I can't breathe. I can't lift my eyes from the ground, and I can't hear anything but the clicks of the camera. It's as though the operator is so close he's inside my head. Click, click, click. All I want is for the noise to stop, the space to clear and for the race to start. But, to be honest, I don't really want to race. I just want to lose the television crew and photographer who have come all this way just to watch me take part in a junior provincial race. They're here for me. They're here for my name. They're here because I'm Eddy Merckx's son and the embarrassment from the attention is so intense that I want the ground to swallow me.
Finally, we can race.
It wasn't easy growing up with the Merckx name but I had a wonderful childhood and fantastic parents. There was never any undue pressure and, as a child of the 1980s, I would often come home from school and flick through our VHS collection and watch tapes of my dad racing.
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There was always one cassette that drew my gaze the most, with its all-black casing and a thin blue sticker on the side that read in my mum's faint blue handwriting: 'Montreal Worlds, 74'. That was the year my dad won, of course, and I must have watched that tape a thousand times, and to the point where it almost wore through. And even though I knew the ending, knew the outcome to the very second, to the very gesture of his celebration, I would still watch it again and again. And if I was alone – and I probably was after the first 500 viewings – then I'd raise my hands as he won.
We weren't the sort of family that kept loads of trophies on display. Our house was modest in that sense, but while we had some memorabilia and jerseys in the attic, what I really remember were the VHS tapes and how my fingers would delicately trace over their sleeves as if they were prizes in themselves.
I grew up reading about my dad but, when I watched him, it was somehow different. It's hard to explain, but when I was reading about the 'Great Eddy Merckx', it was always someone else's words, someone else's story. But when I watched those tapes, it was all about Dad and me. The man and father that I know. And it didn't matter that I knew the outcome, that he'd cross the line first and raise his hands. It didn't matter because he kept on winning each time.
As I became older, I took up soccer, and I reached a decent level with Anderlecht, but by the time I was 15, cycling had begun to draw me closer
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