Free Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal by Daniel Friebe

finished the 1967 season with 26 wins, so far these had all been in one-day or track races. Some even speculated that the victory in Novara on Stage 1 was proof that Merckx had come to Italy only to target stage wins. Adorni was his team’s real captain, they maintained. They were half right, in the sense that the plan discussed and agreed upon in Gavirate had been for the road to anoint the Faema leader. If that was true, however, Stage 1 had cast an overwhelming vote in favour of Merckx.
    A day later, Gianni Motta added his voice to the mounting consensus and building evidence that Merckx was the stronger of the Faema pair. ‘Merckx looks the strongest rider in the race. Faema should count on him,’ the Italian declared, having survived the first major climb of the race, the Col de Joux, before beating Merckx in a two-man sprint in Saint Vincent. In the final four kilometres, Motta had looked like a man outriding not only the peloton but also a now omnipresent, taunting spectre – the pain in his left leg. His winning attack with Merckx had disguised desperation as liberation; poor Gianni’s chances in the Giro and indeed his best days as a rider would soon be over. A positive drugs test announced at the end of the Giro – not to menton the unseemly end to his collaboration with Gianni Aldo de Donato when the doctor illegally fled to Argentina with his estranged daughter the previous autumn – were symptomatic of the way that Merckx’s star had waxed while Motta’s waned.
    Midway through the first week of the Giro, Motta hadn’t been the only rider in the Giro
gruppo
whose health was causing concern. While the usual jollity at Molteni now came and went in inverse synchrony with the aches in ‘
capitan
Motta’s’ groin, all had seemed well at Faema as Guido Reybrouck sprinted to victory in Alba at the end of Stage 3, and Merckx ‘loaned out’ the pink jersey to the Italian Michele Dancelli in accordance with Adorni’s grand plan. ‘
Tranquillo, tranquillo
,’ Adorni had reminded Merckx again before the start in Novara. The message, by the look of things, was finally getting through.
    Reybrouck’s victory, just a few weeks after his positive dope test in the Tour of Flanders, crowned a memorable few days for Faema manager Vincenzo Giacotto in his native Piedmont. A more stylish, less bumbling version of the Peugeot directeur-cum-
bon viveur
Gaston Plaud, Giacotto was, says Marino Vigna, ‘the man who brought a bit of civilisation to cycling, and taught riders how to behave in hotels at races, in the bars and lounges’.
    True to form, Giacotto had wanted to celebrate Reybrouck’s win and Faema’s rip-roaring start to the Giro with a dinner amongst friends. The guests were to include the Faema team doctor Enrico Peracino and Professor Giancarlo Lavezzaro, the chief cardiologist at the Italian Institute of Sports Medicine in nearby Turin. Before the meal, though, Giacotto had invited Lavezzaro to meet his two star riders, Merckx and Adorni, and also to submit them to a cardiogram. The two riders had duly acquiesced, undergone the tests, and Lavezzaro was now examining the results. He didn’t have to look very hard to notice that something in one of the graphs wasn’t only amiss, it was downright alarming. He immediately found Giacotto; the young Belgian chap’s cardiograph, he informed his friend, was that of a man in the middle of a heart attack.
    Lavezzaro says today that, in their concern, he and Giacotto had agreed to repeat the tests the following morning. All they gave Merckx was the false pretext that Lavezzaro wanted to analyse the effects on the heart of several hours’ sleep. After a nervous night, Lavezzaro had knocked on Merckx and Adorni’s door the following morning and performed the test. He waited and watched. To his dismay, Merckx’s graph was still that of someone whose next journey ought to be to hospital, not the 162 kilometres of the Giro’s fourth stage.
    This wasn’t the first