Eddy Merckx Leads Luis Ocaña
Eddy Merckx Leads Luis Ocaña
1971:
8 July. Stage Eleven: Grenoble to Orcières-Merlette
134km. High mountains
10 July. Stage Twelve: Orcières-Merlette to Marseille
251km. Flat
12 July. Stage Fourteen: Revel to Luchon
214.5km. Mountains
To speak of stage eleven or twelve of the 1971 Tour de France in isolation would be like talking about only one half of a great football match. To then ignore stage fourteen would be like not mentioning extra time in a World Cup final.
One of the two protagonists is Eddy Merckx, ‘The Cannibal’, the greatest of all time. He gobbled up races, devoured opponents, yet the curious thing is that he did not win any of these three stages, and, naturally, excludes them from his list of personal favourites. It didn’t stop Jacques Goddet, the Tour director, describing one of these losing performances as the most ‘moving’ of Merckx’s career, while Merckx’s own team-mate, Rini Wagtmans, described the second as ‘the greatest stage in Tour de France history’.
I meet Eddy Merckx in Doha, where he can be found most Februarys, in his role as ambassador at the Tour of Qatar. In the mornings, he rides his bike with the Belgian friends who work on the race in a variety of roles – clearly being a friend of Big Eddy has its advantages. In the afternoons, after returning and clack-clacking across the hotel’s polished marble floors in cleated cycling shoes and lycra that struggles to contain his fuller figure, Merckx heads back into the desert to supervise the stage finishes. In the evenings, he dines and wines in one of the expensive rooftop restaurants. And throughout, Merckx wears an impassive expression, revealing nothing.
Merckx is not merely a retired cyclist. He is his sport’s GOAT: Greatest Of All Time. In cycling terms, he is Ali, Pelé and Jordan rolled into one. Yet the Merckx mystique is difficult to measure. Perhaps it is his ubiquity, which is due to his regular presence at the major races, or the impassivity that is his trademark. He often looks bored. His face – doe eyes, eyebrows like dark caterpillars, high cheekbones, downturned lips – appears to convey deep sadness, or boredom; or vacancy, as the journalist Odélie Grand observed when she interviewed him for L’Aurore in the 1970s. Grand noted that most of her male interviewees betrayed some sense that she was a woman, even some interest, ‘But in front of Eddy Merckx … nothing! His gaze gets lost somewhere over your shoulder and erases you from the picture. It’s a blackout. You no longer exist. He replies with a yes or a no, but he’s thousands of kilometres away, on his own inaccessible planet.’ (Never mind failing to acknowledge the fact she was a woman, there is almost the sense that Merckx didn’t even register that Grand was a person.)
The paradox, of course, is that Merckx’s impassivity is so at odds with his engagement with – or immersion in – his sport. Merckx’s behaviour – his attention to every detail relating to body and bike, his semi-permanent state of high anxiety, his crises of confidence, his failure to ever be satisfied, his need to win every race he rode – was obsessive-compulsive before the term became fashionable.
You cannot appreciate Merckx, and what he did, by sitting and talking to him in the opulent lobby of the five-star Ritz-Carlton hotel in Qatar, or from watching the bloated figure clack-clacking across the marble floors; you must go back to the lean, sculpted and sideburned cyclist of the late 1960s and early 1970s, who came upon the scene like a hurricane, a tornado, and was capable of deeds so extraordinary that the language of the sport seemed inadequate in describing them.
The trouble with Merckx is that there are so many deeds to choose from. The pick for many is 1969 and his Tour de France début, specifically the stage that tackled the ‘Circle of Death’ in the Pyrenees – Col de Peyresourde, Col d’Aspin, Col du Tourmalet and Col d’Aubisque. Merckx attacked over the top of the Tourmalet, then rode alone for 140km to win in Mourenx. That performance prompted the Tour director, Jacques Goddet, to coin a new word: Merckxissimo; and indeed, when I ask Merckx to select his greatest ever performance, this is his initial choice. ‘Sixty-nine, Luchon to Mourenx?’ Merckx suggests. ‘I think also ’68 to Tre Cime di Lavaredo [stage twelve of the Giro d’Italia, on his way to his first Grand Tour victory]. And Paris–Roubaix in 1970.’ Merckx chuckles. ‘There are a lot.’
There are.
