Merckx vs De Vlaeminck

Lore & Background

In the cycling cafés of Flanders and Wallonia, the 1970s are remembered less by the calendar of races and more by the question 'who won on that day?' Merckx entered the decade as the most dominant force the sport had ever seen—his attacking style, his willingness to break the peloton apart in the first hour of a stage, and his relentless pursuit of every honour made him a figure of almost mythic proportion. The press called him 'The Cannibal,' and the name stuck because it felt true: he consumed races, opponents, and entire seasons with an appetite that left spectators and riders alike exhausted just watching.

De Vlaeminck arrived as the antithesis and the answer. Where Merckx was a storm, De Vlaeminck was a tide—steady, omnipresent, capable of being in the decisive moment whether it came in a sprint of twenty, a climb of three kilometres, or a solo time trial. His 1977 Tour de France victory, achieved with a rider's range that no one else in the peloton could replicate, is often cited as the proof that he was the only contemporary who could outthink Merckx's legacy on the biggest stage. Belgian cycling fans still divide loyalties along these two names, and the argument has never fully died.

The rivalry also carried a cultural weight beyond the sport. Belgium in the 1970s was a nation still processing its linguistic and regional tensions, and the fact that its two greatest riders were from different linguistic communities—Merckx from Wallonia, De Vlaeminck from Flanders—gave the duels an extra layer of meaning. Every victory felt like a small statement, and every defeat a small wound. The cycling press, both Flemish and French, fed the narrative, and the riders themselves, in interviews and in the peloton, never let the tension fully cool.

In Their Own Story

The rain had been falling since the second coffee stop, and the cobbles of the final sector were slick with a grey sheen that turned every wheel into a prayer. Merckx sat up out of the drops, his breathing a metronome, watching the gap to the break ahead shrink by metres. Behind him, three riders back, De Vlaeminck's head was down, his cadence a silent engine. They had been in this position—this exact, suffocating geometry of two Belgians separated by a handful of seconds—more times than either cared to count. The crowd on the roadside had stopped cheering and started chanting, two names alternating like a heartbeat. Merckx looked over his shoulder. De Vlaeminck was still there. They had always been there for each other, and in that small, rain-soated moment on a Flanders road, the rivalry was not about the jersey or the record. It was about the fact that no one else in the world could make the other one feel, even for a second, that he was not alone at the front.

Reader's Guide

Two Belgians. One decade. A rivalry written not in a single Grand Tour but across the entire racing calendar of the 1970s.

Merckx was the attack. De Vlaeminck was the answer. In the spring classics—Paris-Roubaix, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the Belgian one-day races—they met in the cobbles and the climbs, each trying to force the other into a tempo he did not want to ride. Merckx would launch his attacks from the front, trusting that his raw power and tactical reading would peel the field apart. De Vlaeminck would absorb, match, and then, in the last ten kilometres, find the gear that Merckx had not expected. The mind-games were constant: who would sit in, who would chase, who would let the other take the wind and then strike from behind.

Their Tour de France careers did not overlap in the same Grand Tour—Merckx's last was 1974, De Vlaeminck's victory came in 1977—but the rivalry bled into every stage race, every national championship, every Sunday where both names appeared in the start list. Belgian fans treated each race as a referendum. The cycling press wrote their duels like boxing matches, complete with cornermen and round-by-round commentary.

By the late 1970s, both men were ageing, but the rivalry had already done its work: it had raised the tactical ceiling of Belgian cycling, created a generation of fans who understood that a race was not won by one quality but by the totality of a rider, and left a narrative that still divides the nation's cycling memory. Two names, two styles, one decade that made the rest look like practice.

Did You Know?

• Both riders were Belgian, and their rivalry spanned the full range of road cycling—sprints, climbs, time trials, and cobbled classics—making them perhaps the most tactically complete opponents the sport has produced.
• Merckx's five Tour de France titles (1969–1972, 1974) and De Vlaeminck's 1977 victory bookend the 1970s, with the decade's middle years defined by their repeated clashes in one-day and stage races.
• De Vlaeminck was nicknamed for his 'complete' riding ability—sprint, climb, and time-trial at elite level in the same race—a trait that made him the only contemporary widely considered able to match Merckx across all dis
• The rivalry carried extra cultural weight in Belgium, where the two riders came from different linguistic communities, turning each race into a small national event beyond the sport itself.