His feats were extraordinary, especially in the mountains. He was the only cyclist to challenge Lance Armstrong's hold on the Tour de France. But he died alone of acute cocaine poisoning. In The Death of Marco Pantani, his biographer Matt Rendell explores the fall of a complex icon as well as the world of Italian politics, global sport, doping, sponsorship and the pressures of celebrity. In this extract, he explains why he felt it was important to investigate the cyclist's life
A block from the seafront, Viale Regina Elena stretches south, one-way, from central Rimini. Midsummer, the population of the Italian town swells sevenfold, and the viale teems. Out of season, the arcades and ice-cream parlours close, the boutiques offer discounts and, with little else to do, the viale resets its cobbles, points its facades and waits for spring. The figure who booked into No 46, Hotel Residence Le Rose, at 2pm on Monday, February 9th, 2004, his only luggage a miniature backpack and a small bag of medicine, was in a poor state of repair. From room 5D he made two telephone calls, then left the hotel for 20 minutes. It was the last time he stepped outside. Back in his room, he closed the windows, drew the curtains and turned up the heating. Not half a decade before, Marco Pantani had been one of sport's most distinctive and inspiring figures. Now he was withdrawing from the world.
Shortly before 9pm he phoned out twice from his room. At 10.10pm he took an incoming call. Instants later, a visit - two minutes, no more. At 11.40pm there was another telephone conversation, his last. For the next four days, at each sign of life on the landing he would open the door and start an incoherent conversation. Lorissa, a Ukrainian cleaner, worked around him. Pantani, quiet and courteous, asked where she was from, and Lorissa replied. But her Italian mostly consisted of concrete nouns and infinitives, so when, on the morning of Friday, February 13th, he posed a less straightforward question - "How do I look?" - she could only garble, "I don't know. I don't know you," and he sent her away.
At 8pm that evening he called reception for an omelette, prosciutto, cheese and fruit juice. Oliver Laghi, the owner of the restaurant Rimini Key, two blocks from Le Rose, brought the order to reception. Pantani's name was mentioned, and Laghi, once a competitive amateur rider, asked to deliver it himself. He collected three small bottles of pear juice from the bar and took the lift to the fifth floor. There, a foul-smelling, emaciated figure in filthy clothes greeted him with a terrible vacancy. "He opened the door with a smile. He seemed tired, like someone in crisis, very depressed. He was thin and drawn, and spoke quietly. His breath was bad. I made conversation with him anyway and told him dinner was on me. He thanked me and patted me on the back. I said: 'I'll see you tomorrow, and we'll celebrate.' "
But Pantani never ate another meal. The following morning he repeatedly telephoned reception to complain about noise, although the only noise was his. Perhaps seeking the source of the rattle and scrape inside his head, he was dismantling the room. He asked the receptionist to call the carabinieri.
When Lorissa came to clean, Pantani swore through the door at her. Soon afterwards, he opened the door on a couple crossing the landing, gave them a look of suspicion and said something like "I know who you are". At 3.30pm a Sicilian student named Pietro Buccellato started his shift on reception. He rang up repeatedly, but the line was always engaged. At the door he could hear no movement. From street level he could see no lights. He tried the numbers Pantani had dialled on Monday, but nobody answered. He tried again.
"Hello?"
"Hello? This is the Residence Le Rose. Reception. We have Pantani here, and he seems to be in crisis. Our records show he called you, so I wanted to let you know."
ATTRACTION FATAL
"If you're talking about Pantani the cyclist, you've got it wrong. I don't know him, so he can't have dialled my number."
The hotel owner had taken the weekend off. Mid-afternoon, he called to make sure all was well. Buccellato told him nothing had been seen or heard of Pantani. "Make an excuse and go and see what's going on."
Buccellato turned the master key in the door. The light was on, but the door was blocked. Not knowing what to do, he went back downstairs. The owner called again and, this time, insisted. At 8.40pm Buccellato took up two towels. He turned the key and forced back the furniture piled behind the door.
The room was in disarray. A fitted microwave had been unscrewed and stacked in the barricade. Shards of mirror glistened on the bathroom floor. Medicine boxes, some empty, were strewn around the apartment. A bed sheet and a tube extracted from the air-conditioning mechanism had been tied to the banister of the stairwell leading to the mezzanine bedroom. Climbing the steps to the bed, Buccellato saw Pantani. The former champion was lying on one side beside the bed, face down, as if he'd fallen out. His famously bald head was swollen and badly bruised. He had been dead for hours.
More medicine boxes lay on the bedside table, over a dusting of fine white powder. Pantani was certified dead at 9.20pm. The time of death was estimated at 5pm. At 10.42pm his death was reported by the Italian news agency Ansa. By 2am on Sunday, February 15th, the body was being
removed from the hotel. The cause of death, determined by the autopsy report with unqualified confidence, was published on March 18th: acute cocaine poisoning.
