Eddy Merckx was something of a totemic figure in the world of cycling during the 1960s and 70s.
Across an 18-year career, he won nearly all there is to win, including 11 Grand Tours, 19 Monuments, multiple world championships and set the record for the most distance covered in an hour. To achieve more than 500 victories in such a gruelling sport is barely conceivable and he is still regarded today to be one of, if not the, greatest and most successful cyclists of all time. Those 18 years of determination and toil for the backbone of Christope Hermans and Boris Tilquin’s new documentary, Merckx. Less of a portrait of the man than a study in what it takes for a man to become a myth; it received its world premiere as part of the Limelight strand at the International Film Festival Rotterdam this week.
Constructed entirely from archival materials, Merckx is an impressive feat of research and assemblage. Containing some snatches of personal collections, it primarily incorporates publicly available media materials from a vast wealth of sources across Merckx’s storied time in the saddle. Combining photographs and moving image footage, Hermans and Tilquin manage to compile and remarkably comprehensive timeline that takes the film right from the rider’s emergence on the amateur scene in the early 60s where he began to make a name for himself, through his lauded 5 Tour de France wins, all the way to his retirement from competitive cycling in 1978. Impeccably edited, the filmmakers manage to create a seamless narrative from these disparate sources – one that concentrates on Merckx’s indomitable will to succeed.
We learn that the young Belgian inherited such resolve from his father who we see glimpses of in the earlier footage. Accompanying the images are a variety of a voices who recount the story to us and offer insights throughout – they all remain completely off-screen, there are no actual talking heads incorporated, instead their voices form a patchwork narration, delineated only by their names flashing up in the corner of the screen to identify them. They include various family members, acquaintances, former teammates and rivals, biographers, journalists, and more. Hermans and Tilquin’s quest to tell Merckx’s tale seems exhaustive in the sheer breadth of material amasses and stitched together. In the audio they allow for us to learn a little more about what was happening behind the champions eyes, how events affected him, what made him tick, how he inherited his mother’s emotional generosity as well as his father’s steel.
As mentioned, the narrative that unfolds here is one of Merckx’s ascent to the top of the cycling mountain, but as with the sharp turns and steep inclines of the Alpe d’Huez, this wasn’t necessarily straightforward. From Merckx’s winning of the amateur world championship at Sallanches in 1964 followed by a first Monument (the collective name for cycling’s five most arduous one-day races) in 1966 and a first Grand Tour – the Giro d’Italia – in 1968, accolades came accumulating, but then a positive drugs test in 1969 left everything in the balance. In floods of tears, he ardently denied any wrong-doing and clips show numerous people implying that his test samples were in some way tampered with, or he was malignly tricked into taking something. After having his ban cut short thanks to ‘the benefit of the doubt,’ Merckx went on to win the 1969 Tour de France only to then suffer a near fatal crash later that year.
As the film explains professional cyclists didn’t make a great deal of money from their primary races in those days and so many of them would participate in exhibition rides to bolster their coffers. At one such event in a concrete velodrome in Blois, Merckx and his pacer Fernand Wambst were involved in a collision and both landed head-first on the track. Wambst died of a fractured skull while Merckx suffered permanent injuries, particularly to his lower back, that would plague him for the rest of his career. Despite this, he went on to win the Tour de France a further four times, becoming somewhat disliked by the French populace who nicknamed him ‘the cannibal’ for who he devoured the competition. At one point, a spectator argues that he should leave some crumbs for the other riders.
What is perhaps most striking amidst the animosity that comes Merckx’s way from the local journalists and crowds that line the streets of the tour – at one point, a man punches him in the liver during a particularly arduous climb – is the adulation with which he was received at home in Belgium. Several commenters make note of the way that Merckx, as someone from Brussels, was able to straddle the divide between the Flemish and Francophone elements of the country and unite people to his cause. One sequence in which he returns to the country after his first tour win to find the streets filled with people chanting his name is particularly moving, in juxtaposition with the somewhat reserved man waving at them from a balcony.
However, where Merckx really shines is in its depictions of the races and some of the footage that Hermans and Tilquin have unearthed and repurposed is fabulous. In particular, Merckx’s famous descent of Col d’Aubisque which has become a thing of legend, almost, is presented in a blistering shot from the perspective of the motorcycle cameraman following him at alarming speed. With the film’s decision to focus solely on the resolve and endurance of Merckx’s career, it might have lost some semblance of the man and his nuances, but in capturing the nature of being a road cyclist it does a triumphant service to its subject.
Directors, screenplay: Christophe Hermans, Boris Tilquin
Producer: Patrick Lauber
Editing: Aurelie Redoute, John Pirard
Sound: Luis Trinques
Production Company: Kaos Films (Belgium)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Limelight)
In French, Dutch, Italian
84 minutes
