Marco Pantani holds the record for the quickest ascent of Alpe d’Huez, perhaps the most famous climb in road cycling. Not only that, but he also holds two of the next four fastest times. What’s sad is that all of these times were, almost certainly, set with the help of EPO, a drug that increases the red blood cell count in an athlete, providing startling increases in endurance.
Among his many honours, he won the Tour de France and the Giro d’Italia in the same season, a feat now considered all but impossible. He was the first Italian to win the Tour since the ’60s. But no matter how many impressive exploits I list, nothing will take away the fact that he cheated his entire career.
Pantani was tiny – he weighed just 57kg (9 stones) and was 5′8″ – but had an enormous power to weight ratio that made his a near ideal climber’s physique. He was known as ‘Il Pirata’ (The pirate) because of his penchant for bandanas and earrings, and a propensity to attack and attack again. These things made him an enormously popular rider.
Away from cycling, Pantani led a very troubled life, which increasingly revolved around prostitutes and drugs. In 1999, he was expelled from the Giro d’Italia following the conclusion of the penultimate stage while in an almost unassailable lead for the General Classification, and his career and life never recovered. In 2004, aged 34, he died in a tatty hotel room in Rimini of a massive overdose of cocaine.
Matt Rendell’s book is a very detailed account of Pantani’s life and career and contains a forensic account of his death. There is a very convincingly argued look at the evidence for Pantani’s use of doping products, extracted from databases used to track athletes’ performance and medical records of blood tests conducted prior to surgery. Every piece of evidence shows that Pantani’s hematocrit level followed a yearly pattern in which it peaked at levels rarely if ever seen in healthy individuals around the time of the Tour and dropped off afterwards, a pattern that would not be observed in even the most esoteric pathologies.
The weight of evidence is too great to dismiss, especially given that most of it does not relate specifically to doping controls and therefore would not have been subject to masking techniques that athletes use to fool testing regimes.
Many of Pantani’s contemporaries, Bjarne Riis and Richard Virenque for example, have subsequently admitted to their use of EPO, although Lance Armstrong continues to deny using it. Riis was stripped of his one Tour de France victory, and Pantani should be too. But, really, EPO use was so widespread at that time that it’s difficult to believe that there were any clean riders in the peloton.
Pantani denied using performance enhancing drugs and hinted repeatedly at some vast conspiracy to frame him. Needless to say, the only conspiracy was his own to cheat the authorities and, ultimately, the fans into believing that his performances were legitimate.
Rendell’s book forms an useful companion to David Millar’s excellent Racing Through the Dark for those seeking to understand the science and practice of blood doping. It is, however, a rather dense and repetitive book, not to mention a bleak one. Despite that, I’d recommend it to anyone interested in road cycling. It’s a desperately sad story, but one that needed to be told.
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