To his fans, Marco Pantani was Il Pirata, a buccaneering figure with a skull-and-cross-bones-emblazoned bandana, an earring, a nose stud and more character than the rest of the Tour de France peloton put together, who was the main draw in the Tour between 1994 and 2000, winning the great race in 1998.
Since his death in room 5A of The Roses apartment hotel in Rimini on the evening of Valentine’s Day, Pantani’s other, hidden life has been brutally exposed. It was not Stevenson’s ‘drink and the devil†that did for this pirate, but men in smart suits peddling cocaine and its derivative, crack.
Police in Rimini revealed this week that they have a name for the first suspect in their investigation into drug trafficking sparked by the death. They are also trying to work out the identity of a ‘smartly dressed man†with whom Pantani apparently had contact in his final days.
They have not ruled out suicide — a large amount of anti-depressants were found in the room — but their inquiry has centred on the town’s drug dealers, on trying to work out who Pantani saw in the five days he spent at The Roses, and on what he did with €20 000 that he withdrew from a bank shortly before arriving in the resort.
Rumours of Pantani’s cocaine habit had been circulating within cycling for several years, and were confirmed when he checked into a clinic near Venice last June. Revelations that he dabbled in crack came last week in the news magazine Panorama, quoting an anonymous friend of his parents, who they apparently called on to explain to their son the risks he was running by smoking the drug.
The details of Pantani’s cocaine addiction make grim reading. A local journalist, Mario Pugliese, recounted how on January 13 a group of Pantani’s friends met for his birthday in a local disco.
‘In the middle of the meal, Marco got up, pulled a packet of cocaine out of his pocket in full view of everyone, and went to the toilets. He was followed by one of his friends who wanted to stop him, and they got into a fight, the evening deteriorated and, as they left, all his friends said, ‘That’s the last time we see him.’ He had arrived at the furthest point of addiction.â€
Quite how the most popular sportsman in Italy ended up in these straits is the question that has exercised the world of cycling. His friends note that the decline started, logically enough, after he was thrown off the Giro d’Italia, on the penultimate day of the race in June 1999, when he had victory assured and was at the height of his powers.
Pantani himself, in a note scribbled in his passport, blamed his cocaine habit on a sense of violation after the ‘four years of court cases†that followed the incident.
Given that another top cyclist with a cocaine habit, Jose-Maria Jimenez of Spain, died in December, it seems reasonable to ask whether the culture of performance-enhancing drugs in professional cycling can draw cyclists towards recreational drugs.
The debate about Pantani’s death centres on an issue that goes beyond sport, but there is one fact that speaks volumes about the difficulty of tackling cycling’s drug problem. He never tested positive for any substance, recreational or performance-enhancing.
During the four-and-a-half years after he was thrown off the Giro d’Italia, Pantani was placed under investigation by half a dozen different magistrates on suspicion of using performance-enhancing drugs and was banned from racing for six months by the Tribunal of Arbitration in Sport.
Clearly, there were grounds for suspicion — his blood-thickness levels pointing to massive use of erythropoietin — but there were no positive tests. The six-month ban came only after police found a syringe containing traces of insulin in his hotel room.
Amid the fall-out from Pantani’s death the International Cycling Union has revealed that, finally, steps will be taken that mark a turn away from the presumption of innocence.
Not that this would have saved Pantani. He wrote what amounted to a last message in his passport recently, indicating that he knew where his habit would end. Others had the feeling as well: Pugliese, the last journalist to speak to him, had prepared Pantani’s obituary a week before he died. —