Pantani had emerged in the first half of the 1990s, when the superlative Miguel Induráin, the winner of five consecutive Tours de France and two Giros d'Italia, as well as world and Olympic titles, dominated cycling through a combination of prodigious strength and tactical conservatism. Induráin won by losing nothing on the flat stages and little in the mountains, and by making colossal gains in the individual time trials. The pleasure in observing Induráin at work was the blissful contemplation of changelessness. Nothing astonished but the calm enigma of his strength.
Then Pantani appeared, a ball of inspired chaos, full of subversive trickery, full of style, and capable - who knew how? - of Promethean accelerations whenever the road turned skywards. Where Induráin defied the invisible resistance of the air, Pantani challenged the mountains, those
most evident of hurdles. They were strange rivals: Induráin, the master of a mystical form of tedium, with flotation-tank lungs and the sleepy manner of the plankton-feeder; Pantani,minuscule and flamboyant, prone to dart, fishlike, out of the pack and disappear into the blue. In this often unfathomable sport, Pantani's only method was to quicken into the altitude until, looking down from a great height, his rivals seemed a distant distraction, lost somewhere far below.
At the 1994 Giro d'Italia, Pantani's second appearance in a great professional stage race, he had won two epic mountain stages and finished second overall, ahead of Induráin. A month later he went to the Tour de France and finished third. It wasn't just his results that attracted the fans. With his bent nose, protrusive ears and thinning hair, he was recognisable the way few movie stars ever are, and not just in Italy or to followers of cycling. To step up from those podium places to outright wins, Pantani faced not only an austere physical trial but also formidable mental barriers. The advent of wind-tunnel testing, aerodynamic time-trial bikes, teardrop helmets and low-friction bodysuits had given powerful physiques such as Induráin's the decisive edge in stage racing. On long, flat time-trial stages they could gain five minutes or more on any diminutive climber - yet in the mountains they could keep the climbers in sight and their losses to a minimum. Induráin's became the model package of skills for the modern stagerace champion.
But Pantani specialised in the impossible. He'd train for eight hours, then, on the final climbs, the final 50km, 60km, he'd take himself to the limit, push himself to the edge of the abyss, gauging just how far he could lurch, just how much his body could take. And that was how he won, free-diving within himself to greater depths and darknesses than others dared, surfacing barely alive, tasting blood, from the great apnoea.
That was on the climbs. On the descents he'd bury the saddle in the hollow of his abdomen and lower his weight over the back wheel, his crotch millimetres over the tyre, arms outstretched to grasp the handlebars. It made you wince to watch: the lightest contact between buttock and tyre, the smallest stone beneath the front wheel, might not have emasculated him, but it would surely have destroyed his delicate balancing act, catapulting the front of the bike into the air, leaving no reaction time. He'd have fallen the way a dead body falls. But he accepted the risks: in this death-inviting tuck, his flyweight frame could stay ahead of a pack of heavier riders.
The cruelty of his attacks was belied by the naive warmth of Pantani's smile. There was an innocent appeal, a childlike vulnerability about him; a lack of sophistication that rather contrasted with what sport had become, and was becoming even more. An innocent elan, authentic, immediately winning: this was the meaning of Pantani. When, despite the mental and historical barriers, he won the 1998 Giro d'Italia, and followed it with the Tour de France, cycling braced itself for a new period of dominance. Not for Pantani Induráin's impregnable citadel. He would suffer catastrophic failures in the valleys, then compensate with sublime solo victories in the quiet of the mountains.
Indeed, at the 1998 Tour de France only Pantani's epic performances in the mountains had sustained the sporting interest of an event mired in scandal following the arrest, shortly before the Tour started, of a 53-year-old soigneur named Willy Voet at the wheel of a car in the colours of the Festina team. A search had revealed the presence of hundreds of doping products. Untouched by the scandal, Pantani was branded the saviour of his sport.
His expected period of dominance started at the 1999 Giro d'Italia, where he won four remarkable mountain stages. It ended there, too. On the morning of June 5th, 1999, at the mountain town of Madonna di Campiglio, he was stopped. After a mandatory health test, Pantani was suspended on suspicion of doping, and the Giro he had dominated was snatched from his grasp. He could have returned to competition two weeks later and ridden the Tour de France; instead, invoking a plot to destroy him, he took refuge in cocaine.
There were half-hearted comebacks, amid fresh doping allegations, forensic investigations and a long suspension. Then, nothing. In the orange tower that rises gantry-like over the A14 motorway at Imola, Romano Cenni, whose supermarket chain Mercatone Uno sponsored Pantani from 1996 to 2003, is telling me: "If they hadn't stopped him, we'd be standing here today saying: 'We won the Giro and Tour in 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003.' "He might have added that, with the support of a team instead of that disparate pool of freelancers, Pantani might have won the 1994 Giro d'Italia and improved on his third place in the Tour de France. Or that only a wretched series of accidents had deprived him of likely podium places - wins, why not? - in 1995 and 1996. "In 1997," he resumes, "he fell at the Giro d'Italia, couldn't train because of his injuries, then went to the Tour de France and finished third."
