Remembering Marco

On February 15th 2004 my friend Drew and I rolled out on a solemn bike ride. We were sporting black armbands, strips of cotton cut from an old t-shirt — a shabby yet honest tribute. Our conversation came in fits and starts, interspersed by long moments of silent gloom. We were in shock, saddened and more than a little angry: the man of our shared sporting inspiration had died the previous day of a cocaine overdose.

The aforementioned Drew, my Breakaway travelling partner, had been inspired to get into cycling by Eurosport's coverage of the 1998 Tour. He had never seen an athlete, in any sport, quite like Marco. It was the guts, the determination, the panache and the daring (attacking on the rain-soaked Galibier ascent, solo and so far from the finish). For Drew it was love at first sight. By the end of that summer he was riding around Edinburgh on a Mercatone Uno replica Bianchi, sporting the matching kit, bandanna and all.

Remembering Marco

pic from cycling-passion.com

The late Marco Pantani was a cyclist I greatly admired, a climber whose exploits further fuelled my admiration of the cycling climber and stoked my ambition to go to Europe and try the mountains for myself. He was also the cycling inspiration of Drew, my companion during the travels that make up my book, The Breakaway - Cycling the Mountains of the Tour de France. Without Marco I might never have ridden Alpe d’Huez, the Stelvio, Mont Ventoux, et al.

Pantani was oft compared to an artist; Lance Armstrong called him the Salvador Dali of cycling. He rode with unbridled panache, making crazy decisions to attack based on gut feeling, eschewing modern training and racing aids such as the heart-rate monitor.

However, as the French Senate confirmed on Wednesday Pantani also doped, in this case with EPO, during the 1998 edition of the Tour de France, which he won. Pantani wasn’t alone in his indiscretions: second-placed rider that year, Jan Ulrich, also retroactively tested positive for EPO, as did the American, Bobby Julich, who finished third. It was just those three, and all the rest – the ’98 Tour will forever be synonymous with the Festina affair. Watchmaker Festina was the title sponsor of the team whose soigneur was caught with performance enhancing drugs prior to the race start. The arrest lifted the lid on the sport’s pharmaceutical underbelly and triggered the greatest scandal cycling would see for, well, until the next scandal.