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Photo: BrakeThrough Media www. Includes free shipping. Hurry, ends Sept. I was in a position where I could see both sides of his character. The strange cultural attachment stands in stark contrast to how other cycling nations view their disgraced heroes. No major American race has honored Lance Armstrong since his doping admission in , for example. Jan Ulrich, who retired after his doping ban, only recently stepped back into the German cycling world after living in seclusion in Spain. This was just days before his life-changing violation for an elevated hematocrit at Madonna di Campiglio. In death, Pantani lives on as a hero in the collective memory of Italian fans and media. He was also fragile and not very talkative, and when he came back from his troubles, he was never the same. Many foreign observers only remember Pantani through the lens of his scandalous downfall. To the Italians, Pantani was bigger than life. Fans still revel in his famous attacks on the Mortirolo or over the rainy Galibier to secure the yellow jersey. At his peak, there was even a hit pop song about him. Pantani was at once arrogant and aloof, vulnerable and introverted, a rider who was capable of facing down Lance Armstrong, yet at the same time, incapable of handling the burden of fame and the eventual shame that came with doping allegations. Socially awkward, Pantani was a quiet, reclusive person forced to live a very public life. According to those close to him, he was never comfortable with his early hair loss much more of a stigma 25 years ago than it is today or protruding ears. Pantani was so self-conscious that he later underwent plastic surgery on his ears. All of his scandal came out after he retired, after he became fabulously wealthy. Who paid the higher price? Pantani lost everything, including his life. Unlike his flamboyant compatriot Mario Cipollini, Pantani never sought the spotlight that followed him everywhere he went. He had the odd habit of referring to himself in the third person when conducting press conferences and interviews, as if he was somehow separating the public Pantani from the private Marco. He was often uncomfortable under the media glare and rarely spoke to journalists beyond required press obligations at races. The image of Pantani being led away by the Italian carabinieri in was a humiliation he could never overcome. Pantani went from the absolute top — winning the rare Giro-Tour double in — to rock bottom when he tested for high hematocrit levels just days short of winning the Giro. His death roiled a nation. The sport of cycling paid and lost. What is left? Just a lot of anger and sadness for the violence of the judicial system. In the more than 10 years since his death, the media have stoked the legend of Pantani the Pirate, not Marco the Man. Rather than being seen as a drug-abuser, or as Rendell insists, someone who might have been suffering from depression, a new mythology is being born: Pantani was a victim, or even a martyr to dark, unseen forces. There are far-flung theories that Pantani was a fall guy for a corrupt sport, or even a victim of a murder plot organized by the Naples-based Camorra mafia that was going to lose millions of dollars if Pantani won the Giro. Police documents, Olympic files, and other sources reveal habitual use and abuse of doping products, starting in his U23 days and continuing through the end of his racing career. Despite this, there has been an unofficial campaign within Italy to dismiss and downplay this part of the story, and reaffirm and reconstitute the image of Pantani the hero. There is another parallel movement to award Pantani victory for the Giro, even though Pantani did not finish the race — something that even eventual winner Ivan Gotti agrees with, according to Italian media reports. Lost in despair, Pantani locked himself inside a hotel room in Rimini. According to police reports, he bought up to 20 grams of cocaine, and was discovered dead in his bed after hotel employees realized he had not left his room in days. These unsubstantiated stories persist in part because of what Rendell explains is a deep-seated hostility and mistrust of Italian institutions of government, police, and bureaucracy. Of course, Pantani the martyr is an easier character to forgive than if he were still alive today. There also seems to be something more complex about the Italian ethos: Is it more merciful than the sterner Anglo culture? And there is deeply ingrained suspicion of power, so many view Pantani as a victim of a corrupt system. For Italians, Pantani strode tall among the pantheon of cycling gods. Only Fausto Coppi and Gino Bartali loom as large. Giro d'Italia.

