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While Orcières-Merlette has the honor of being Tuesday the first final atop the 2020 Tour de France for stage 4, in a sense it wouldn’t matter much if it were lost off the road for another two or three decades. And that’s because whatever happens today, when it comes to the magnitude of events back in 1971, it is very, very unlikely to match them.
Yet here he is, back on the Tour. And as most French newspapers will no doubt reflect this morning, the return of Orcières-Merlette offers the cycling world a wonderful opportunity to briefly rewind the events of 49 years ago, when a relatively anonymous 7.1 kilometer climb on the The southern half of the Alps marked the final and crucial act of one of Eddy Merckx’s most significant defeats in the Tour de France, at the hands of Spaniard Luis Ocaña.
However, even if Eddy Merckx and Luis Ocaña were suddenly teleported, Harry Potter-style (sideburns, BIC and Molteni jerseys and all) into the 2020 squad, today’s Orcières-Merlette rise would still have a very different role than play in the race. for three great reasons.
One is partly because, as the old saying goes, lightning rarely strikes twice. In terms of cycling, that means the Tour has climbed Orcières-Merlette four times since that mythical stage in 1971, the last time in 1989 in a time trial, and it has never had the same devastating effect on the race, not remotely. A second reason is that Orcières-Merlette arrives at a point on the 2020 Tour, in the first week, where it would be very strange for a top favorite to show his hand as clearly as Ocaña did in his day. But also, if we are honest (and more on that later), due to Orcières-Merlette’s nature as a climb in itself.
Would you like history to repeat itself anyway, given the strength of the drama of that stage from Grenoble south to the ski resort over the city of Orcières 49 years ago? If 2019 and the efforts of Julian Alaphilippe and Thibaut Pinot to oust Ineos from dominating the Tour were repeatedly branded a ‘French Revolution’, the events of 1971, without disrespecting Alaphilippe and Pinot, represented a much more spectacular assault on two. Bastille on wheels.
That was because the Tour came at a time when, while he had earned the label of being his most dangerous rival, Ocaña had already tried unsuccessfully to beat Merckx on numerous occasions, most notably in 1971 at the Critérium. du Dauphiné.
Then and now, the Dauphiné was a critical warm-up race, and it was speculated, briefly, that Merckx might be having a bad year after losing a bit of time on a climb, the Col de Granier. But at the end of the Dauphiné, Merckx was back in control and winning the race, even if his team seemed weaker than usual as Ocaña returned to box one, that is, being beaten by the Belgian.
In fact, there were rumors that Merckx was not in such a good year on the way back to Liège-Bastogne-Liège that year, and again at Midi-Libre, due to a bad knee injury. But nothing, really, not even Merckx looking as if he had been in pain the day before Orcières-Merlette after a puncture, made it clear that Ocaña could launch a 60-kilometer solo attack at that stage, make Merckx lose nothing less. than eight minutes. and 42 seconds, and with it the yellow jersey.
If the UCI stewards had correctly applied the time cut on the winner’s time that day, no fewer than 61 of the Tour’s 109 riders would have been sent home. But such was the magnitude of this defeat of ‘The Cannibal’ that it felt as if the era of the all-conquering Merckx, despite finishing third, had come to an abrupt end. To quote Jacques Goddet, the Tour director at the time, when he spoke at the Orcières-Merlette summit, “Things will never be the same again.”
‘The most amazing thing I’ve ever seen on a bike’
As for the man at the center of affairs that day, winning that day had been all about Merckx, Merckx and Merckx. In one of the last interviews that Maurice de Muer, Ocaña’s veteran manager at the BIC, gave before he died, he recalled how the Spaniard’s only interest at that stage had been to gain time at Merckx.
“I drove alongside him when he was at halftime and said, ‘Now you have four minutes at Merckx, take it easy.’ And all he did was yell, ‘Well, it’ll be five soon.’ And then when I drove a little later and said, ‘Now you’ve got five, sign up,’ he said, ‘Well, now it’s going to be six.’ And so on, “De Muer said.
“Luis was alone; nobody helped him. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen on a bicycle.”
De Muer’s memory of the last 90 minutes of the stage is correct. But what is also true is that at the team’s hotel, as he recounted the night before, he and Ocaña, having seen Merckx in difficulties in that scenario, had had the support of the Portuguese cycling legend Joaquim Agostinho to deliver the first Steep and punchy Côte de Noyer hit, the first climb of the day. At the top, Ocaña and a small group, which also included Lucien Van Impe, the 1976 Tour winner, and Joop Zoetemelk, who had taken the title in 1980, had two minutes at Merckx, which means it wasn’t. only Ocaña who had instead of the Belgian that day.
“They rode against me,” Merckx once told me. “They wanted me to lose, not for them to win it themselves.”
He also felt, curiously, that it was his loss of time on that first climb and the lack of support from the team, discover the lesson of the Dauphiné, what really cost him at the end of the stage.
On the next climb, the Côte de Laffrey, much narrower and more tortuous, Ocaña had some history to solve, since it was there that he had been definitively eliminated from the main platoon of the Tour in 1970, losing all chances of remaining in the race . . But a year later, at stage 11, the boot was on the other foot when Ocaña dropped the rest of the break in the middle to go straight to the history books.
Oddly enough though, despite its reputation as an epic mountain stage, the fact remains that the route of that day’s stage was not that difficult, with all three climbs that day ranked second category. The length of the stage was also only 134 kilometers.
Perhaps not so strange if you look back at the 188-kilometer Fomigal stage at the Vuelta in 2016, where Alberto Contador and Nairo Quintana inflicted a painful defeat on the Grand Tour giant of their time, Chris Froome, on a stage that he ended up with a fairly easy second-rate promotion, all while properly structuring his all-day attack.
That goes to show that, as Contador likes to say, bullets aren’t lethal in and of themselves, it’s the speed at which they travel that does the damage. And in 1971 on the Tour, it was how stage 11 was raced, as well as the terrain itself (something some Grand Tour organizers would do well to recall from time to time) that really affected Merckx.
A rise in power
So it may come as a surprise to find that while Orcières-Merlette is stable and steeper at the bottom (which makes positioning crucial), and with no false flats or small drops to breathe, its slopes from six to six eight percent are relatively benign, and the road is sufficiently well paved, to mean that this is not Angliru or Galibier. Rather, it is a rise of power, nothing more, but also no less.
This was the reason why a pilot like Ocaña, a talented climber but a great time trialist, was able to inflict so much damage on Merckx. In fact, according to De Muer, Ocaña lost a bit of time at Merckx on the final climb, “because he had entered the stage much earlier,” much of which in the last hour was flat or smooth. Someone like Marco Pantani would have been destroyed on that kind of terrain, but no time trial.
So who does Orcières-Merlette favor, apart from ‘trains’ like those of Jumbo-Visma and Ineos Grenadiers? Among the specialists in the general classification, Miguel Ángel López (Astana) effectively won a Volta a Catalunya in a similar, although more irregular, ascent in La Molina, one year. Richard Carapaz (Ineos) has won the Giro d’Italia twice in stages like this, both in 2019 and 2018.
But whoever inflicts the most damage today, it’s also worth remembering that in 1971, it wasn’t Ocaña who ultimately won the Tour – it was Merckx.