But in 1971 there appeared to be a chink in Merckx’s armour. He is adamant, in fact, that he was never the same rider after a crash in the velodrome at Blois, in which his motorcycle pacer died, at the end of 1969: ‘Absolutely. Absolutely. After ’69 I was no longer the same, for sure.’ (It didn’t stop him winning four more Tours, four more Giri d’Italia, one Vuelta a España, four Milan–San Remos, two Paris–Roubaixs, four Liège–Bastogne–Lièges, one Tour of Flanders, two Tours of Lombardy. And lots more.)
Even if his strength was diminished, the Cannibal’s appetite was not. During the 1970 Tour, Goddet despaired of Merckx’s domination, telling a L’Equipe editorial meeting, ‘Gentlemen, this is a catastrophe!’ It was the year he won seven stages plus the prologue and arrived in Paris with a lead of over twelve minutes on Joop Zoetemelk. A year later, on the eve of the 1971 race, the front page of Paris Match asked: ‘Merckx – Is he going to kill the Tour de France?’
Merckx arrived at the start in Mulhouse on 26 June having tinkered with his winning formula, skipping the Giro d’Italia for the first time in five years. He had started the year with a bang, winning the Tour of Sardinia, Paris–Nice and, for the fourth of an eventual seven times, Milan–San Remo. Then came wins at Het Volk and the Tour of Belgium. The list would be extraordinary, yet for Merckx it was routine; business as usual. Which was surely why, in Paris–Roubaix, when he punctured five times, his rivals seemed so eager to capitalise on his misfortune, racing clear instead of waiting. Normal etiquette would see sympathy extended to a rider who suffers bad luck, but because Merckx was not normal, normal rules did not apply.
On the eve of the Tour, he won the Dauphiné, but not without some difficulty. He struggled in the Alps where, as William Fotheringham writes in his biography, Half Man, Half Bike, he was experimenting with a new, raised pedal, to compensate for the fact that one of his legs was shorter than the other. Such tinkering could often bring trouble: in the next decade, Bernard Hinault would suffer knee pain after adjusting his saddle height. And so it was with Merckx, a persistent tinkerer (a symptom, no doubt, of his constant fretting), who experienced problems with his knee at his next stage race, Midi Libre. But equally ominously, the Spaniard Luis Ocaña pushed him hard at the Dauphiné, placing second.
Now Merckx tells me: ‘I was not good at the 1971 Tour. I was not in good condition. I didn’t do the Giro, I did the Dauphiné and Midi Libre and had some problems with my knee. I came to the Tour, and my condition at the beginning was not good. On the first climbs, I was suffering a little bit … For me the best preparation for the Tour was always the Giro, because the climbs are harder. I was always better in the Tour when I had done the Giro.’
Ocaña smelled blood and thought he could take advantage. He might have been in a minority of one: on the eve of the Tour, a newspaper cartoon showed Ocaña in the role of matador facing a much larger, more aggressive and determined-looking bull – a bull with Merckx’s face – rearing up and over the cowering matador. In the cartoon, as in some pictures, it was actually quite difficult to tell Ocaña and Merckx apart: both were dark, with strong jaws, and prominent cheekbones with long sideburns. Not that they were identical: Merckx was taller, and Ocaña had the more expressive face; his eyes could sparkle or appear downcast and haunted. They had something else in common: mental fragility. But it manifested in different ways, and was of a darker hue in Ocaña’s case. As his old team-mate Johny Schleck told Daniel Friebe, for his Merckx biography Cannibal, Ocaña’s skin was ‘so thin you could practically see through it’. He was ‘sensitive to everything, even success’.
Ocaña, born in Spain but raised in France from the age of six, was second to Merckx at the Dauphiné but made life difficult for him on the climbs. The winner of his own national tour, the Vuelta a España, in 1970, he was eight days older than Merxkx but a later developer; and by 1971 he felt he was gaining on his rival. ‘They all surrender to Merckx, but I’m going to stand up to him,’ he said. Earlier in 1971, he bought an Alsatian and called it Merckx. ‘Obey, Merckx!’ he would tell the dog. ‘I’m your master, your boss.’
The prologue to the 1971 Tour was unusual: a team time trial that Merckx’s Molteni team won comfortably. The next day included no fewer than three road stages: 1a, 1b and 1c (of 59.5, 90 and 74km respectively). The day after that, to Strasbourg, saw fifteen riders go clear 100km from the finish, a move that included most of the favourites, including Merckx and Ocaña. They finished nine minutes ahead of the peloton. And in the velodrome in Strasbourg, who else but Merckx won the stage. Once again he was in yellow.