Pantani retains a mystical hold on Italian fans

How can I buy cocaine online in Madonna di Campiglio

The man on the fifth floor wanted pizza. Four nights in a row, a clerk from Le Rose Hotel called, and four nights in a row, the restaurant owner dispatched a waitress with a Margherita pie for the guy in 5-D. Why someone in a hotel room overlooking the Adriatic wanted delivery didn't concern the restaurant owner. Oliver Laghi was a businessman and this was Rimini, where businessmen didn't ask too many questions or make too many moral judgments. Two hours south of Venice, three hours northeast of Rome, a world away from any notion of office or deadline, Rimini beckons and teases with its cloudless summer skies and vast sandy beaches, but at night, away from the T-shirt shops and gelato stands that line the main drag, there exists another resort of less innocent but no less potent allure and economic vigor—the one of all-night parties and easily accessible cocaine and prostitutes. So it was mid-February? So it was the resort's off-season? Some guy wants to hole up and look at waves and chew crust in the dark—who was Laghi to wonder? Business is business. The fifth night in a row and this time the guy wanted an omelet. This time, the clerk told Laghi who the guy on the fifth floor was. Imagine Babe Ruth putting away a few hot dogs around the corner and he calls and could you join him? Imagine Michael Jordan's car is stalled, and would you mind bringing some jumper cables? Imagine you're a businessman who doesn't ask too many questions or make too many moral judgments and that you have just speed-walked two blocks and you're holding the omelet you whipped up yourself—Fontina cheese and ham, two eggs, no toast, no potatoes—and your country's greatest and most beloved athletic hero opens a door and stands in front of you, bloated, grayish, unkempt. Imagine he hasn't bathed in days. Imagine terror in his eyes, confusion. Imagine gazing at exhaustion so deep you think you might weep. Imagine you start babbling. The Giro d'Italia! The businessman couldn't. He wept. The hero had always confounded. The unthinkable acceleration, the perfect gesture at the most unlikely moment—that's what defined his greatness. That's one reason people loved him. He attacked when others retreated, fought when others quit. Even now, wrecked, malodorous, terribly sick, he did it again. The impossible. He smiled. A great, dazzling smile. A miracle, really. He patted Laghi on the back. There, there. No need to cry. Laghi couldn't stop. He laughed. He also insisted on paying. Imagine you have a chance to ease the pain of a demigod, but you are a businessman, and your restaurant is busy. Laghi hated to go. Would it be okay, he asked, if he came back to visit tomorrow? Tomorrow was Valentine's Day. Laghi would bring more food. They could talk about cycling. They could talk about whatever Pantani wanted to talk about. Would that be okay? The hero's smile was gone now. Huge efforts exact huge costs. They always had with Pantani. The exhaustion had returned. And sadness. Great sadness. Laghi remembers it: 'Molto triste. Come tomorrow and we'll talk some more. Imagine you'll never see your hero alive again. Imagine no one will. Now, imagine a nation that can't stop chasing ghosts, that won't stop weaving reassuring little lies. Imagine an entire country that can't face a simple truth. Cycling's greatest climbers are different. The greatest climbers, the pure climbers—those who can ascend any given mountain faster than even the most accomplished all-around champions—these men are not just lighter and smaller and more sinewy than other cyclists, who are themselves lighter and smaller and more sinewy than most humans. The pure climbers are not just positively spidery in their ability to scale steep routes. No, these great climbers—the Angels of the Mountains, as they are known—are different because they are so odd. Exquisitely tuned. Angels are rarely champions, and champions are rarely Angels. It is the calm and the predatory and the brilliantly conniving and the consistent who win major races. But it is the Angels who make us forget the science of the sport—the computer-refined carbon frames and the diets calibrated to the tenth of an ounce and the wind-tunnel-tested, custom bodysuits—and force us to witness the art. It is the Angels who attack absent any apparent regard for consequences, who find fearlessness on paths where others hang back, who pedal into arrogant climbs and desperate, primal pursuits. The great champions calculate and focus and hold something always in reserve. The Angels inspire and baffle and alarm. Angels tend to be held in awe because when they do win, the way they do it is so simple and primitive, and as basic and as easily comprehensible as going faster than anyone else where it's basically impossible to go fast. Because of this, they tend to be suspected of cheating. And they tend to come to bad ends: hermetic isolation, premature deaths, suicide. Marco Pantani stood apart. Even among these frail seraphs—a group prone to exposed nerve endings and