim he was hit in the kidneys, in the back, but Merckx would know.)

He finished third, 34 seconds out, and never won the Tour again. His total of victories is usually put at 450 races — not stages — and he did it all after injuring his back in 1969, an injury he felt for the rest of his career, and into today. Yes, he still rides.

Merckx resists comparisons with the other champions, saying: “You can only be the best of your time. I was the best of my time.”

Perhaps because of the mercantile background of his family, Merckx showed an aptitude for business, manufacturing his own line of bicycles for many years. There is now a Merckx model in the Gita brand, and he still makes suggestions for streamlining, but will not sacrifice safety for lighter weight. He has seen friends die for lack of security, he said somberly. He divides his time between Brussels (a subway stop is named after him) and Monaco, and brags about his son Axel, who rode in the Tour, and his daughter, and the five athletic grandchildren.

Merckx followed the recent Tour and respects Cadel Evans, the Australian, for winning, but he could not resist adding that Evans was not a versatile champion who could win stages under many conditions. Back in the day, there was financial incentive to win every stage, every race, from spring to fall. That made a rider hungry. Made him the Cannibal.

E-mail: [email protected]


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## HigherGround (Mar 3, 2005)

Nice article, thanks for sharing that. :thumbsup:


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## Brent Perkins (Jun 16, 2012)

good stuff


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## Brent Perkins (Jun 16, 2012)

ya great thanks


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## Le Turbo (Jun 10, 2010)

Amazing, amazing cyclist. I can't agree with Armstrong about the quality and depth of today's riders - especially when he concentrated on the TdF. Those days, the guys did everything, and they did it well. With heavier machines. With downtube shifters. With 5 or 6 speeds instead of 12. With 52/42 front blades. No, sorry Lance, Merckx in his day would have left you standing.


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## scott7024 (Jul 12, 2012)

nice thanks


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