The twelfth stage was another strange chapter of this spectacular Tour. It was a transition stage after the Alps. From the gun Merckx's teammate Rini Wagtmans took off. Merckx, Aimar, Armani, Huysmans and 4 others joined him. For the next 250 kilometers, the lead group pounded away with all they had.

When the attack occured Ocaña had been in the back, signing autographs. A chase was organized. Hour after hour the 2 groups relentlessly hammered away. Merckx was out to teach Ocaña a lesson and take back some serious time. Under the hot southern French sun the lead fluctuated between 1 and 2 minutes. Luciano Armani outsprinted the others in Merckx group after a 5 hour, 25 minute super-intense team time trial. Cyrile Guimard led the Ocaña-Thévenet-Zoetemelk group in only 1 minute, 56 seconds later.

Merckx had taken back 2 of the 9 minutes he needed to win the lead back from Ocaña. But at what a huge cost in effort! The racers had ridden so fast that they showed up in Marseilles an hour earlier than the most optimistic projections for the stage. There was no one at the finish to greet the racers. It was the fastest stage to date in Tour history, 45.351 kilometers an hour.

Celestino Vercelli remembers that day very well. "We arrived in Orcières-Merlette and then we had a rest day. The day after there was another incredible stage, the twelfth, from Orcières-Merlette, in the Alps, to Marseilles. It was 300 kilometers long, with 20 kilometers of downhill and then 280 kilometers in the Reno Valley. Merckx was quite furious about the previous stage and so he decided to break away with 5 or 6 teammates right away, in the first 20 kilometers. Some other riders followed them and the group immediately gained several minutes. He needed to recover the 9 minutes he lost and he meant to do so by arriving in the valley with several minutes' lead with a good group of about 8 riders. This way it would have been very difficult for the rest of the peloton behind to catch them in the 280 kilometers of the valley. What happened instead is that during the descent they went so fast that when they braked for the turns the brake pads overheated the rims. The glue holding the tubular tires to the rims melted and their tubular tires came off the rims. This happened to 2 or 3 of Merckx's teammates and so they could not help him anymore in the valley. And by the way...this also happened to me!! Otherwise I would have been in the first 10 riders at the end of that stage. This happened much more to the big riders like me, because we had to use the brakes more heavily. Because of this Merckx lost some riders along the way who would have been a fundamental help to the plan.

"In the 280 kilometers of flat road he personally pulled the group for 250 kilometers on his own! And of course the peloton behind him went very fast. There were all of Merckx's adversaries who were very motivated to catch him. They all worked together for that. It was basically Merckx alone against all the others. And despite that they never caught him. If he had not lost his teammates on the descent he would have been in Marseille at least 10 minutes before his adversaries and he would have recovered all the time from Ocaña.

"Another thing I remember about that day is the terrible heat, I remember the sound of the cicadas for all of the 300 kilometers. We went so fast that when we arrived in Marseille there was no television there to broadcast our arrival. We were 2½ hours early! So the arrival was never filmed. At that time they usually showed only the last part of each stage on TV and we arrived before they could start doing that! In the 10 years I had been a professional this never happened again."