15/01/2024

“They are still looking for the next Eddy Merckx, but they’ll never find one” - Alfons De Wolf on Belgian obsession with finding a successor 'De Kannibaal'

The palmares of the great Eddy Merckx reads like no one else's in the history of cycling. Ever since his retirement in 1978 however, Belgian cycling has been waiting for a successor.

One of the men first touted as 'the next Eddy Merckx' was Alfons De Wolf. Ultimately it was a pressure he couldn't live with. “The press started it as soon as Eddy retired,” De Wolf tells Cycling Weekly. “Every journalist was talking about finding a new Eddy, but the pressure was too high."

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Remco Evenepoel, the latest star of Belgian cycling has also felt the pressures of such a label. After he became junior time-trial world champion, Evenepoel made a public plea for the comparisons to stop. “Being described as the new Merckx is not something I want to hear. Please, just stop it,” he said at the time and on social media. “Nobody can be a new version of something he or she has never been and never will be. Stop comparing, please.”

“They are still looking for the next Eddy, but they’ll never find one,” De Wolf continues sadly. “Just like they’ll never find the next Pelé in football.”

“The press tried to put pressure on me, but I was clever enough to know I wasn’t as good as Eddy. I could do a few good races, two or three months a season at a high level, but not a whole year. I knew what I could and couldn’t do,” he concludes. “It was strange. I would go into a shop and everyone would know me. There were many requests from sponsors and even some people asking me to go into politics, but none of this interested me."