Attention turned to stage eight, to the extinct volcano of Puy de Dôme in the Massif Central. It was where Raymond Poulidor and Jacques Anquetil famously duelled in 1964, grazing shoulders as neither gave an inch. A viciously steep climb of just 14km, it last featured on the route of the Tour in 1988 and these days cannot return – the road is too narrow and the Tour is too big. But in 1971, with Merckx still in yellow, he appeared to be struggling as they began the climb. The scent of blood filled Ocaña’s nostrils. He jumped away. Merckx was left behind.
Emerging through the mist at the summit, Ocaña won the stage, with Zoetemelk second at eight seconds and Joaquim Agostinho of Portugal third. The hysterical French TV commentary conveys just how strange it is for a hilltop stage to finish with no sign of Merckx. The mist adds to the mood of tension and suspense: where is he? ‘Can he keep yellow?’ yells the commentator as the tall figure of Merckx appears through the gloom, his big shoulders rocking with the effort of damage limitation. ‘He’s sprinting!’ Merckx heaves his body across the line in fourth place, 15 seconds down.
Although Merckx kept yellow, the talk was now all of Ocaña, who, when the road went up, appeared stronger – there was no getting away from that. ‘Before ’71 he had great qualities,’ says Merckx of the Spaniard, ‘but he never did anything amazing until then and the Puy de Dôme; it was incredible, that attack.’ According to Zoetemelk, Ocaña ‘was riding like a mad man. I’ll never forget it.’
Next, it was on to Grenoble, the finish of stage ten. Merckx punctured on the descent of the Col du Cucheron, with 32km remaining. Again etiquette was ignored: Ocaña attacked ‘like a bullet out of a gun’. Merckx, having waited for a spare wheel, fought hard to try and close the gap on the next climb, the Col de Porte, but paid for his efforts and came into Grenoble almost a minute and a half down on Ocaña and the Spaniard’s three companions. Joop Zoetemelk was the new overall leader.
The obituary-writers now smelled blood, too. ‘Has the Merckx era begun slipping away to its conclusion?’ wrote Jacques Goddet in L’Equipe. ‘The least we can say is that it has entered a new period. The glorious bird has lost a little plumage … he is no longer in a class of his own.’
Then came Orcières-Merlette. Stage eleven. The Côte de Laffrey was early: not one of the bigger-name Alpine climbs (though the first ever included on the route of the Tour), yet capable of inflicting serious damage; a steep ramp up a sheer cliff. There were 120km remaining of a relatively short stage when they started to climb, but Ocaña’s team manager, Maurice de Muer, had a plan: ‘We set the whole team to work, and the race was hard from the off because we had seen the day before that Merckx wasn’t in his best form.’
Ocaña, so determined to ‘stand up’ to Merckx, also had the advice of Jacques Anquetil, the first five-time Tour winner, echoing in his head. ‘Go,’ Anquetil had told him in Grenoble the previous evening, ‘on the Côte de Laffrey.’
It was Agostinho who was the first attacker; Ocaña, Van Impe and Zoetemelk followed. Merckx had suffered a sleepless night – as well as his usual anxieties, he was now suffering stomach pain, too – and did not react. A gap opened. The Laffrey ‘only’ climbed to 910 metres, but by the top Merckx was already two minutes adrift. Was Goddet’s prophecy correct?
The twenty-six-year-old Ocaña sensed his time was now. One by one, he dropped his companions until on the Noyer climb, with 60km still to go, he was on his own. This was the way Ocaña rode: he wasn’t explosive, but as strong as an ox; he dropped riders not by attacking but by steadily ratcheting up the speed, like a torturer tightening thumbscrews. The roads were poor, the heat was stifling, but soon Ocaña had three minutes and 45 seconds on Van Impe, four minutes on Agostinho and Zoetemelk, five and a half on Merckx and the other nine riders in his group.
At the foot of the final climb to the ski station at Orcières-Merlette, with 20km left, Ocaña’s lead had increased further: over five minutes on Van Impe; an enormous nine minutes on Merckx. Yet Merckx was relentless in his pursuit; he never gave up. Nor did he receive any help.