thrilling, evanescent victories and unfortunate demises—he stood apart. No Angel ever ascended more swiftly. None ever fell so far, so fast. For seven years, Pantani seduced a cycling-mad country, vexed a sporting establishment as few cyclists ever have, and wounded legions of fans who refused to believe how fast their hero was falling. In , Pantani climbed the iconic and fearsome Alpe d'Huez faster than anyone in history. The next year, he won the Giro d'Italia the Tour of Italy, his homeland's biggest race and the second-biggest race in the world and the Tour de France, one of only seven men to have ever achieved the double triumph in the same season, and the last. With his Tour victory, he rescued the sport from irrelevance and destruction in its most scandal-plagued hour. He was a cheater. He was an innocent victim. Sensitive and cruel. Loving and arrogant. A villain. A hero. He saved the Tour de France. He brought shame on cycling. He inspired others. He destroyed lives. This is what people say, and it's all true. The six-year-old boy was clumsy, accident-prone, always moving but seldom with much grace. A skinny child with a fearsome sweet tooth he loved Nutella and the apricot jam his mother, Tonina, made especially for him, and at night he snuck down to the kitchen and licked mascarpone from the bowl , a thumb-sucker, as he would be until he was eight years old, a loner with big eyes and big ears. A sweet little boy, a mama's boy, really. In another time, in another country, a doctor might have prescribed Ritalin. But this was Cesenatico, Italy, in , and so Tonina Pantani bought her young son, Marco, a red two-wheeler because she thought it might calm him down. It didn't. Three times as a child, he was hit by cars while cycling. Tonina says she knew every time, even before she heard. By the time he was 12, he had traded in the little red two-wheeler for a racing machine, and the rest of his life receded. Every day, he'd ride to the distant hills of Emilia-Romagna, and every day upon his return, he'd bring his bicycle inside to wash it in the bathtub. Afterwards, he'd let it dry in the hallway on the second floor. At night, he'd bring it into his bedroom. He could have kept it in the garage. Marco hated that, she says. Marco promised that he would call if he were in trouble. So that when she didn't hear from him, she shouldn't worry. She worried, anyway. His father, a plumber, worried for different reasons. At the end of Marco's first year on a racing bike, Paolo Pantani told his son that if he loved biking so, he should devote himself to it for another year. At the end of the year, if cycling hadn't worked out, Paolo would teach Marco plumbing. It worked out. At 20, in , Pantani won the amateur version of the Giro d'Italia, including two stage victories in the jagged Dolomites. By the time he was 24, he had turned professional, placed second in the Giro and third in the Tour de France. In the mountains, with his feral attacks and ridiculous, out-of-the-saddle surges, he was incomparable. He had a following, and a nickname. Because of his youth and the size of his ears, which was exaggerated because he was prematurely balding, cycling fans and cyclists called him Elefantino, or Baby Elephant, which he hated. He was an Angel now, one with prodigious talent and horrible luck. In the October Milan-Turin race, a jeep drove onto the course and Pantani hit it head-on, shattering his left leg. People said he would never race again. His mother is crying, and who can blame her? Marco was her only son, and it hasn't even been five months since his death. Outside the locked front gates of the family villa in Cesenatico, Pantani's birthplace, 15 miles up the coast from Rimini, a car full of fans from some far-flung province, or maybe from another country, stops so they can shoot videotape, then snap photographs, then just stare. Tonina ignores the car. She's learned to do this. Behind her, inside the house built with her son's enormous cycling wealth, airing out, opened for the first time since she heard the horrible news, is the wing where he stayed. There is his tanning booth, and his bedroom and his bathroom with his Lion King cologne still on the counter of the sink, and the chamber that has become his shrine, filled with photos and keepsakes. There is the great champion sucking his thumb as an eight-year-old and peering over his shoulder with embarrassment; there is the hero standing with the Pope, and a tiny, red-plastic Volkswagen a little boy from England sent him. Children always adored him, even at the end. There's a framed yellow jersey from the Tour de France. A photo of the cyclist passing Lance Armstrong on a steep, narrow road. It is a hot day, windless, cloudless. On the front lawn, a grass-covered wire sculpture of a bicyclist. Behind the sprawling structure, a swimming pool. On one side of the villa, fields of corn. On the other side, a vineyard. Looming in the mid-distance, the hills into which he would disappear as a little boy, pedaling to places Tonina couldn't imagine, to places that always worried her. She sits on