The Death of Marco Pantani
It is the mavericks who make sport worth viewing; those whose skills alone might set them apart from their peers, but whose tight bond of unpredictability and athletic genius insists that we sit down or, more often, stand up and watch. Given that professional cycling requires an abnormal amount of conformity - riders are shielded behind similar clothes, helmets and dark glasses, and usually have similar physiques - Marco Pantani was a maverick's maverick. He was bald. He had a nose-stud, earrings and a goatee. He was tiny. He was a loner in a sport that requires teamwork to succeed. And if he saw a mountain, his first instinct was to attack it as if it were a trolley ramp, making him arguably the most thrilling rider of his generation.
Specialist climbers such as Pantani rarely win major tours because they lose so much time during the individual time trials, which are suited to taller, more muscular men. Yet he won the Giro d'Italia in 1998 and, weeks later, the Tour de France, too; a double considered so daunting that even Lance Armstrong never attempted it. By the time Pantani had won four mountain stages of the Giro the next year, cycling's cognoscenti began to talk of him as perhaps the greatest climber ever.
Then, on 5 June 1999, with the Giro within his grasp again, Pantani failed a routine blood test. Results indicated that he had used recombinant human erythropoietin (r-EPO), a banned substance that enables a rider to transfer huge quantities of oxygen in his blood and therefore ride harder and for longer. He was thrown out of the race. Disqualified from the Giro, he continued to race but never reached the same levels of success. Less than five years later, on Valentine's Day 2004, he died alone, overdosing on cocaine after barricading himself in a hotel room in despair. He maintained his innocence to the end.
Immediately after his death, Matt Rendell went to Italy to write a story published the next month in this magazine. That piece has now been expanded into an excellent book about the life and death of il Pirata, the Pirate, as Pantani was known. Rendell has interviewed dozens of those closest to Pantani to paint an intimate and sympathetic - if unsentimental - picture. He describes how a shy, introverted boy discovered a gift for cycling and shed his inhibitions. But this is also a work of meticulous investigative journalism that shatters what ever doubts anybody could still have about systematic doping in cycling.
Since the mid-Nineties, average speeds during the major tours had spiked sharply, raising questions about the widespread use of r-EPO. Pantani claimed that a second breakfast of spaghetti coated with honey and Parmesan cheese was his main form of energy before a mountain stage. The true story took years to come out.
The 1998 Tour de France, won by Pantani, should have been a defi ning moment for cycling. Shortly before the start, a car belonging to the most powerful team, Festina, was stopped at France's border with Belgium. It was packed with doping products and Festina's team were thrown out of the race. Yet the other competitors reacted to coverage of the scandal with a strike and a go-slow.
Many cycling administrators and fans, enthralled by the super-human performances of the riders, refused to acknowledge that cycling was riddled with cheating. Even after Pantani was caught, many people chose to believe he was the victim of sabotage and his popularity in Italy scarcely waned.
Rendell explains in detail the different doping tests and what their outcomes mean, which slows the book down and may put off the casual reader. But, given the controversy his conclusions are bound to cause and as a matter of public record, the detail is essential. Based on computer files recovered by police from the University of Ferrara, where Pantani and dozens of other high-profile athletes were monitored for years, Rendell shows that the Pirate almost certainly took r-EPO and possibly other performance-enhancing drugs, too, from as far back as 1993 - putting a stain on the achievements of his entire professional career. Trapped in denial, Pantani sought solace in cocaine almost immediately after his failed blood test. He managed a few more brief fl ashes of success, winning two stages on the 2000 Tour de France, but these were rare peaks on an otherwise steep downhill track. His behaviour became increasingly irrational and paranoid as his addictions and appetite for cocaine, crack and prostitutes grew.
Perhaps the greater tragedy, however, is that the sport has shown so few signs of cleaning itself up. As Rendell points out, several prominent former cyclists whose names figured in the same database as Pantani and whose blood tests thus showed strong hints of r-EPO abuse are still involved in running the sport at the highest level.