The Cannibal Hour
Cycling Legend Eddy Merckx Chases History and Hell in Mexico
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In the fall of 1972, the greatest cyclist of all time flew to Mexico City to do something stupid. He was Eddy Merckx, the Cannibal, and he was in the middle of perhaps the most dominant run in the history of his sport. A few months earlier, Merckx had won his fourth consecutive Tour de France racing for the Italian team Molteni. He was 27 years old and he was in the best form of his career.
A lot has been written about Eddy Merckx, and for good reason. He was and is an icon. The kind of athlete who both defines and transcends their sport. But for the sake of this story let’s just sit with how good he was. There was a reason they called him the Cannibal. Since entering his first race as a teenager in Belgium, Merckx had done nothing but win. And by 1972, he had won just about every type of race the sport of cycling had to offer.
Still, for some reason, Merckx felt he had something to prove. This feeling that despite being universally lauded as a historically great athlete you still need to prove something to someone is probably what made him Eddy Merckx in the first place; is probably what separates the greatest athletes from the rest of us. The critics (not that there were many) said that Merckx was merely the best cyclist in a down era for the sport. He wasn’t actually that great. He just faced lesser competition. We’re used to this argument of course. It’s the kind of unprovable hypothetical that generates like 80 percent of our G.O.A.T.-related discourse. But Merckx felt there was a rather simple way to prove himself once and for all. He would just break the Hour Record.
The Hour Record is exactly what it sounds like. It is the test of how far a cyclist can push him or herself for 60 minutes. The kind of basic competition a kid would invent. It is sport at its purest and most beautiful and most elemental. The Hour Record also exists at the epicenter of cycling’s perpetual crisis over technology and what counts as human vs. mechanical achievement. Its first official holder was Henri DesGrange, who was also the organizer of the first Tour de France. DesGrange set his record in 1893. Each record breaking performance in the 130 years since has come with its own miniature crisis over the aforementioned question of where the athlete ends and the mechanics of the bicycle begins
By the time Eddy Merckx decided to try and break the record, it belonged to a Danish cyclist named Ole Ritter. Ritter was not in the same league as Merckx as an overall cyclist, but he was a hell of a sprinter. When he broke the Hour Record in 1968 in Mexico City, it came as something of a surprise. Ritter was in Mexico to help train the Italian team for the Olympics. The day before the games, he took advantage of an open hour on the velodrome by using it to ride 48.23 KM -- a hair over 30 miles.
Mexico City was also where Merckx would make his attempt. Merckx initially wanted to make his run at Ritter’s record in Milan, at the famed Velodromo Vigorelli. But the track was in poor condition due to rainstorms. Merckx’s team made the calculation that the thin air in the altitude of Mexico City would help him aerodynamically more than it would hurt his lung capacity (which was tremendous). But the decision -- like the rest of Merckx’s preparation for Mexico City -- was made hastily.
Merckx only spent a few weeks building up for the race. He prepared by riding on rollers while wearing a mask that pumped in thinned out air -- the hope was that doing so would acclimate him to the deoxygenated air in Mexico City, at more than 7,000 feet above sea level. One thing Merckx did not do was attempt to ride an hour and test himself ahead of time. He ran shorter sprints, but that was it. The only proof he really had that he could achieve the record was the feeling that he could do it, and the faith that he was willing to put himself through hell.
I’m not a cycling expert by any means, but it strikes me that the willingness to torture yourself for sustained periods of time is a big part of what makes the sport’s greatest legends so great. There is something about the simplicity of man and bike and open road. Of the grueling, long climbs. Of the days and days and days of riding. For all the fanfare, the teams, the pace cars, the crowds, the glory, the technology, it still comes down to what you are willing to put yourself through. How far are you willing to push?
Eddy Merckx knew that misery awaited him in Mexico. He waited a few days for the right conditions. Finally, on the morning of October 25, 1972, he made his way to the track. The look on Merckx’s face even before he began the race was grim and business-like. But he was here for a reason. He had called The Hour Record “the supreme test of cycling.” He looked like he was preparing to take a test.
That morning, an announcement about Merckx’s attempt was broadcast on the radio in Mexico City. A couple thousand curious onlookers filed into the grandstands. The stadium scoreboard said SALUDOS EDDY MERCKX. Merckx had brought a delegation with him from Belgium including the exiled king Leopold III, his coaches, and his doctors.