Yet that recurring conditional - "If they hadn't stopped him . . ." - circumscribes Cenni's reminiscences. "He told me in many ways that he was clean, very clean, but they wanted to destroy the man and the athlete. We destroyed a man, and we destroyed an athlete. Perhaps we also destroyed a sport."
Elite sport makes absolute demands of its initiates. The soul is its raw material, no less than the body. "Nothing goes to waste," as Pantani's adversary Lance Armstrong put it. "You put it all to use; the old wounds and long ago slights become the stuff of competitive energy." In these circumstances we can hardly hope to understand the athlete without understanding the man or, more interestingly, the relationship between the two.
Writing Pantani's story means confronting two types of substance abuse.
One is, supposedly, private, personal and recreational. The other is professional, vocational and centred on a milieu - that of global sport - that brings together sometimes vast corporate interests and potentially uncontainable public passions. Both depend on organised crime and involve vast sums of money. Trespass on those interests and the threat is unlikely to be purely imaginary. Yet, to go back, it would seem possible to write a book about Pantani's sporting career without touching on his life at all. Or on the final weeks of his life without connecting it to his sporting career. Or, again, on his downfall at Madonna di Campiglio or his relationship with his manager without connecting them to the mechanisms that made Pantani a sporting icon, and asking what that icon meant (and means).
Early in my research, during the first, preliminary interviews, two fundamental questions arose: could a biography be morally justified? And was it even possible to write? They came up not as abstract, philosophical issues but as urgent practical problems. The ethical question stemmed from the pain such a book might cause his loved ones. The manner of his death is still deeply felt in the several small communities he belonged to in life. The first of these was his home town of Cesenatico, with its population of 23,000, almost too small not to be overwhelmed by the passion that came to surround Pantani.
Another was the world of professional cycling, many, perhaps most, of whose members have been traumatised by the deaths and maimings of teammates and friends on the road, and some of whom have seen doping as, more than an occupational hazard, a secretive subculture. A third was the wider sporting community, including the journalists and writers who cover professional cycling. All three are worlds where comradeship is accompanied by jealousy and where rumour abounds - which is, perhaps, to say no more than that Pantani was one human being living among others.
The practical question was raised by the unwillingness to talk of many who knew him. Pantani's attitudes to media interest added to the quandary, for Pantani was an introvert as well as an icon. He valued his privacy above all else, and media attention put him on edge. If there was affection in the coverage - if the media even sought to protect him - he didn't notice or care.
All he knew was that his face sold newspapers. True, he cashed in on the emotions he stirred in the public - his image rights made him a multimillionaire - but what choice did he have? A poorer Pantani would have been guaranteed no less serious invasions of his privacy than the rich one suffered. But I soon found that fighting between many of those who knew him made it possible to compile an enormous quantity of information, even if not all of it was reliable. There seem to be legions of spokespeople - all well-intentioned, no doubt, and deeply hurt, each in conflict with the others - ever ready to tell "the truth about Marco Pantani". As well as the books, there were monuments, a play, the first streets named after him and an imminent television drama. There have been celebratory DVDs and some dreadful TV documentaries, one of which set a benchmark for bad taste by showing his corpse.
Yet at the time of his death, much was unknown about his existence, even to those close to him. He had organised his affairs to ensure that nobody had more than a partial view of his existence. This and the fanatical possessiveness Pantani inspired among his confidants led to a bitter struggle over his memory. Few of those closest to him, then, seemed to want to let Pantani rest in peace.
Nicola Amaducci, the man who introduced Pantani to cycling, says: "What he needed was affection. He needed someone to be near him. With me he was always himself. With me he never changed." Amaducci's words seem to refer not just to those childhood years but to the end of Pantani's life.
Mario Pugliese, a journalist who went to school with Pantani, says: "As an 11-, 12-, 13-year-old he was expressive. Then things changed. He was a little taciturn, although obviously it depended on the company. But I think here is where a gap opened between Pantani the athlete, who sits in the saddle and acquires charisma, security, and can impose his will very persuasively, and Pantani in plain clothes, not on the bike, who finds it harder to impose his charisma and finds it harder to be secure."
Vittorio Savini, who began to coach Pantani as a teenager, says: "When he was climbing he was something else. Mother Nature had given him a gift. He hardly breathed; he didn't break into a sweat. People forget that. Marco had a capacity for riding we'll have to wait another 50 years to see the likes of again. When you told him to attack he attacked, and nobody could stay on his wheel."
The Death of Marco Pantani: A Biography, by Matt Rendell, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99