While Ocaña was on the rampage, Merckx fought all the way up to the ski station at Orcières-Merlette where, typically, he led in his small group. ‘Even when he is beaten, he still has his pride,’ said the French commentator. He won the sprint, but he had lost eight minutes – eight minutes – to Ocaña, who was now in yellow.
The Tour was over, was the opinion. Ocaña seemed the only one unconvinced, telling reporters: ‘The Tour is not finished. It would be if Merckx were not in it, but a rider like him is capable of anything.’
‘Today Ocaña tamed us all,’ said Merckx. ‘With the lead he has I cannot see, right now, how he can lose, but I’m not quitting, though I can tell you that at one time today I thought of it.’
Merckx was down that night; Wagtmans later recalled him being ‘completely depressed, saying silly things, like that he’d never beat Luis Ocaña again. We all tried to gee him up, but he was having none of it.’
‘For the first time, I was dictated to by a stronger rider than me,’ said Merckx that evening. ‘Now I think it’s all over. Ocaña has been dominating for three days ... I don’t know what’s wrong, but I’m incapable of attacking.’
There was one word for Ocaña’s performance: ‘Merckxissimo’. But such a performance from a rider other than Merckx was new and unprecedented. The Tour was about to enter uncharted territory. The question was, how would Merckx respond?
* * *
In the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in Qatar, Merckx’s phone rings. He stares at it, as though unsure whether to answer, then answers and talks in Flemish. His facial expression remains fixed, frozen, inscrutable: sad or bored? After four minutes, he finishes the call without saying goodbye. He resumes our conversation, without apologising for the interruption. Then again, he is Eddy Merckx.
What does he recall, now, of the day everyone agreed he had lost the 1971 Tour, to Ocaña? ‘Well, first, I had bad luck the day before to Grenoble with the puncture, and I remember Ocaña attacking. There were other riders in the break, but nobody would help me. If it happened today, the sports director would say, “Wait – there are some riders at seconds [behind],” but at that time, well, anyway ...
‘The day after, on the Côte de Laffrey, Ocaña was super that day. Super. When I arrived at Orcières, I thought the Tour was over, for sure.’ What had it been like, chasing for mile upon mile without any help from anyone, and with the gap increasing to almost ten minutes? Merckx shrugs. ‘It was normal that no one helped me. When someone dominates the sport like I was dominating cycling … I wouldn’t expect gifts from anyone else, because I didn’t offer any gifts. It was payback. But then we had the rest day and I went training with my team. And I said, “Maybe we can try tomorrow?” We started at the top of the mountain. Ocaña was not so good on the descents …’
In Cannibal, Friebe’s biography of Merckx, a curious incident is related. It is from immediately prior to the stage. Raymond Riotte of the Sonolor team had been up early that morning, and ‘as he made his way through the grotty bowels of the Club du Soleil, Riotte noticed a strange whirring noise coming from an adjacent room. He followed it to a doorway, poked his head around the corner and rubbed his eyes. It looked like … no, it was Merckx, churning away on the rollers.’
Riotte said: ‘Eddy, Eddy, what are you doing?’
‘Oh, you know, my legs didn’t feel great so I was just trying to loosen up.’
‘But have you seen the length of the stage?’ Riotte asked. ‘We’ve got 250 kilometres to do, in this heat …’
Was Merckx warming up? Was he up to something? He denies the story now. ‘No. No, no, no. You don’t warm up for a descent. We had trained on the rest day, but on the morning of the stage? No.’
* * *
The stage from Orcières to Marseille was 251km. After the descent from the ski station where they had been camped on the rest day, it was more or less a flat run to the Mediterranean. The kind of stage that would ordinarily be quite uneventful.
Stage starts at the Tour follow a typical routine: the flag drops and the riders roll out. Some will be left behind, but there’s no need to panic, no sense of urgency. At some point the attacks will start. And then the race will be on. But nobody attacks from the gun, before some riders have even got their feet in the pedals.
In Orcières, on top of the mountain, something was up. As they lined up for the start, Merckx and his Molteni men nudged their way to the front. And there they stood, as though lining up for a Formula One Grand Prix, at the front of the grid. ‘We planned to start at the front,’ Merckx explains now. ‘Ocaña was at the back of the bunch, speaking with journalists because he was in the yellow jersey.’
