Free Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal by Daniel Friebe Page A

time that someone had said there was something not just unusual, but genuinely faulty about Merckx’s heart. Prior to the amateur World Championships in Sallanches in 1964, the then 19-year-old, and anyone else in contention for a place in the Belgian team, had been summoned to Gent for routine medical checks. Merckx would later refer to their outcome as the first ‘hammer blow’ of his career: the tests had supposedly revealed that Merckx had a problem with his heart and therefore wouldn’t be available for selection. When his mother called the Belgian Cycling Federation to query the results, she was told: ‘You’re putting him on a pedestal…He can’t climb a mole-hill.’ Selector Oscar Daemers then said that her son could perhaps be accommodated in the four-man 100-kilometre time trial team. Jenny Merckx demanded to know why Eddy’s heart was considered fit for this, most aerobically exacting discipline, and not for the road race. ‘You stubborn old woman!’ Daemers snapped back. Now she was convinced that something fishy was going on. A few more phone calls, between Jenny Merckx and the family doctor, then between him and the man who had examined Eddy in Gent, and it quickly transpired that Daemers didn’t want Merckx to race in Sallanches, most probably because he hailed from Brussels and not Flanders, and had apparently ‘engineered’ his exclusion. Merckx’s heart was, as the Merckxes’ GP Dr Fesler had always said, ‘strong like his father Jules’s’. Shamelessly, Daemers ‘atoned’ by sending the first telegram of congratulations that Jenny Merckx received after Eddy’s victory in the Sallanches road race.
    Four years on at the Giro, Giacotto and Lavezzaro faced a genuine dilemma: did they tell Merckx about his condition, or even pull him from the race? Lavezzaro remembers Merckx ‘making vague noises about his cardiograms always being funny’ but also seeming completely blasé. Lavezzaro was terrorised – but didn’t insist. Instead he returned home to Turin and every day for the remainder of the Giro feared that he would return home from work in the evening, start asking his wife what had happened in the Giro, only to see a pallor in her face. Every day he braced himself and every day, it seemed from his wife’s summary, Merckx was becoming stronger.
    ‘Now,’ Lavezzaro says emphatically, ‘Merckx wouldn’t be allowed to race. At the time we could see that he had a problem but couldn’t make a precise diagnosis without doing a cardiac catheterisation, which obviously wasn’t practical at the Giro. We just knew that he was at risk. Later I wrote to Merckx’s doctors in Belgium but they said it couldn’t be anything because he was still winning on the bike. The next year, the brother of the president of Torino football club had exactly the same thing and we went to Houston in the USA to get it diagnosed properly, because we didn’t have the right apparatus in Turin. It was a non-obstructive hypertropic cardiomyopathy. Nowadays, you pick it up straight away in the electrocardiograms that, for instance, professional cyclists have to pass to get their licence. And someone with that diagnosis wouldn’t be allowed to race. There are no symptoms…but there is a risk of sudden death. In 1977, an Italian footballer called Renato Curi with this problem dropped dead in the middle of a match… But no, there were no aerobic advantages and nothing Merckx could feel. There was just this sword of Damocles above his head every time he raced.’
    By the time Merckx had failed for a second time in four months to win on San Remo’s Via Roma at the end of Stage 5, narrowly losing out to his mate Italo Zilioli after their attack on the Passo Ghimbegna, one problem in the Faema camp was at least nearing its resolution. With Dancelli still comfortably leading the race but expected to struggle in the mountains, and Merckx over two minutes clear of every other contender for the Giro title, Zilioli’s