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months. The man who conducted the study, Gary McPherson, said the results were ‘staggering’: ‘With the same amount of practice, the long-term commitment group outperformed the short-term commitment group by four hundred per cent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-terms who practised for an hour and a half.’
    McPherson’s conclusion was this: ‘It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallising experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says
I am a musician
. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.’
    Or, in Coyle’s words, ‘What ignited the progress wasn’t any skill or gene. It was a small, ephemeral, yet powerful idea: a vision of their ideal future selves, a vision that oriented, energised and accelerated progress, and that originated in the outside world.’
    Early in 1967, it was perhaps premature to speculate about what had ‘ignited’ Eddy Merckx, but the match under his natural ability, that searing desire which terrified Claudine, was there for all to see and envy. No wonder Nino Defilippis, witnessing it for the first time, spoke of an ‘electrocution’.
    Merckx himself still didn’t know how far it would all take him, and neither, at this point, did rivals with their own designs on world domination. Merckx’s 1966 season had been an improvement on 1965, with 20 wins including that first and to date only true pearl, Milan–San Remo, but most, including Merckx, would wait somewhat longer than Defilippis for their eureka moment.
    And, yet, even a fortnight before lightning shook the Matterhorn, it had struck for the second time in two years 300 kilometres to the south on the Ligurian coast.

2
    something in the water
    ‘We were too immersed in our own careers to see what was going on. To an extent, we only realised what had happened when it was too late…’ W ALTER G ODEFROOT
    SAN REMO’S VIA Roma is one of those places in sport where real mystery and imagined mystique intertwine almost to the point where they become one and the same thing. Augusta National’s 12th tee has its swirling wind, Lord’s its slope, and the Via Roma its own matrix of wiles. Real or imagined, they confuse and beguile. Failing that, they provide explanations for the otherwise inexplicable, excuses for the otherwise inexcusable.
    It’s the strange camber, say some. No, argue others, it’s the imperceptible rise in those final 400 metres. Another popular yet preposterous theory is that this otherwise unremarkable shopping street threading east–west through San Remo is beholden to its own micro-climate. The breeze doesn’t so much blow off the Mediterranean, just two streets to the south, it doesn’t so much swirl as cast a spell. Tonight there is talk of black magic. How else can the Italians account for their 14th consecutive Milan–San Remo without a home winner, after 42 wins in the first 50 editions? Or, for that matter, the second victory by a young Belgian in a Peugeot jersey in two years?
    When Eddy Merckx came thrashing, bobbing, brutalising across the line, Italian heads dropped as though from a guillotine. On the road, three of them – Gianni Motta, Franco Bitossi and Felice Gimondi. Then, tens of thousands more behind the barriers on either side, and a hundred or so among the journalists waiting behind the line. All except
Tuttosport
’s Gianpaolo Ormezzano. Ormezzano had gone out on a limb at Paris–Nice the previous year to report that a young Belgian named Merckx was riding strongly in France and was an outsider for victory at San Remo. When Merckx vindicated his judgement a few days later, Ormezzano began to regard the 21-year-old as his own project, his protégé. In March 1967, for the second year in succession, the journalist studied the delighted figure in the black-and-white Peugeot colours as they muscled him towards the podium. If Merckx was handsome,