the porch, underneath a flat, tinny summer sun. She is not private in her grief. She never has been. In an interview shortly after he died, she said he had been murdered. She blamed members of his cycling team. She lashed out at officials in the cycling community. She said she would name names. Since then, Marco's manager, who took him on in and stayed with him until he died, Manuela Ronchi, has been present to monitor Tonina's interviews. She is here now. The manager, it turns out, is measured and diplomatic only when compared with Tonina. In five years, he never, never tested positive. If not for that scandal, he would have won four Tours! And he would have won by four hours, not two minutes! Ronchi is grieving, too. And who can blame her? Pantani was more than a client. He was a friend, in some ways like a little boy to her, a little boy in desperate trouble. Someone crying for help. Pantani had that effect on people. I ask if anyone could have saved him. They blame Pantani's Danish girlfriend, Christina Jonsson, who, it should be noted, admitted to sharing cocaine with him for years and after his death gave—or sold—an article to L'Hebdo , a Swiss weekly, which was headlined, 'We Did Drugs for Love. They blame the cycling powers for making Pantani a scapegoat for the sport's woes. They blame themselves. Others blame them, too. Mario Pugliese, the lifelong friend who, for the past seven years, has been a reporter for La Voce di Romagna , the regional paper of Cesenatico, says Tonina and Ronchi were more interested in Marco's lucrative cycling career than in protecting his life. Pugliese also blames his editor for not allowing him to write a story addressing Pantani's addiction. Michel Mengozzi, a friend who repeatedly tried to get Marco to quit drugs and who, just a few months before Pantani's death, journeyed to Cuba to retrieve him from a vacation gone horribly wrong, blames the staff at the hotel where he spent his last week. These are the ones who let Marco die. Some of the people I talk to in Cesenatico and Rimini blame the local cops, for not arresting the national hero after a series of car accidents, when they knew or should have known he was using drugs, for not scaring him straight. Many blame, naturally, the drug dealers who supplied him. Some fans say he was injected with drugs by jealous competitors while he slept. Or that Italian industrialists orchestrated his downfall because he'd participated in a Citroen advertising campaign. Some of his countrymen blame Cuba. A few Cubans blame Italy. And if people can't find anyone to blame, they invent someone. Vittorio Savini, who managed the racer before Ronchi and now serves as president of Club Magico Pantani, a fan club, says Pantani was targeted by influential and unnameable cycling authorities. But why, I ask? Why would they single him out? Wide eyes, arms out, leaning forward. And who wanted him out? Franco Corsini, a Cesenatico restaurateur who tried to save Pantani up till the end, says, 'He was a thorn in someone's side. There was a plot to get rid of him. A plot high up. I think maybe he was murdered. He weeps when he says this. His life was cycling. There is only one person that the friends and fans and competitors and family of Pantani don't blame for the hero's death. They can't. They can't blame their hero. When bones shatter and flesh rips, what happens inside? As Pantani's body healed from his crash, did his soul twist in upon itself? Or was that the moment the mask slipped, when the ravenous monster inside the sweet little boy scrabbled out? Is this when the cyclist turned into a junkie? No one thought to ask then—why would they? Certainly he was different when he returned to cycling. But dangerous? Marked for death? When he came back to the sport he rode with a shaved head and goatee, a hoop earring and a bandanna emblazoned with skull and crossbones. At the beginning of a steep, absurd mountain chase, he would tear off the bandanna and fling it to the ground. Elefantino was dead. Marco called himself Il Pirata. So would everyone else. He was different, but he was the same. Whereas other top racers rely on packs, use teammates as pacers and protection, Pantani rode as he always had, alone, often from behind, slashing, with no apparent strategy other than sacrificial velocity during the most astonishing climbs. The prodigious talent, and horrible luck, held. In the Giro d'Italia, a black cat darted in front of Pantani and he crashed and dropped out. But later that year, on his way to another third-place finish in the Tour de France, after a long and hard day on the road, he scaled the forbidding Alpe d'Huez in 37 minutes, 35 seconds, a record that still stands, even after last year's time-trial up the mountain. The next year, , Pantani won the Giro, then showed up for a Tour de France that was imploding, after the entire French Festina team was disqualified for blood doping. A sport of cheaters—that's what skeptics had been whispering for years. Now they shouted. Il Pirata, dashing and explosive, quieted them by winning the Tour with spectacular ascents. Here