Matter-of-factly, while passing his mobile phone from one hand to the other, and with his expression unchanged, Merckx adds: ‘And at the start, we attacked.’
Johny Schleck had spotted Merckx and his team gathering at the front and had an inkling that something was afoot: ‘I said, “Luis, look out. Le Grand [another nickname for Merckx that needs no explanation] is on the front line.” Luis just said, “Come on, he’s not going to attack on the descent.”’
But attack on the descent is exactly what he and his Molteni team did. As Wagtmans told Friebe: ‘BOOM! Off I went. Like an atomic bomb.’ Wagtmans led the line while Merckx and two more Moltenis, Joseph Huysmans and Julien Stevens, did their best to follow. Eight other riders joined them, including a team-mate of Ocaña’s, Désiré Letort. A sense of panic gripped the peloton. There was chaos, not least, as Barry Hoban told Friebe, because ‘Everyone had had new tyres glued on the previous day, and they hadn’t bedded down yet.’ Tyres were rolling off rims. ‘People were falling off all over the place.’
By the foot of the descent, with the lead group whittled down to ten, the gap was a minute. Merckx and team-mates hammered away at the front, while Ocaña and allies (not all of them from his own team) chased. It was relentless. Under the pressure, the peloton splintered into five groups. After 20km, the gap was creeping up. It was 1:20. Then 20km later, another 20 seconds had been added. But at 80km, it had come inside a minute: 55 seconds. In the main peloton, as more bodies joined the chase, one of Merckx’s team-mates, Joseph Bruyère, punctured. The other Moltenis were ordered to wait for him: an error. They never got back on. It meant they couldn’t make a nuisance of themselves in trying to disrupt the chase. Then Ocaña punctured, and the gap momentarily expanded to two minutes. By the top of a small climb, the Padequette, at 147km, it was back down to 1:20.
For 240km and five hours, it didn’t let up. Nobody blinked. The speed didn’t drop below 50kph. And the gap hovered around a minute. Merckx began at one point to lose heart, but his director, Lomme Driessens, encouraged and cajoled. There was a greater prize at stake; greater, perhaps, than any time to be gained on Ocaña on this particular day.
At the front of the peloton, Ocaña’s Bic team received help from the Spanish Werner squad and Cyrille Guimard’s Mercier men. Guimard was an old adversary of Merckx who would later claim that by chasing he was protecting his own interests – an argument Merckx found about as credible as the tooth fairy. Once again, there was an unholy alliance against Le Grand. Payback.
Merckx and his fellow eight fugitives raced into Marseille almost an hour ahead of the fastest predicted schedule. This had unfortunate consequences. Streets that should have been lined with thousands of fans were all but empty; TV crews were still setting up; barriers were still being erected; most seriously of all, the mayor of the city, Gaston Deferre, was still lunching with his VIP guests. They missed the finish completely.
Merckx launched himself at the line but he had to go the long way around Huysmans. An Italian rider, Luciano Armani, nabbed the stage win by centimetres from the lunging Merckx. Two minutes and twelve seconds later, the peloton arrived. Ocaña was angry, complaining that Wagtmans attacked before the flag had even been dropped. That might have been a first: a false-start in a road race. The Marseille mayor, Deferre, was even angrier: ‘The Tour de France will never set foot in this city again, as long as I live,’ he said. He was as good as his word. Deferre died in 1986; the Tour finally returned three years later.
But Merckx wasn’t exactly happy, either. ‘Too much for too little,’ was his mantra. He was interviewed on the podium, the interviewer telling him he had done ‘something incredible today’.
‘If there had been more of us, we would have made a real break,’ said Merckx. ‘Not many were riding hard.’
Ocaña was riding hard as well, he was told. ‘Yes, it was very hard today,’ shrugged Merckx.
Was Merckx satisfied? ‘No, we pushed a lot for not much.’
‘You don’t want Ocaña to win the Tour easily,’ the interviewer teased. ‘The Tour de France finishes in Paris,’ Merckx replied. ‘Obviously Ocaña has a strong advantage on me … It’s still very difficult. But you should never give up.’
At this stage, the jury was out on whether Merckx’s great escape had been a success. What everybody could agree on – everybody except Ocaña – was that it had been thrilling. ‘Cold realists could consider whether the gain was worth the effort,’ said the report in Cycling Weekly, ‘but that was not the attitude of those privileged to follow a Tour stage that will go down in history – the day when Eddy Merckx took flight over the long hot road to the sea, taking eight more men with him, to finish over an hour up on the fastest schedule in a record average speed of 45.351kph (28.26mph).’
