Pantani's downhill career ends in hotel death

CYCLING: The death certificate recording the demise on Saturday night of Tour de France and Giro d'Italia winning cyclist Marco Pantani will show that he died in a hotel in the Adriatic resort of Rimini.

In truth, 34-year-old Pantani died five years ago on the June 1999 morning when he was thrown out of the Giro d'Italia after failing a dope test.

When the medical team from the UCI, cycling's ruling body, knocked on Pantani's hotel room that morning in Madonna di Campiglio on the penulitmate day of the race, the "Pirate" was on the verge of lifting his second consecutive Giro. The race leader was unceremoniously thrown out of the race when the random dope test showed his blood registered a 52 per cent haematocrit level, 2 per cent above the 50 per cent maximum permitted.

What sports historians may not record so graphically is that Marco Pantani never really recovered from that traumatic moment. Although he did play an important role in the Giro d'Italia won by team-mate Stefano Garzelli in 2000 and although he also won two stages in that year's Tour, Pantani was never again the same cyclist.

The cynical will argue that his subsequent failure to refind his best form was attributable to his no longer being able to use performance enhancing substances with impunity. That interpretation ignores the professional pride, the fierce amour propre and the raw athletic ability of a cyclist who, in the words of his one-time team-mate, Irishman Stephen Roche, "could climb like an angel".

Despite his "sins", he remained the best loved Italian cyclist of his generation as evidenced by the outpouring of national grief yesterday. All radio and TV news bulletins as well as most newspapers led with the news of his death whilst a minute's silence was observed at some Serie A football games.

With an autopsy due to be carried out this morning, the cause of Pantani's death is not yet known. As of now, we know only that when his body was found in a room at the hotel Le Rose at around nine o'clock on Saturday night, it bore no signs of a violent death. Media reports yesterday claimed that traces of medical substances similar to the tranquilliser valium were found in the room.

His critics will argue that he had only himself to blame for the destruction of a glittering career. That assessment fails to recognise the extent to which Pantani's doping infringements (a syringe containing insulin was found in his hotel room during the 2001 Giro) made him a media scapegoat for a cycling peloton in which he was far from the only one to wilfully break the rules.

A successful amateur rider, Pantani broke through as a professional in 1994 when finishing second in the Giro and third in the Tour. From the start, it was obvious his peculiar combination of dogged determination and wiry physique would make him almost unbeatable in the mountains.

One year later, however, his career suffered a severe, almost terminal, reverse when he was involved in successive road accidents, the second more serious one coming during the Milan-Turin one day race in October 1995.

He missed out on the 1996 season but, against all the odds (his left leg was now significantly shorter than the right) he returned to something like his best form when finishing third in the 1997 Tour. That set him for his annus mirabilis in 1998 when he lifted both the Tour and Giro with a series of breathtaking performances in the mountain stages of both races.

One year later, with the Giro again at his mercy, the Madonna di Campiglio dope test changed all that. Like Baudelaire's albatross, once knocked off his bicycle and forced onto land, he struggled in an ungainly manner for the rest of a career that was played out more in court rooms and in clinics for the depressed than on the racetrack.

The last official news of Pantani came last June when in the wake of a 14th place finish in the Giro , he checked himself into a clinic for the depressed. We now know just how serious were the problems that prompted that move.