was purity. The sport needed a hero, and it could not have invented a more engaging one. He chatted with fans, played with children. He presented wonderfully thoughtful, wonderfully strange quotes to journalists. He helped those in need. When an earthquake damaged the town of Assisi, Pantani bought and loaded a truck with food to drive there. It was Pantani who coaxed the troubled Angel of the mountain, Charly Gaul, into making some public appearances again, and rekindling ties with his racing brethren. The Luxembourger had won the Tour in , then grew fat, grew a beard and grew into a grumpy hermit who lived in the woods and refused all visitors. Pantani invited him to rejoin the company of humankind. Was it just kindness, or had Il Pirata peered into the woods and seen himself? For his victories, Pirata was cheered. For his good deeds, he was admired. For his exceeding and engaging oddness, he was beloved. In Italy, where he was the first paesano to win the Tour since , he was something else altogether. Just like the Pope, except that Pantani was 28, a sensualist, delighted with the trappings of fame, intoxicated with his singularity. He shot marbles with fans after races, played the horses, hunted pigeons. Other athletes delivered homilies about sacrifice and effort and teamwork. Il Pirata waxed as only Il Pirata could. I'm a nonconformist, and some feel inspired by the way I express freedom of thought. There's chaos in everyday life, and I tune into that chaos. He could afford all the chaos he wanted. Though he invested—much of it in property in and around Cesenatico and Rimini, including the capacious villa he built for his family—he also didn't deprive himself. He bought his girlfriend, Jonsson, a metallic-blue A-Class Mercedes. He drove a BMW. He danced at Rimini's discos. He was said to enjoy the company of prostitutes. He drank and he used cocaine. Cycling had never seen a disco-dancing, marble-shooting, philosophy-spouting Angel like Pantani. In , he announced his intention to win the Giro-Tour double two years in a row, which no one had ever done. It actually seemed possible. With just two stages left in the Italian race, Il Pirata had built a lead of five minutes, 38 seconds—insurmountable unless something terrible and bizarre happened. It did. On June 5, shortly after dawn, at the mountain sanctuary of Madonna di Campiglio, cycling's drug inspectors knocked on Pantani's hotel door. Vittorio Savini, then his manager, was with him. The inspectors told Pantani that his blood hematocrit level—at the time the most accurate indicator of the performance-enhancing drug EPO—was too high. Pantani could have served a quiet, if embarrassing, two-week absence from competition then simply have begun racing again, as other cyclists had done. Because the test didn't detect EPO, just the abnormally high level of red-blood cells, racers were technically barred from competition, for their health, until the hematocrit level returned to normal. It wasn't even officially a drug violation. Instead, Pantani claimed he was a victim of a plot, accused authorities of botching the test and fabricating results. He demanded DNA testing which later proved the tests were accurate. He retreated to his villa. He lashed out. He began speaking of himself in the third person. His cocaine use escalated. He gained weight, went days without sleeping. He always had driven fast, but now he drove into accidents, once speeding the wrong way down a one-way street and wrecking eight cars. There were long, inexplicable absences. And he chose that. Other cyclists accused of doping have admitted error, focused on recovery and saved their careers. But this was an Angel of the mountains, a man of outsized, enormously fragile pride. Other cyclists found guilty of doping have focused on creating new lives outside the sport. But this was Pantani—man of miracles, patron saint of long odds and steep climbs. He got back on his bike. In the summer of , he helped teammate Stefano Garzelli win the Giro. Then he took on Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France. Piqued after Armstrong announced that he had allowed Pantani to win a mountain stage which he, in fact, had , Il Pirata insulted Armstrong in the press. When Armstrong responded that 'Unfortunately, Il Elefantino has shown his true colors. I thought he had more class than that,' Pantani was enraged, and he let his rage define his riding. He attacked as only a splenetic Angel could—or would. First, on his way to a stage victory in the Alps, he dropped Armstrong. The next day, he opened up a one-minute gap on a climb early in the stage, and so rattled the normally phlegmatic Texan that Armstrong forgot to eat at a crucial moment, bonked on the Joux Plane ascent and lost two critical minutes to the only rival—Jan Ullrich—who actually posed a threat to Armstrong's Tour aspirations. Later, Armstrong described it as his worst day ever on a bike. Pantani's attack was thrilling, vengeful, and enormously self-destructive. He eventually was caught, then lost 14 minutes overall. The next morning, he dropped out of