Merckx eddy biography examples

Eddy Merckx, The Cannibal by Daniel Friebe

During his career Eddy Merckx won roughly one third of all the races he started. For an unbroken period of seven years he finished no lower than first in every grand tour he completed.

Daniel Friebe’s biography is more than the story of Merckx, it is a history of cycling under the reign of rider known as The Cannibal as told by interviews and anecdotes from the riders who saw their hopes, ambitions and earnings swallowed up by the insatiable Merckx. Yet many now seem cheerful about the whole experience.

The book follows Merckx’s career in chronological order, the early years right until the painful decline in public. Friebe has an enjoyable writing style with some florid language at times. Eddy Merckx’s agent Jean Van Buggenhout is labelled “Van Bug” and described as a “big kahuna”. The writing style comes alive when interviews with rivals of Merckx. You almost laugh when Friebe describes the domestic scene of Roger De Vlaeminck and his younger wife. Observing his technique of dabbing spilt coffee, Friebe describes how the Flemish legend looks out from his kitchen window onto a muddy field where a pet llama stands to declare the beauty of the Flemish countryside.

Across all landscapes the consistent theme is utter domination by Merckx and how his appetite meant famine for others. One typical tale comes from the 1970 Giro d’Italia. A Tuscan winegrower offers 40 flasks of wine for the winner of a bonus sprint in the middle of the stage. It’s not for a jersey, nor a time bonus, just some red wine. Dino Zandegù notices Merckx readying himself but outfoxes him to take the sprint. Merckx was livid and declared “that Chianti was mine” and threatened Zandegù with never riding a criterium again, an important source of income for riders in those days. After the stage Merckx tracks Zandegù down in his hotel room to demand half of the wine. Zandegù relents.

It is said that when Norwegian wunderkind Edvald Boassen-Hagen first broke through into the pro ranks he didn’t know the name of the cycling demi-god to whom he was initially compared to. His lack of knowledge about the history of the sport raised a few eyebrows at the time and is occasionally brought up again now as a contributing factor in his later inability to more closely emulate the man he didn’t know. I also suffered from such ignorance at one time, though I think that being only thirteen and not a professional cyclist does go in my favour a little.

One summer in the late 1980’s, my older brother and I had somehow acquired a very beaten-up old frame – from one of our regular trips to a local junkyard I assume – and, having hauled it back to our mother’s garage, were trying to work something out. The previous owner had, rather ham-fistedly, added a marquee to the downtube using black electrical tape and we were trying to decipher the ragged remains. The first name was clear enough: EDDY, but the surname was far more puzzling. An M for certain, maybe an E, an R, a gap where a letter had disappeared completely, then something that could have been a F, H or possibly a K, and finally what looked like half an X but which must surely be a misshapen Y. It didn’t take us long to reckon we had worked it out. Obviously no name could finish with a consonant and an X so we decided that the owner must have tried to ‘rebrand’ his frame with the name of the most famous Eddy on the planet and, maybe being a less competent speller or sign-writer than we felt that we were, had mucked it up. It was clearly a poorly executed attempt at EDDY MERFY, or rather EDDIE MURPHY, and was a tribute to the star of the Beverly Hills Cops movies.. I mean who else could it be?

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Even if there had been an English language biography of Eddy Merckx available in my early teenage years I think it’s safe

Several Interesting Facts About Eddy Merckx

04.12.2012 | 11:19 am

When I was in France last Summer, Andy Hampsten was going on and on and on about what a great book Slaying the Badger is, so I thought I’d get a copy and read it.

As it turns out, Andy was right. It was an awesome book, about an extraordinary race. And in a couple months — when VeloPress releases the book to the U.S., we’re going to do a book clubbish thing, where we all read it, and then have the author, Richard Moore, join us for a live discussion.

But that’s not the main topic for today’s post. No, that’s just the tangentially-related teaser. Because when I read Slaying the Badger, it occurred to me that I really had no knowledge whatsoever of the early days of cycling, much less the glory days of cycling.

In fact, I wasn’t even sure what the difference is.

I started feeling a little big guilty about the fact that — because it’s expected of me — whenever asked, I state with what I hope passes for conviction that Eddy Merckx is the greatest cyclist of all time, and that nobody has or even could ever surpass him, and that anyone who even tried should not even be allowed to call himself a “cyclist,” but would have to henceforth call himself a “bicycle rider.”

But even as I said these things, I knew in my heart that I really had no idea why Eddy Merckx was such a big deal.

So I decided it was time to educate myself in the matter.

And since I am a professional research analyst, my investigation into the life and time of Eddy Merckx was as thorough as it was exhaustive. After countless hours spent reading, collating, interpreting, interviewing, and — as a last resort — utilizing internet search engines.

And now I am happy to report that I am an Eddy Merckx expert. And as such, I have uncovered a number of truly astonishing facts and anecdotes about this man’s life and accomplishments

Sports fans always like to fire up the old debate over who is the greatest in a sport’s history. Is Pele, Maradona, Ronaldo, or Bobby Moore the greatest ever footballer? In tennis is it Roger Federer, Pete Sampras, John McEnroe or Steffi Graf?

When it comes to cycling the debate never gets very far. We know the answer. Eddy Merckx is the greatest cyclist of all time.

During his career from 1965 to 1978, the Belgian won 525 races. He is still the joint record holder for the number of Tour de France overall victories (five). He has undisputedly won the most Tour de France stages (34), the most Grand Tours (11) and the most Grand Tour stages (64).

He has won the most Monuments (19) including seven victories at Milan-San Remo. He broke the Hour Record. He was the first rider to achieve the Triple Crown of Cycling — victory in the Tour, Giro d'Italia and World Championships in one season — and only one other rider, Stephen Roche, has done so since.

In 1971 Merckx won 45 per cent of the races he started. Come up against Merckx during that season and your chances of victory as a rival rider were as good as halved before you’d even begun.

There is just so much. There’s a bronze and stone monument dedicated to Merckx at the top of

the Côte de Stockeu, a steep climb used in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, which lists his achievements. It simply ends with the word ‘etc’. There isn’t even space to mention the fact that he won Paris-Roubaix and Paris-Nice three times each.

But reducing Eddy Merckx to mere statistics is missing the wood for the trees, like talking about Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’ as a collection of coloured pixels or one of Mozart’s symphonies as a big bunch of notes.

In his native Belgium, Eddy Merckx is a combination of David Beckham, Paul McCartney and Winston Churchi