Free Eddy Merckx: The Cannibal by Daniel Friebe Page B

win had ‘saved the Giro from becoming a one-man show’, according to
Tuttosport
. There appeared to be nothing, however, which could stop precisely that happening at Faema.
    Luckily, in Adorni, Merckx had a clever and pragmatic tutor and former co-leader. Eclipsed by his pupil on the road, Adorni now did exactly the opposite of Van Looy at Solo-Superia, resolving to pass on as much of his
savoir faire
as possible before the end of the Giro. The ‘Corsa Rosa’, as the race was known, was the perfect context in which to ‘Italianicise’ Merckx, just as Giacotto had wanted.
    ‘You could tell straight away that Eddy wanted to learn. It took him no time. But the Belgians were totally different from us,’ Adorni remembers. ‘At the Giro, on the first night, the Belgians were all congregating in a room, sometimes ours, and eating biscuits and drinking beer after dinner. For a few days I just watched them, quietly shaking my head. It happened once, twice, then on the third or fourth night, they all came in and I said, “Right, no more! Everyone out! This is no way to spend evenings at a stage race. Eddy, you have a camomile tea, you go to bed early, and you look at tomorrow’s stage map. That’s how you recover in stage races. You can’t go around Italy drinking beer and eating biscuits for three weeks.” Maybe at first he was sceptical, but then he saw that I was talking sense.’
    Sure enough, within days, Merckx had a new routine. A phone call to Claudine back home in Belgium, some ribbing from Adorni about the frequency of their conversations, perhaps a mug of tea, then it would be down to business and the map of the following day’s stage. ‘He wasn’t cold or clinical, and neither did he really know what he was capable of, so he needed someone helping him,’ Adorni explains. ‘If his legs felt good on a climb a hundred or a hundred and fifty kilometres from the finish, he’d want to attack. But the system we came up with was that I’d basically tell him when to go and when to sit in. Later, he performed these amazing exploits in the Tour and Giro, so we knew he could hold everyone off for a hundred kilometres or so, but in 1968 we didn’t know how he’d last over three weeks.’
    Meanwhile, at Salvarani, Gimondi was getting very little right except his predictions: he had said Stage 8 to Brescia would give vital pointers and Merckx had duly dropped everyone on the Colle Maddalena, this in a stage which passed through both Gimondi and Motta’s home villages, Sedrina and Groppello d’Adda. That pair both crossed the line 48 seconds behind Merckx. Motta was then penalised a further second for holding on to his car on his way to greet family members in Groppello, with the permission of the peloton.
    Years later, it would be remembered, scarcely, as a Merckx victory like hundreds of others. Merckx, though, had noticed an unusual but soon-to-be familiar sound as he rode into the Brescia velodrome eight seconds ahead of Adorni: the crowd was booing.
    Alpine folklore has it that there are six ‘great north faces’ in the range, each so high and so challenging that they remain the preserve of only the most daring – or foolhardy – mountaineers. Of the six, the most vaunted and infamous are the Eiger and the Matterhorn, both in Switzerland, and the third member of the so-called ‘Trilogy’, the Grandes Jorasses in the Mont Blanc massif. The Petit Dru in France and the Piz Badile on the Italian Swiss border are barely less terrifying.
    This leaves one, great north face, and the only one whose name is also inscribed in cycling folklore. The Tre Cime or Three Summits of Lavaredo are a trio of adjacent pinnacles tucked high in the north-west corner of Italy in one of the most visually beguiling mountain ranges anywhere on the planet, the Dolomites. To give them their individual names, those summits are the Cima Piccola, Cima Grande and Cima Ovest, and it is the north face of the 2,999-metre Cima Grande,