From the outside, Merckx looked relatively normal -- not at all like he was about to attempt something superhuman. He wore what seemed to be normal cycling clothes: a leather protective cap that didn’t get in the way of his wavy hair or his thick sideburns, a short sleeve Molteni jersey, a pair of ordinary-looking white gym socks. Then the gun sounded and he took off from a standing start.
Olympic velodromes measure 250 meters -- that’s about 820 feet. To break the record, Merckx would need to circle the track 196 times in an hour. He would need to sustain an average speed greater than 30.23 miles per hour. If you haven’t been on your bike in a while, well, that’s insanely fast. Merckx took off going even faster. His early laps made it look as if the Hour Record would be a cinch, or else like he had no intention of finishing it. His team had set up pace goals but Merckx was blowing past them.
Riding in his trademark style with his torso completely parallel to the ground, Merckx looked beautiful and powerful and almost ordinary: alone on the track he was merely a man riding a bicycle. Watching the footage, you don’t know that the bicycle itself is a work of art; a technical marvel by the expert bike maker Ernesto Colnago. Colnago spent months on the bike. His main ambition? To make it as light as possible. He used titanium, which was a relatively new and untested material at the time. He drilled holes to cut weight wherever he could. From the outside, the bike looked normal. It was anything but. Toward the middle of the hour, Merckx began to slow down beyond the pace his trainers wanted. There was a man standing on the infield charged with pacing with each 5 km split: step forward to show where Merckx was ahead of the Hour Record, and backwards to show when he fell behind. This way the crowd would have a decent sense of where he stood. Early on, the man had paced forward forward forward.
But Merckx began to slow. The man paced back closer and closer to Ritter’s time. It’s hard to imagine what was going through Merckx’s mind as he willed himself to complete the hour. The truth is that probably he was only thinking of how miserable he was. “The Hour is a permanent, total, intense, effort which can’t be compared to anything else,” he said later. It was all consuming. The entirety of his being was devoted to destroying Ritter’s record, to completing the fastest hour he could. And even though he had not trained at that length, Merckx managed to increase his velocity after he hit the 30 KM mark.
He slowly crept further and further ahead of Ritter’s pace, lap after lap. Until finally, the hour was complete. Merckx had done it. He had broken Ritter’s record by about 800 meters. “He finished in crescendo,” one of his trainers later said.
The scoreboard read NUEVO RECORD. Merckx himself stayed on his bike. He cooled off for a couple more laps around the velodrome before finally dismounting and being carried, literally, into his dressing room. He had done it.
In the years later, Merckx would tell his friends and colleagues that he didn’t want to talk about the Hour Record. It was something he needed to do, but now that he had, it was not something he wanted to dwell on.
“Never before had I had such pain,” he said. “And I have never felt such pain again.”
Related Reading
There are a couple of Merckx biographies I recommend here: but special shoutout to William Fotheringham’s Half Man Half Bike. Fotheringham does a really nice job setting scenes and building dramatic tension. I also relied on Daniel Friebe’s Eddie Merckx: The Cannibal which had great detail on his Hour Record attempt.
As for reading about The Hour Record and Merckx in general, I find cycling writing to be entertaining and enlightening. It’s like entering a whole new world for someone like me. The one writer I especially appreciate and enjoy is Suze Clemitson for The Guardian. Just on a prose level, she’s fantastic. Here’s a story she did on a Merckx victory from Flanders in 1969.
The Hour Records
In a way, Merckx’s Hour Record was the last of its kind. Even with his custom-built bike, he was considered by the UCI (cycling’s governing body) to be the last Hour Record holder to achieve the mark in a way that was not overly marred by technology. It’s hard to say whether this was because he was Eddy Merckx, or because Francisco Moser, the rider who ultimately surpassed him in 1984, did so using disc wheels (a pretty significant technological advancement).
I won’t get too deep into it because the aforementioned Suze Clemitson has already done so beautifully. If you‘re interested in good writing and/or learning more about The Hour and its conquerors over the years, please read this. We’ll leave you with Clemitson’s lovely description of the Merckx Hour:
“Where the Merckx Hour stands as the pinnacle of human achievement, a moment caught in the pale grey light of a Mexican morning. This is the moment when the UCI pins the “athlete’s hour” like a butterfly in a specimen cabinet. The moment when all possible futures of the sport diverge through the prism of technology.