Body and soul

The Death of Marco Pantani: Matt Rendell. Weidenfeld & Nicholson 2006. 304 pages hardback, £16.99. ISBN 0-297-85096-2

AT THE BEGINNING, when the boyArthur pulls the sword from the stone, there are still 800 pages to go, yet Malory calls his story 'The Death of Arthur'. Matt Rendell too sees that the chaotic life of his flawed hero is a long preparation for his inevitable and tragic death.
Rendell has to be recognised as one of the outstanding writers in the cycling world, a historian, but also a story-teller with real style, so much more than the journalist's journeyman one-word-in-front-of-another method, like his subject. In the beginning was Miguel Induraín, 'the master of a mystical form of tedium'. And then 'Marco 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.' Rendell is concerned to tell the whole story - really the whole story, nothing known should be left out. You may occasionally feel that we're being unnecessarily detailed here - the account of Pantani's last race as an amateur (he finished 10th) occupies no less than four pages, a damn sight more than it would have been given in La Gazzetta dello Sport.
But it's better to include than to leave out. The writer must distance himself from his subject, avoid the 'edifice of ambiguity rising around his memory', must tell the truth as far as he can identify it: 'Would that it were otherwise, but I have to tell you that this is the way it was'. Opposing his search is a mountain of myth interested more in image management than historical truth.

Pantani came essentially of peasant stock and his parents scratched a living in Cesenatico on the Adriatic coast. He was a loner from the beginning, an oddity with his huge ears (he hated being dubbed 'Elefantino', and later they'd be surgically pinned back) and his premature baldness - he was fifteen when he began to lose his hair. And he heard voices. They presumably accompanied him on his otherwise lonely training rides and would be there at the end. By the age of 14 he was winning, usually on climbs considered too severe for boys of his age.
Desperately insecure, he would shut himself in his room for two days after a victory, be reduced to tears if he finished second. By 17 his victories were televised and his future looked assured. He began his association with Carrera in 1991. In 1994, in his first Tour de France, he was third and Best Young Rider, far and away Italy's number one. In 1995 he won the white jersey again and finished 13th. Then in Milan - Turin he hit a car which had strayed on to the course (we have the transcript of the police radio), smashed his left tibia, gave a blood test, began to recover, acquired a new girlfriend, rebuilt his strength, began to train again. Four years later the blood test would come back to haunt him.

In 1997, now with Mercatone Uno, he acquired the bandana and became Il Pirata. In the Tour he won at L'Alpe d'Huez and Morzine and finished third. A year later he pulled off the double, supposed to be impossible after Induraín's failure to do it for a third time in 1994. He was hailed as the saviour of a shipwrecked Tour. The cycling world was at his feet: wealth, adulation, euphoria, delirium. He asked Mapei for five million euros but stayed with Mercatone. Politicians wooed him; on 'Pantani Day' Prime Minister Prodi stood beside him in his town piazza. About this time an 'image consultant', Manuela Ronchi, became his personal manager. She behaved much like a groupie, and may have done as much harm as good, but she remained with or near him until shortly before his death. Her confused ramblings to the press didn't help, and she would write a self-serving account of their relationship (see page 25).

Hubris is the fatal flaw of the tragic hero, and by now Marco had it in spades. It was time for the Fates to strike. The following year, in the pink leader's jersey of the Giro d'Italia at last, at Madonna di Campiglio, with two stages to go, Marco gave a haematocrit reading of 53.5%. He wept, shouted, smashed a window, had to be helped from the hotel, but it did no good: he was out.

How could it happen? Everyone was artificially boosted to the 50% limit, as they had been since the UCI introduced it - how else could you remain competitive? - but it was easy enough to produce a false result by dilution. Rendell outlines the more sane conspiracy theories, but whatever the reason, Marco's great career was over. He never recovered from the disaster, couldn't live with the rage provoked by the thought that these robotic functionaries had dared to question his supremacy, shown him to be a cheat.

Now it was open season on Marco Pantani: the 1995 blood test, re-examined, showed a haematocrit of 60%. Even before the fatal Giro he'd begun a feud with the Tour de France which only ended with his death. He took to cocaine, hallucinated, took the cure, got into training, raced sporadically, drove around like a lunatic in his Ferrari or 4 x4, caused dozens of accidents, went back on the cocaine. He went on a crazy trip to Cuba, met Diego Maradona, returned even more disturbed, and flew back to Havana where he behaved like a madman. The cycle of crack cocaine and detox continued. With a personal fortune of around 35 million euros, Pantani had unlimited funds at his disposal. His paranoia mounted. In February 2004 he booked into the Hotel Residence La Rose in Rimini where, filthy, stinking, emaciated, alone except (one supposes) for his voices, he went on a cocaine binge which ended four days later with his death. Searching (apparently) for his enemies, he had dismantled the apartment.

It is certain that no-one will ever give a more exhaustive and detailed account of the life and death of a sporting figure. It is the story of talent destroyed, full of compassion, yet concealing nothing; the drug-sodden culture of pro-fessional cycle sport broods like an evil spirit over all.
Incidentally, I feel obliged to correct what I take to be a fundamental error frequently perpetrated by cycling journalists. Rendell account of rEPO, its origins and its effects, is excellent. EPO can boost haematocrit by 12 percent, raise VO2max by six or seven percent. Graphs show that between 1994 and 2000 Pantani's own haematocrit varied from 40.7% to 60%. But that cannot translate to an exactly equivalent performance improvement, which is unlikely to be greater than 2 - 3 percent - still a huge margin, around two minutes in a 40-km time-trial. The 10 or 12 percent which Rendell hypothesises is impossible.

But this is not to take away from a magnificent achievement, perceptive, exhaustively researched, lucid, beautifully written and handsomely printed and bound. There is a good index which would be even better with more subject headings as well as names.
If we wanted an epigraph for this story, and an epitaph for its subject it would be Rendell's, 'Elite sport makes absolute demands of its initiates. The soul is its raw material, no less than the body.'

Ramin Minovi