Raphaël Géminiani, one of the great figures of French cycling, a leading rider of the 1950s who then became a top manager, agreed: ‘It was sublime. I rate this effort better than Ocaña’s on the Merlette.’
But Merckx was down, in a figurative and literal sense – the gap to Ocaña remained a yawning chasm of seven minutes, 34 seconds. Wagtmans sought to reassure him, telling him that although the time reclaimed seemed insignificant, the psychological damage done to Ocaña was anything but. Physically, too, the 240km pursuit match must have drained Ocaña; it was always tougher to chase than be chased. Wagtmans studied Ocaña on the podium and concluded that he was a shadow of the swashbuckling rider who had won at Orcières-Merlette forty-eight hours earlier. ‘All the colour had drained from his face,’ he recalled. ‘He had lost too much power that day. When Merckx came down off the podium, I stopped him and said, “Eddy, Ocaña has no future in this Tour de France. Trust me.”’
Had it been worth it? ‘Maybe not,’ reflected Merckx. But in a way that wasn’t the point; to debate it endlessly was to misunderstand the cyclist known as the Cannibal. ‘All I know is that I will attack to my limit,’ he said, ‘even if it means I finish the Tour in twentieth place.’
* * *
‘That day, I think the Tour changed,’ says Merckx now of Marseille. The balance began to tilt, but would have tilted more, he believes, had it not been for his team-mate Bruyère’s puncture, and the sacrifice of other team-mates to a forlorn chase. ‘If they had stayed together in the group, with Ocaña, I think we could have taken fifteen minutes.’
Does he remember arriving early in Marseille, and the odd experience of racing through empty streets? ‘Ha ha ha! Yes. We were on the rivet all day, absolutely. Absolutely.’ He seems infused, for the first time, with a nostalgic glow. And yet he says the stage is not among his most memorable. ‘Not especially, because I did not win the stage, and the Tour was not finished. And we didn’t take that much time …’
But did he feel Ocaña was beatable? Merckx turns serious, solemn even. ‘Yes, yes. Yes. Yes. After that there were only two riders [in contention]. After that stage, I believed again I could win the Tour.’
He won the next day’s time trial in Albi but only edged eleven seconds closer; then they were in the Pyrenees, for the 214km fourteenth stage to Luchon: Act Three, the final part of the trilogy.
At the start in Revel, Merckx told a team-mate: ‘I’m going to batter Ocaña until one of us breaks, him or me.’ The battering began as they climbed the Col de Portet d’Aspet, but Ocaña wouldn’t give an inch. Then, on the Col de Menté, as Merckx would later write in his book, Carnets de Route, ‘I notice that Ocaña’s progress isn’t as smooth as it was and, above all, that he hasn’t been able to eat. Could he be on the brink of collapse?’
As they climb the Col de Menté, Merckx has a few more digs, and Ocaña responds as, among the peaks of the mountains, dark clouds begin to gather. Again Merckx goes and again he is shadowed by the yellow jersey. ‘Luis, calm down!’ urges his team-mate, Schleck. Then, with a clap of thunder echoing in the valley, the storm breaks. The heavens darken and open as they crest the summit. Gloom descends; visibility is reduced to about five metres. Merckx, his woollen jersey plastered to his skin, seems oblivious and unconcerned, leading Van Impe, Ocaña and a select group of favourites down. He slightly misjudges a left-hand hairpin but remains upright. Where Merckx goes, so does his shadow; but Ocaña, following Van Impe, who is following Merckx, does not have Merckx’s composure. He careers into the bend: too fast, out of control; his upper body locked rigid, his hands pulling hard on the brakes, which in the rain don’t work. He runs out of road and crashes against the verge. Quickly he picks himself up, but Zoetemelk and Agostinho have the same problem, entering the corner too fast. Zoetemelk skids and hits Ocaña, then Agostinho slams into him. He is floored a second time.
Ocaña lay on the wet road, his yellow jersey covered in mud, screaming in pain. ‘I thought I was dying,’ he wrote in his autobiography. ‘It was as if my chest was smashed in, but my mental state was simply atrocious.’
