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with Merckx. Born poor, the Frenchman hoped to get rich, and realised that he could do so thanks to his one extraordinary talent: riding bicycles. ‘I was inestimably lucky,’ he said once. ‘I didn’t have to fight my way up because I became a star very quickly, but if I hadn’t succeeded, I’d have really scrapped and I’d have become a star anyway.’
    At this stage still relatively little was known about Merckx’s upbringing in Woluwe-Saint-Pierre, the Brussels suburb where his parents owned and ran a grocery store. Enough, though, had filtered into the public domain for most to realise that the Merckxes were now solidly middle-class, and there was no way Eddy’s motivation was an escape from poverty. Neither, it was quite clear, did money and fame occupy a prominent place in his hierarchy of needs. An old Merckx family maxim, ‘Whatever you do, do it well’, echoed permanently in his consciousness, and Merckx knew that the limelight was one place in which he could never excel. ‘I’ll admit that I’m a lot more at ease on my bike than in a lounge,’ he told Marc Jeuniau. ‘I don’t have a commercial smile. My mother already used to say that when I helped my parents at the grocery store.’
    Patrick Sercu could vouch for the comfortable surroundings in which Merckx was raised. He first teamed up with Merckx in track races when they were both teenagers. Sercu then became a regular visitor at the Merckx household when he was stationed in military barracks near Brussels during his national service in 1963. He remembers Merckx’s ‘very lovely mother’ Jenny, her delicious cooking, Eddy’s ‘very disciplined father who didn’t speak much’ and thinking that they had ‘maybe a bit more money than normal people, but had to work very, very hard for it’.
    Sercu didn’t need these glimpses of domestic serenity to convince him that his friend had a lust for cycling and for winning that went beyond the usual zest and bravado of youth. It was a fire burning deep, deep within. ‘To tell the truth, Eddy has a very big advantage over all of us: he has remained a true amateur,’ Sercu declared at the time.
    Sercu meant that his Madison partner’s was a pure, unfettered, unquestioned passion for cycling – one of an amateur in the word’s original sense, ‘lover’. People would later marvel at his professionalism, when really it was Merckx’s amateurism that was unique. The lady who would become his wife at the end of 1967 knew it well. ‘The problem with Eddy is that he was vaccinated with a bicycle spoke,’ Claudine would joke. So viscerally did his love of racing translate into aggression that Claudine admitted to being frightened when she watched her husband hammering away on the front of a peloton.
    Over subsequent years, those who knew the couple would describe their marriage as the final piece in the Merckx jigsaw, the solid ground from which he could plot the final ascent of cycling’s Everest. Merckx once said that his days consisted of three things – ‘cycling, recovering and sleeping’. It was not a complaint, more the honest admission of a person to whom life had given one immense blessing: not a talent but a calling. Anquetil had utilised one to cultivate the other; with Merckx, it was the vocation that came first. His talent was the flower that grew from that stem.
    In his compelling study of how excellence develops,
The Talent Code
, Daniel Coyle cites several examples to illustrate how outstanding motivation underlies all outstanding progress and achievement. One of Coyle’s most striking case studies involved 157 children as they prepared to start learning a musical instrument. Before their first lesson, the children were asked how long they envisaged playing the instrument – a year or under, to the end of primary school, to the end of high school or for the rest of their lives. The musicians’ abilities were then plotted against their hours of weekly practice after nine