No Gifts

OK, so Pantani was a doper. Took EPO. Cheated to be one of the best.

Give this one a read - a news article from back in 2000 when Pantani and Lance Armstrong blew apart the peloton going up Ventoux, eventually culminating in Lance "gifting" the stage win to Pantani at the top.
http://www.active.com/cycling/Articles/Armstrong_and_Pantani_take_a_beating_to_Ventoux.htm

Take all the names in that article. Sit them down in a room. Ask for a show of hands, "who here is not doped?'
Crickets. Except for maybe Armstrong, it's how things were.
You can watch it happen here...


Drugs beating other drugs.
That doesn't abscond Pantani of guilt, but dig a little deeper - he DID have standards.
Racing was divine, and if you look closely, at about the 1:40 mark in the video, Lance just lets him take it. He let Pantani win. For Pantani, to gift a stage win was blasphemy. Especially from Lance, a guy who had nicknamed him "elefantino" referring to his height and his ears. You can't call a guy "little elephant" and then let him win a stage on purpose. Pantani would have his revenge the following day...

Pantani let him have it out of the gates on the way to Courchevel. He rode completely outside of his ability, acknowledging that today would be his last day in the Tour De France, and just wanting to blow Lance up and show the world that Lance was still mortal, still beatable by someone, even if it would never be Pantani. Pantani rode himself into the ground, pulled the plug, and hoped Lance would fold further up the road.

Watch it happen. Lance, dydrated from chasing Pantani all day, gives up 2 minutes to Ullrich on the way up to Courchevel and nearly loses the Tour.



Pantani's erratic behavior on Ventoux that day was not something out of character. He'd rather quit a race than lose. He'd rather leave professional cycling than be Lance's pet. He'd rather die than be elefantino. And his death, like so much of his life, was marked with pain:

"For reasons that were at first unclear, he'd destroyed everything in the hotel room: the furniture, the mirrors, the plugs in the walls, not in an uncontainable anger, but in a persecutory delirium; in sheer paranoia. Apparently, to stop some alien entity from entering, he had piled the furniture against the door...
As a means of suicide, cocaine is a poor option. A heroin overdose lets you sleep to death. To kill yourself with coke, you need a lot of money, and even then, you can't be sure it will kill you. Marco probably took some time to die. It was an ugly death." -Dr Giuseppe Fortuni, Forensics Medicine, University of Bologna