His Tour was over. He was taken by helicopter to Saint-Gaudens, but there is an enduring mystery about just how serious Ocaña’s injuries were. Though he lost consciousness in the helicopter, the diagnosis at the hospital was that he was suffering from ‘thoracic contusions and a pronounced state of shock’. He was discharged the next day.
Ocaña’s wife, Josiane, would later claim to have had a ‘bad feeling’ the morning of the fourteenth stage to Luchon. It is tempting, though, to trace Ocaña’s downfall back to the stage to Marseille, when Merckx didn’t gain much time, but did sow seeds of doubt in the sensitive Ocaña’s mind. By attacking on that stage, then relentlessly on the Portet d’Aspet and Col de Menté, he confirmed that he would not give up. It was why Ocaña felt he couldn’t let him out of his sight; why he felt he had to follow him even as the sky blackened and the rain fell. Perhaps it wasn’t the crash and subsequent collision that ‘broke’ Ocaña, but Merckx. The agony and trauma, as he lay in that wet ditch on the descent of the Col de Menté, seemed both physical and psychological.
In Luchon, where the stage finished with a win for Fuente, Merckx became the new overall leader. He refused to wear the yellow jersey the next day: a symbolic gesture of sympathy for his fallen rival, but for one day only. He put it on the next day and kept it to Paris where he won by almost ten minutes from Zoetemelk. Merckx won two more Tours, in 1972 and ’74, then retired quite young, at thirty-two, when his form had dipped and decline seemed irreversible. ‘I was nineteen when I turned professional,’ he tells me. ‘Mentally it becomes hard. Look at the top riders, the number ones, they all stop quite young.
‘But I ride a lot now,’ he adds. ‘I like riding my bike. I ride when I can, when it’s nice weather. Not every day, but 6,000, 7,000 kilometres a year.’
Merckx has described Ocaña as his bête noire, but the Spaniard had his own demons and they weren’t slayed by his victory in the 1973 Tour – which, tellingly, was the one year Merckx stayed away. In retirement, Ocaña suffered with failed business ventures and ill health. In 1994 he was diagnosed with hepatitis, liver cirrhosis and cancer, and given a few weeks to live by his doctor. In early May he met the L’Equipe cycling writer, Philippe Brunel. He was in a reflective, nostalgic mood, telling him: ‘Nowhere else in life have I got back the feelings I used to have as a cyclist. If someone told me now that I could ride the Tour de France and die the second I crossed the finish line, I’d sign without a moment’s hesitation.’
‘They all surrender,’ Ocaña had said of Merckx, ‘but I’m going to stand up to him.’ It might be crass to compare his subsequent actions with his avowed refusal to be dictated to by his old nemesis. But a couple of weeks after speaking to Brunel, on 19 May 1994, Ocaña took matters in his own hands. At the age of forty-eight, at his home in Gers, south-west France, he put a gun to his head and shot himself.
Classement
Stage Eleven: Thursday 8 July, Grenoble to Orcières-Merlette, 134km
1 Luis Ocaña, Spain, Bic, 4 hours, 2 minutes, 49 secs
2 Lucien van Impe, Belgium, Sonolor, at 5 minutes, 52 secs
3 Eddy Merckx, Belgium, Molteni, at 8 minutes, 42 secs
4 Joop Zoetemelk, Holland, Mars-Flandria, same time
5 Gösta Pettersson, Sweden, Ferretti, s.t.
6 Bernard Thévenet, France, Peugeot, s.t.
Stage Twelve: Saturday, 10 July, Orcières-Merlette to Marseille, 251km
1 Luciano Armani, Italy, Scic, 5 hours, 25 minuens, 28 secs
2 Eddy Merckx, same time
3 Lucien Aimar, France, Sonolor, s.t.
4 Jos van der Vleuten, Holland, Gazelle, s.t.
5 Enrico Paolini, Italy, Scic, s.t.
6 Désiré Letort, France, Bic, s.t.
Stage Fourteen: Monday, 12 July, Revel to Luchon, 214.5km
1 José-Manuel Fuente, Spain, Kas, 6 hours, 11 minutes, 54 secs
2 Eddy Merckx, at 6 minutes, 21 secs
3 Lucien van Impe, same time
4 Vicente López-Carril, Spain, Kas, s.t.
5 Lucien Aimar, s.t.
6 Joop Zoetemelk, s.t.