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Eddie Merckx (1945- ) is a former Belgian professional cyclist. He was the most successful rider of all times and won virtually every important race, most of them more than once. He was nicknamed ‘the cannibal’ because he did not want to ride tactically. He wanted victories of every single race he participated in, and never -arranged- a race with another competitor.

Edouard Louis Joseph Merckx was born on 17 June 1945 in Meensel-Kiezegem, Belgium and grew up above a small grocers shop in Brussels. Eddy was as a child a great admirer of Stan Ockers, a professional cyclist of the 1950s, and was shocked when his idol died after crashing during a track race in Antwerp in 1956.

Eddie Merckx started competing in 1961. After becoming a world champion as an amateur, he turned pro in 1965. His first major victory as a professional cyclist came when he won the first of seven editions of Milan-San Remo in 1966 at the age of 20. His last major victory was in that same race, ten years later. The ten years in between, he dominated cycling like no one else. His peak years were from 1969 to 1975, in which he won 35% of the races that he participated in.

His major achievements can be summed up as follows. Eddie Merckx is one of only two men to have won the Triple Crown of Cycling (Tour de France, Giro d'Italia, and the World Cycling Championship) in the same year (1974). From the Grand Tours, Eddie Merckx won the Tour de France five times with a total of 34 stage wins and is the only cyclist to have won all classifications (yellow, green and red polka-dotted jersey) in the same Tour de France (1969). Merckx won the Giro d'Italia five times with 24 stage wins and won the Vuelta a España. He won each of cycling’s five monuments (Milan-San Remo, Tour of Flanders, Paris-Roubaix, Liege-Bastogne-Liege, Tour of Lombardy) more than twice, with a total of nineteen victories. Eddie Merckx was World Cycling Champion three times. Overall, Merckx entered 1582 road races in his 13 year professional career, and won 525 of them.

Despite his successes, Merckx was not immune to injury and accident. In 1969, he crashed in a derny-paced exhibition race. A motorcycle pacer and a cyclist fell in front of Merckx, causing Merckx and his pacer to fall. His pacer, Fernand Wambst, was killed instantly. Merckx was knocked unconscious and was bleeding heavily from a head wound. From this accident Merckx cracked one of his vertebrae and twisted his pelvis. He admitted in interviews that his riding was never the same after. Because of his injuries, climbing was painful and it may even have limited his winning to some extent.

On 17 May 1978, Eddie Merckx retired from racing. He has now a bicycle factory in Meise, Belgium. Merckx is often asked to comment as an authority on various topics in the field of cycling. In 2000 he was chosen Belgian ‘Sports Figure of the Century’.