the Tour. The following season, in , police raiding the riders' hotels at the Giro found a syringe with traces of insulin in Pantani's room, and he was banned for another six months. Seven judicial inquiries would eventually be launched against Pantani, including one that charged him with sporting fraud for using performance-enhancing drugs while being a professional athlete. Money wasn't enough. Adulation couldn't save him. The antidepressants he was taking didn't make him happy. What choice did he have? He would not quit, even as his cocaine addiction consumed him. At the Giro, he was mobbed every morning at the sign-in. This would have been the perfect moment for his fans to face the truth, to change the narrative they and their hero had conspired to create. But his fans—his country—wanted an Angel. Twice the number of fans surrounded Il Pirata as anyone else, including the leaders. Didn't they know how far he had fallen? Maybe they did. Maybe it drew them. Maybe they thought he could rise, against ridiculous odds, once again. He couldn't. He might have been an Angel, but he was just a man. On the 18th stage of the Giro, descending the Colle di Sampeyre in driving hail and rain, Pantani crashed. There is a photograph of him the moment after the fall, sitting on rain-slicked grass, clutching himself, crying. His fans screamed for him to continue. Il Pirata, who perceived competitors' tactical maneuvers as grievous personal affronts, who, if he wasn't stalking a pack, was assaulting it, devouring it? Il Pirata, who had been hounded by racing authorities when he should have been honored? Now that he'd crashed out of contention in his homeland's biggest race, his fans wanted him to join the pack, to continue when he could not triumph? Angels confound. They perform the impossible. They find the perfect gesture at the most unlikely moment. And now, Pantani did it again. He gave his fans their miracle. He got on his bike and he rode. Not for victory, not to mount one of his furious, quixotic charges. He rode when defeat was absolutely certain. Just so he could finish. Just because people were asking him to. It was perhaps his least-talked-about ascent, his most ordinary. It might have been his most heroic climb. It was his last. In the autumn of , for reasons no one can agree on, Pantani traveled to Cuba. He went there to dry out. No, he flew to the island for a massive binge. He wanted to reconnect with a girlfriend he'd met at the beach on a previous trip. No, it was because Maradona, the great Argentinean soccer star and a good friend and a recovering cocaine addict , invited him to the place he'd been treated for addiction. For three days, my translator and I search for the rooming house where Pantani stayed in Havana, for hints about what happened. It is a strange trip. People avert their eyes and profess ignorance to the most innocent queries, and dark rumors mutate and fester in narrow, cramped alleyways thick with diesel fumes and the heavy scent of human waste. We are invited into tiled rooms no larger than small closets, greeted with warmth and wide smiles and strong, bitter coffee. We are told of a local doctor who has discovered the cure for cancer in the venom of giant blue scorpions; we listen to not one but two sordid and fantastic rumors of hushed-up prostitute murders. We see mounted upon doors crude representations of pierced tongues and covered eyes—both a religious caution against bearing false witness and a political reminder that sharing information here is dangerous. In Cuba, truth is a slippery, elusive commodity. Yes, a local man we meet on the street in Havana says, after a couple mojitos, Pantani was here. He came in , and and He led bike tours around the country. The children adored him. Fidel entertained him at one of his secret palaces. The cyclist knew that money meant nothing, that it could not buy happiness, and isn't that insight the very essence of living? And now, could we please give the helpful man some American dollars, 'for cooking oil, for my sick mother. Her daughter was not the cyclist's girlfriend, they were merely acquaintances, and she has no idea how anyone could have thought differently. As she says this, her teenage daughter rolls her eyes at the translator and me. On the third day, guided by rumors, a Santeria witch, some mojito-fueled guesses from locals, an old man selling rolled paper filled with roasted peanuts, a relentless translator, gossip, a vague article from an Italian daily called La Nazione, and dumb Caribbean luck, we find the boarding house where Pantani stayed. He took whatever pills he could get his hands on. He would open doors and just take pills. Blood pressure pills, for example. My blood pressure pills. Franco Corsini, the Cesenatico restaurateur and one of Pantani's close friends, heard the Cuba rumors and tracked the cyclist to Havana. He and Michel Mengozzi flew from Italy to help their friend, bringing antidepressants obtained from Pantani's doctor back home. Sebastion Urra Delgado, a Cuban hunting guide who extricated Pantani from Havana at Corsini's request, says