A pirate’s life: Tour de France sets sail for home of the great Marco Pantani

Those who like their history black and white, with coherent moral conclusions and all loose ends tied up, would do well to avoid looking too closely at the Tour de France in any year, but particularly this year. On Sunday morning, all the contradictions and messiness inherent in the way the Tour treats its past will be raised for the umpteenth time, when the race’s second stage starts in the little Italian seaside town of Cesenatico. This was once the home town of Il Pirata , Marco Pantani , one of the Tour’s biggest stars of the postwar era, banned for using drugs, yet enduringly popular, and still widely loved.

Twenty years after he was found dead in a hotel just up the coast in Rimini, and 26 years after he took the legendary double of Giro and Tour, the Pirate signs with his motif of stylised skull and crossbones will be brandished this weekend as they always are. Fans will throng to his museum and statue, just as they still ride the sportive named after him and turn up to watch the Memorial Marco Pantani race. His is the Tour’s classic cautionary tale, a play in five acts: meteoric rise, hubristic zenith, dramatic downfall, sordid death, blurred legacy.

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The meteoric rise came in 1994, when the cycling world woke up to a stimulating talent in an era dominated by the soporific Miguel Induráin: Pantani was slight, accident prone and completely unpredictable, an old-school mountain climber, who zipped out of the bunch whenever the road went uphill, to what purpose God only knew, but to universal acclaim. “Families turn on the television in the afternoon to watch the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia because they know Pantani will always do something, the question is what?” said a reporter for La Gazzetta dello Sport the following year.

In 1994 Pantani notched up podium finishes in the Giro and on his debut in the Tour; in 1995 Pantani won two stages at the Tour, before a horrendous episode that October when he collided with a car on a descent in the Milan-Turin race, suffering an open fracture of his fibula and tibia. The following spring, the photographer Phil O’Connor and I visited him in Cesenatico, meeting him, as one always did, at the stall where his mother sold piadin a , the flatbreads made in Romagna. He could barely walk; he could only ride his bike in a low gear, and there were still gaping holes in his leg that had taken the screws for a metal plate to ensure it healed at the right length.

That horrific injury was one reason why Pantani’s victories in the 1998 Giro and Tour had such impact. Sport loves a comeback, and the Turin crash was just another example of the constant bad luck that stalked the Pirate. In his blend of misfortune and charisma there were echoes of the campionissimo of the 1940s and 50s, Fausto Coppi – whose homeland the Tour will pass through on Monday – such that by the end of 1998 Pantani was arguably the most popular sportsman in Italy, on a par with Valentino Rossi and Alberto Tomba; he was the guest of honour at the Ferrari Formula One team launch in 1999.

All of this made his downfall that year all the more dramatic, when he failed a routine blood test in the final week of the Giro, with victory a certainty. The tests didn’t prove the use of the blood booster erythropoietin, but were seen as indicative in his case; a string of legal cases followed.

The drugs police caught up with him in 2001, when a syringe containing traces of insulin was found in his hotel room during a massive police raid, and a six-month ban ensued. He was refused entry to the centenary Tour de France in 2003 and went to his deathbed – alone in that hotel in Rimini, with a cocktail of antidepressants – a cocaine addict, convinced that he had been made the scapegoat for a sport in which drug-taking had become the norm.

His legacy? Italian cycling is now a shadow of its former self. When Pantani was thrown off the Giro in 1999, his Mercatone Uno team were one of 12 Italian squads in the race; 25 years later, this year’s Giro boasted only two from Italy. In this year’s Tour, Italy will field eight riders, three fewer than Great Britain. The slow death of the former powerhouse nation can be traced back to Pantani’s fall from grace and the years of drugs scandals that followed.

When I wrote about Tom Simpson in Put Me Back on My Bike , I pointed out that it is perfectly possible for someone to be charismatic and hugely attractive as a person, and yet be a cheat; a person can be perfectly self-aware, yet be convinced they are doing no wrong.

Pantani’s tragic rise and fall draw one to the same conclusion, and always pulls me back to the same episode: the last full-length interview we did, at the height of his fame, in 1999. Afterwards, the photographer, Leo Mason, gave him a Polaroid of the portrait he had just taken; impromptu, Pantani borrowed a screw driver from a team mechanic and delicately etched the snap to make a mini work of art, which he handed back to Leo. It was an astonishingly human gesture, and that humanity – in all its shades of grey – is what the Tour will celebrate this Sunday morning.