Edouard Louis Joseph, Baron Merckx was born June 17, 1945. The French magazine Vélo called him "the most accomplished rider that cycling has ever known." The American publication, VeloNews, called him the greatest and most successful cyclist of all time. He won the Tour de France five times, won all the monuments of cycling, won the Giro d'Italia five times and the Vuelta a Espana once, won the world championship as an amateur and a professional, and broke the world hour record.
Eddy Merckx was one of three children born to a couple who ran a grocery in the middle-class area of Sint-Pieters-Voluwe. His brother and sister are twins. The family moved to the suburbs when he was young.
"I had a beautiful childhood. I had loving, very sensible parents. We weren't rich, but my younger brother and sister... and myself never wanted for anything. My father was a man of great character and my mother very warm and kind. Both of them were wonderful examples to me. Like everyone, I am a mixture of both of them. My determination and willingness to work hard came from my father. He worked tirelessly to build up his grocery business. He was strict on discipline, but he was also a bit of a philosopher. I have kept some of his sayings in my head for the whole of my life. From my mother I get my softer side. An example of that is the fact that I often find it difficult to say no to people. They maybe don't mean to, but people can use you up if you let them."
He acquired his first racing bike, second-hand, when he was eight. His hero was Stan Ockers, who died in a fall on the Antwerp track in 1956.
"(He was my hero) because of the Tour de France. Ockers had won stages in it, won the green jersey twice, finished second overall twice. He was always in the news during the Tour de France, and the Tour was everything to me. The race. I didn't even know much about the classics because they were held on a Sunday, and on that day we used to visit my grandmother at her farm in Meensel-Kiezegem, where I was born."
Merckx said: "I hated school, I loved doing all the sports, but I hated to be inside. I left as soon as I could. It caused friction at home, especially with my father. But it was typical of him that he supported my decision, especially when he saw that I loved the thing I had chosen, cycling, and was doing well at it."
Merckx rode his first race at Laeken on July 16, 1961, riding for the Evere Kerkhoek Sportif club. He rode 12 races before winning his first, at Petit-Enghien, on October 1, 1961. The French magazine, Vélo, said: "Eddy Merckx was a spoiled child of the post-war generation. Very spoiled, in fact. To see that, you have only to look at photos of his youth: Eddy dressed as a page boy, as an injured soldier (his sister played the role of nurse), as a cowboy, the Merckx family on winter sports holidays, Eddy and his father's Plymouth. So many memories of a happy childhood far, very far, from those of a (Rik) van Looy or a (Fausto) Coppi. He was often reproached for it, but was it his fault if God gave him so much? From his win at Hal (the year after his first victory), he started to live the life of a proper professional. Felicien Vervaecke, an excellent rider from the 1930s, king of the mountains in the Tours de France of 1935 and 1937, second to Gino Bartalli in 1938, drove him to the track at Schaerbeek every Tuesday. Then Guillaume Michiels, another celebrity, took over.
Merckx moved from the youth to the senior amateur class two months early. At the time, riders had to wait until their 18th birthday. Merckx later said: "I was winning races but it wasn't easy. I wasn't dominating anything back then."
Patrick Sercu rode with him in newcomers' and junior races on the track at the Palais des Sports in Brussels. Merckx could not beat him on the track but Sercu said that when he saw Merckx on the road he believed he was looking at a future winner of the Tour de France.
In 1964, he rode the road race at the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo and finished 12th. In the same year, he became the world amateur champion at Sallanches, France. He said his victory was tainted by the long list of riders who won the amateur championship and had done nothing afterwards.
Merckx said of the race: "Yes, I remember it, but winning the Tour de France for the first time was more important to me. The world championship can be won by any good rider who has the right form on the right day, but to win the Tour you have to be good every day. I was in the break after the first few laps, but when the bunch started coming back to us, I broke away on the last climb to win by 27 seconds from Walter Planckaert, with Gosta Pettersson of Sweden third. Planckaert hadn't realised I was away and he thought that he had won."
He turned professional on April 29, 1965, after 80 victories as an amateur. He joined Solo-Superia under Rik van Looy. One of the other riders was Jean van Buggenhout, who later became his manager. His first win was at Vilvoorde on May 11. He came second to Walter Godefroot in the national championship and was picked for the national team for the world championship near San Sebastian, Spain. The race was won by Britain's Tom Simpson. Simpson--who was to tragically die of exhaustion two years later on the slopes of Mont Vertoux during the 13th stage of the Tour de France normally rode for Peugeot and Merckx moved there the following year after nine wins with Solo. There he won the first of seven editions of Milan-San Remo, still aged 20.
In 1967 he repeated his 1966 Milan-San Remo success and also won La Fleche Wallonne. His first grand tour was the 1967 Giro d'Italia, in which he won two stages and finished ninth. Later that year he out-sprinted Jan Janssen and the Spaniard Ramon Saez to become world professional champion at Heerlen, Netherlands. The reporter covering the race for "Cycling" wrote:"A gamble which paid off won the world professional title for Eddy Merckx, three years after his amateur victory, the quickest 'conversion' in history, and justification of a policy of careful preparation rather than opportunism. The tall Belgian, who with his countryman Jean Aerts (now a radio commentator) is the only road-man to have done the double, had led the race from the first lap... So they came to the sprint, which was as clean as one could have hoped, the five men giving one another no mercy, yet sprinting as straight as a die following a lead by the ever-aggressive Jos van der Vleuten, who blotted his copybook by refusing a dope-test after the finish. Merckx was flanked by Janssen on his left, Saez on his right, two redoubtable sprinters at the end of a long hard race, yet he left them no opportunity of getting by."
Merckx was earning 125,000 Belgian francs a year when he won the championship. He didn't buy his first car until he had been a professional for three years.
At Peugeot, Merckx had to pay for his wheels and tyres. In 1968 he moved to the Italian Faema team. The Italian coffee machine company had returned to sponsorship, having backed teams led by van Looy and others in the past. He said: "It was a relief to ride in Italy. It wasn't by chance that all the big riders of the era wanted to ride there. There was a structure, organisation, medical supervision."
Faema, however, had no interest in the Tour de France Merckx said. "They even had to find a sponsor, Coca-Cola to be able to ride it. But I was 23 and I hadn't yet ridden it. I could see how it was going in France. I signed with Faema the day before the world championship at Heerlen, in 1967. I could earn three times as much with them than I would in the next two years with Peugeot."
Coca-Cola offered Merckx a million Belgian francs to ride in 1968, van Buggenhout urged him to accept, but Merckx refused, believing himself not strong enough to ride both the Giro--which was important to Faema--and the Tour--which wasn't.
Merckx won the Paris-Roubaix and started his domination of the grand tours by becoming the first Belgian to win the Giro d'Italia in 1968. He did this another four times, equalling the record of five by Alfredo Binda and Fauston Coppi.
In 1969, he won Paris-Nice for the first time. In the time trial, he overtook five-time Tour de France winner Jacques Anquetil, who had been the world's best time-triallist for the previous 15 years. Merckx won Milan-San Remo, the Ronde van Vlaanderen and Liege-Bastogne-Liege. During the 1969 Giro d'Italia, he was found to have used drugs and was disqualified.
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