Tour de France 2024 | 2nd step | Marco Pantani, complex but living myth

The shadow of Marco Pantani will hover over this Tour de France. It had already enveloped the last Giro, which passed through Cesena and the slopes of Oropa. But with this Grande Départ in Italy of the Grande Boucle, Pantani’s hour is ringing again. Between the finish on Saturday evening in Rimini, where Pantani left this world on a fatal Valentine’s Day, and who sets off this Sunday from Cesenatico, the city where he grew up and where his tomb is located, we are somewhere between homage and pilgrimage. Not to mention this legendary Giro-Tour double, which Tadej Pogacar is tackling and which no one has accomplished since the Pirate with the protruding ears.

Pantani, these are seven letters frozen in the legend of his sport. Of the mountain, especially. Like Bahamontès. Names that smell of the slope, that resonate from the ice-clad walls of the Stelvio to those, burning, of the Alpe d’Huez. And so many others. In his life and in his death, Pantani forged his myth, very much alive two decades after his disappearance, and leaves us a complex, ambivalent story, between fascination for what he was, and repulsion for an era of which many refuse that he is one of the incarnations. And yet.

The Italian’s career largely followed that of the EPO era, which arrived in the first half of the 90s, like him, before experiencing a kind of peak at the end of it, still like him. The 1998 Tour de France remains that of the Festina affair, of generalized gangrene, but Marco de Cesenatico still reigns supreme in the prize list of this edition of sinister memory. As if nothing had happened. As if nothing had happened. After him, just after him came the Lance Armstrong era and all that it drained. It has been erased from the history of the Tour. But not Pantani’s coronation. Are there good guys and bad guys? The devil who is banished and the little devil who is forgiven?

Texas is far away and that’s a good thing, but even if it had been next door, it’s hard to imagine Christian Prudhomme organizing the passage of the caravan and the peloton through the streets of Austin for a memorial procession. Did the Tour boss and his teams hesitate to come here, putting so much emphasis on what appears to be “the Pantani weekend”?Marco Pantani is certainly light and shadowconceded Prudhomme this week. But his name is written hundreds of times on Italian roads, there is a fascinating side“.

Here we are. It is not a former winner that we come to celebrate here, but a form of myth. The man fascinated, the runner too, as if he came from another era. Pantani was timeless. Different from the leaders of his time, the Indurain, the Ullrich and the Armstrong, with whom he had to battle. It nourished the imagination. Perhaps this is why he was forgiven more than others.

In Italy, the sponge was less burdened and was largely passed. At home, in this Emilia-Romagna of the Adriatic beaches, don’t say bad things about Marco Pantani. There, no one will think of summarizing him as a cheater who lost his soul to doping and his life to drugs. He remains a mythical hero through his flights of fancy, and a tragic hero through his early death, at 34 years old. In Cesenatico, where her statue imposes her on the Piazza Marconi standing on her pedals, as a dancer and climbing on an inclined block of granite, point of controversy. The character is essential and loved.

In addition to the statue, Cesenatico is home to Pantani’s tomb and a museum to his glory and memory, whose director, Serena Boschetti, is none other than the late climber’s niece.What surprises us is to see among the visitors children, young people who were not born when Marco was running. He still fascinates by his victories, his offensive style, his pirate look, with his bandana and his earrings, but also by his journey: he had so many injuries and struggles but he always managed to get back on track.“, she confided a few days ago to AFP.

Nothing, not even his darkest pages, like his exclusion from the 1999 Giro for a hematocrit level above 50% two days before the finish when he was promised victory, seem to have any effect on his legacy among his fans. At the time, many already saw him more as the prisoner of a global system that turned its back on him than as a culprit. A victim, Pantani? Hell is other people, bastards too.

Even in death, the icon is controversial. For 20 years. Officially, the theory of a cocaine overdose in that Rimini hotel room remains the only one put forward. The family, for its part, has waged a long legal battle, convinced as it is that Pantani was killed. In 2014, ten years after his death, the conclusions of the counter-investigation opened confirmed the official theory. But like Tonina, Marco’s mother, the anger has never faded. Present this weekend, the arrival of the Tour tends to sharpen his pain more than it soothes it.Evil Doesn’t Go Away With a Tribute 20 Years Later” she cries.

Complex and controversial, until the end and even beyond his death. Marco Pantani gave cycling incredible popularity at the end of the previous century. He contributed to its greatness but, like others, he also embodied a generation that did a lot of damage. She wasn’t responsible for everything, but to absolve her 100% is impossible. The system has broad shoulders, but to put everything on its back…

“I am too young to remember Pantani when he was alive, but I would love to accomplish what he did. I know how important he was for cycling in Italy and around the world..” So speaks Tadej Pogacar, whose quest for the Giro-Tour double helps to revive the memory of a champion who, with his power of fascination in contradictions, remains apart.

Time is responsible for regulating each person’s inheritance. Pantani therefore continues to occupy a unique place. Because he was different, mysterious, and because he died young. There is Senna in his house. The two men left at the same age ten years apart. The Pantani myth. Pantani mythology. He was not a saint. His aura was bigger than his halo. In all his humanity, full of strengths and weaknesses, the Pirate endures.