As someone who has a bookshelf groaning with volumes dedicated to a certain now-non-Tour de France-winning Texan, it has always seemed odd to me that books dedicated to the greatest racing cyclist ever are fairly scarce in English, or pretty much any other language. There is an old joke that the only famous Belgians anyone can name are Hercule Poirot and Tintin and both are fictitious but not only has Belgium produced celebrated cyclists (and, in fact, many notable people in other fields) but it has given us the best one of all: Edouard Louis Joseph Merckx. Merckx 525 is a particularly good book published by Velopress nearly a decade ago that gives us his accomplishments in visual form and is well worth seeking out.Originally published in Flemish in 2010, the year Eddy Merckx turned 65, Merckx 525 celebrates the Cannibals career highlights from the beginning in 1961 to the fade-out in 1978, from a small obscure race in rural Belgium to, closing the circle, another one at the end. In those seventeen years, the dark-haired Belgian amassed a record of success that will never be matched in our age of specialists. Divided into 25 chapters, the large-format book chronicles his wins year-by-year with a table of victories, a short account of a highlight from that season and full-page photos. The majority of these are in timeless black-and-white, while the colour ones have that period feel appropriate to a half-century ago but look somewhat unnatural to us now. Many of...
