🇧🇪Eddy
Merckx

He was twenty-two years old when a journalist gave him the nickname that would define an era. After Eddy Merckx won a minor Belgian one-day race by a margin so enormous, so utterly unnecessary in competitive terms, that a sportswriter wrote he "devours his opponents like a cannibal." The name stuck because it was accurate. Merckx did not merely race bicycles. He consumed races — entire seasons, entire careers, entire categories of achievement — with an appetite that cycling had never seen and has not seen since. By the time he retired in 1978, he had won 525 professional races, five Tours de France, five Giri d'Italia, three World Championships, seven Milan–San Remo classics, and set the world hour record in Mexico City on a track bicycle at altitude, a record that would stand for twelve years. No cyclist before or since has come close to the breadth and volume of his dominance.

Edouard Louis Joseph Merckx was born on June 17, 1945, in the small Belgian village of Meensel-Kiezegem, the son of a grocery shop owner. His family moved to the Brussels suburb of Woluwe-Saint-Pierre when he was two years old, and it was on the roads of the Belgian countryside around Brussels that he learned to ride, first as recreation and then, with growing urgency, as vocation. He entered his first race at fourteen, finished second, and decided immediately that second was not acceptable. He won his first amateur race at fifteen. By seventeen, he was the best amateur cyclist in Belgium. He turned professional at eighteen with the Solo-Superia team in 1965 and won his first major race — Milan–San Remo — that same year at the age of nineteen. The cycling world took notice. What it did not yet fully understand was that the wins would not stop.

The Tour de France was the race that made Merckx mythological. He won it for the first time in 1969, in his debut at the race, in the most dominant fashion the Tour had ever seen: he won six stages and claimed the yellow jersey, the green jersey for sprinting, and the polka dot jersey for climbing — all three simultaneously — the only rider ever to accomplish this in a single edition. He returned in 1970, 1971, 1972, and 1974 and won each time, although a catastrophic training crash in 1969 that left him with permanent skeletal damage — a misaligned pelvis — meant he raced every subsequent Tour in chronic pain. He finished second twice in the years between his victories. He never won the race in a manner that suggested anything less than full domination.

What made Merckx impossible to categorize, and impossible to plan against, was the completeness of his abilities. He was a climber of the first rank — capable of riding away from dedicated mountain specialists on the highest Alpine and Pyrenean cols. He was a time trialist of devastating power, able to put minutes into the field against the clock. He was a sprinter who could finish fast after six hours in the mountains. He was a classics rider who won races over the cobbled pavé of northern France and Belgium with the same frequency he won stage races across three weeks. No rider before or after him has demonstrated such thoroughgoing excellence across every discipline that road cycling demands. His contemporaries — Bernard Thévenet, Joop Zoetemelk, Luis Ocaña — were excellent riders. Against Merckx at his peak, they won when he was absent or injured.

The hour record, set on October 25, 1972, in Mexico City, remains the most revealing demonstration of what Merckx was. He rode 49.431 kilometres in sixty minutes on a track bicycle in the thin air of altitude, shattering the existing record by 778 metres. He described it afterward as the hardest thing he had ever done in cycling. He was nearly sick on the track. He said later he would never do it again. But he had done it once, and the distance stood as the benchmark against which all subsequent hour records were measured until 1984. The effort encapsulated everything about Merckx: the willingness to suffer beyond what other athletes could endure, the refusal to leave any record untouched, the almost compulsive need to test every limit.

Merckx retired from professional racing in 1978, at thirty-two, his body finally worn down by the accumulated injuries and the extraordinary volume of racing he had subjected it to across thirteen seasons. He had started 1,800 professional races. He had won 525 of them — a winning percentage that no professional sport, in any era, has approached. He moved into bicycle manufacturing, founding the Eddy Merckx Cycles company in Brussels, which continues to produce high-end road and track bicycles. He was named the greatest Belgian sportsman of the twentieth century in a national poll. He was appointed a baron by King Albert II. He remains, for the sport of cycling, the fixed point against which every generation of new talent is measured — and found, if not wanting, then simply human where Merckx was something else entirely.