Marco Pantani didn’t set out to be anyone’s mentor, but the one-time Tour de France winner who died Saturday had something to do with the evolution of Lance Armstrong.
Over the course of a few days during the 2000 Tour de France, the flamboyant Italian with the shaved head and jockey’s hubris inadvertently tattooed a couple of indelible lessons on his younger rival.
It was Armstrong’s first Tour as defending champion and he still was feeling his way along as boss of the peloton. When Armstrong tried to emulate five-time winner Miguel Indurain by handing Pantani a stage victory, allowing the Italian to slip by him at the summit of legendary Mont Ventoux, Pantani took offense. He didn’t think the Texan had earned the right to make that kind of princely gesture.
“I was doing something that didn’t come natural to me,” Armstrong wrote in the second installment of his autobiography, “Every Second Counts.” “Indurain could give it and people could accept it. But when I did it on the Ventoux, it infuriated Pantani. He felt I’d patronized him.”
The move backfired, starting a fascinating chain of events. Armstrong and Pantani snarled at one another in separate news conferences. Pantani said he hadn’t needed help to conquer Ventoux and won the next mountain stage in the Alps to make a point.
The following day, he set a brutal pace in a breakaway. Armstrong was so mesmerized by the mano-a-mano that he rolled through a feed zone without eating.
On the final climb of the day, Armstrong ran out of energy and sagged visibly on his bike, watching other riders blow by him, his lead safe only because it was so huge. Pantani, in turn, was so spent by his own effort that he quit the Tour the next morning, never to return.
The experience with Pantani taught Armstrong not to go against his competitive grain in a prestigious stage at which he might never get another shot. (He couldn’t catch Richard Virenque on Ventoux in 2002 and the climb has been absent from the Tour route since.) From Pantani, Armstrong learned the perils of emotionally fixating on a single opponent.
Extracting lessons from Pantani’s life isn’t quite as straightforward.
Pantani, 34, found dead of cardiac arrest at a resort hotel last Saturday, was buried Wednesday in his hometown of Cesenatico. He had not raced since last summer and was not affiliated with any team. He had been treated for depression recently and bottles of prescription medication were found in his room.
A scribbled note on a napkin indicated Pantani was lonely and remained preoccupied with the doping accusations that sullied his career, but authorities have ruled out suicide.
His stardom was filled with asterisks. The evidence against him was murky as well.
Winner of the 1998 Giro d’Italia (Tour of Italy) and Tour de France, Pantani’s latter victory came over a field reduced and demoralized by the Festina doping scandal.
He was charged twice with “sporting fraud” in Italy for having elevated red blood cell counts–the rough indicator used in the days before there was a reliable test for blood doping. One conviction eventually was overturned. The other, which caused his ejection from the 1999 Tour of Italy, still was pending when he died. Traces of insulin found in a syringe in his room during a mass police raid of the 2001 Giro resulted in a short suspension.
It could be some time before pathologists determine an exact cause of death. The question of whether he was clean or dirty, victim or cheat, may not be answered by the microscope. Regardless of what the final lab report shows, the toxins that plague athletics played a role in Pantani’s tailspin. As Armstrong has noted often, all prominent riders suffer from guilt by association because of cycling’s past and the pharmaceuticals afflicting all elite sports.
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The two men reconciled after the 2000 Tour, and Armstrong posted a respectful statement of condolence on his Web site. Others said Pantani was hounded unfairly into the grave.
But it’s too easy to blame law enforcement. Only the most naive would contend the sport has solved all its problems, and plenty of riders have endured suspicion, rank embarrassment and temporary exile to compete again. Virenque, who confessed to doping after letting his former Festina teammates take the rap for two years, is Exhibit A.
Pantani was unable to survive the scrutiny. He had moxie and the legs for explosive accelerations on Europe’s steepest mountain roads, but apparently couldn’t outrace his own volatile emotions.