that when he arrived in the city the cyclist was barely conscious and, if anyone gave away—or, more likely, sold—Pantani's possessions, it was Fernandez. Before he left Havana, Pantani scribbled in the blank pages of his passport. This is what he wrote: 'My life is already over. The thing that matters in life is to feel deathI'm left all alone. No one managed to understand me. Even the cycling world and even my own family. I want tobreak this addiction. I want to finish with that world and I want to get back on the bike. Back in Italy, when Pantani drove to meetings with drug dealers, Michel Mengozzi followed on his motorcycle hoping to dissuade him. He rarely succeeded. Pantani checked into drug rehabilitation clinics twice, but lasted only days each time. At the second one, in Milan, he had cocaine smuggled in. In a published interview with Pugliese, his journalist friend, in September , Pantani declared that he was done with cycling forever. Pugliese says he asked his editors if he could write another story. Can we run an article about his drug problems? At the beginning of February , a week before his friend's death, Pugliese wrote Il Pirata's obituary. At the end of what would be Pantani's last stay at the family villa, his mother emptied his wing. She always knew when he was going to fall. She had a feeling. On Monday, February 9, he checked into room 5-D, a split-level room on the top floor of Le Rose with a view of the Adriatic. He wanted it for only one night. Una grande tristezza. He made five or six phone calls, came downstairs then walked into the winter night. Two hours later, he returned. He wouldn't leave the hotel again. Every morning, Deluigi took a brioche and coffee to Pantani, and every morning, he asked if he might have the room another day. Every night, a waitress from Oliver Laghi's restaurant showed up with a pizza. On Saturday morning, Valentine's Day, some of the guests on the fifth floor came downstairs to complain. Other guests complained. Pantani was screaming. There were loud, banging noises. When Larissa Boyko, the cleaning woman at Le Rose, knocked on the door, Pantani screamed at her until she went away. Buccellato went upstairs to investigate. I talked about it with the owner and he said 'Let's say we have to change towels as an excuse. There was no answer. At , he knocked again and, this time, opened the door with a manager's key. The lights were on, the furniture upturned. Pantani was on the top floor, next to the bed, facedown. There was swelling in his brain and lungs, brought on by an overdose of cocaine. He was 34 years old. He'd been dead for six hours. It could have been me. I didn't possess extraordinary athletic gifts, nor fame, nor money, and I was 30 pounds overweight and I lived in a cluttered, one-room apartment in a Midwestern suburb and binged on cheeseburgers and vanilla milkshakes and read detective novels until sunrise, but other than that I was exactly like one of the greatest climbers who ever lived. At first it was just a few beers and occasional cocaine, not a lot, just a normal amount for a guy like me. And then it was more than a normal amount. I remember myself as a sweet kid, and I had a sweet tooth, too. But sometimes the mask slipped. Sometimes the monster scrabbled out. There were nosebleeds and vomiting and car wrecks and hurt feelings and lost jobs and liver disease and worried people who didn't know what to do. Bad things happened, and things got worse. Can we learn from Pantani's end? And what is the lesson? That those who climb too fast, too far—like Icarus and all other mortals who dare to spread their wings toward bright, shining suns—must surely crash to Earth? It's bullshit. Why can't his mother and managers and friends and fans see that? Why can't people see that? There is no cautionary tale about fame and greatness here, no lyrical saga of hubris and tragedy. I could have died like Pantani. I could have died exactly like him. There would have been nothing lyrical about it. Of course other cyclists have taken performance-enhancing drugs. Some have been caught; others, no doubt, haven't. Maybe Pantani was singled out by a cycling establishment terrified that the savior of the Tour might be exposed as a cocaine abuser. Maybe he was hounded. But others have been singled out. Others have been hounded. It hasn't killed them. Other cyclists have used recreational drugs, too, including, no doubt, cocaine. In , the great Jan Ullrich, Armstrong's arch-rival, was temporarily banned from cycling for testing positive for ecstasy. It didn't kill him. Italy's great cyclist, one of the greatest climbers of all time, the doomed Angel of the Mountains, died not because of judges, or lawyers, or reporters, or the cycling community, or his parents, or the embarrassment of oversized ears or an uncaring world or mysterious, shadowy overlords hatching sinister plots. He didn't die because he was hounded. He didn't die because anyone failed him. It's cruel and narrow-minded to reduce a man's life to a medical diagnosis. Pantani brought a bruised majesty to cycling and it was a rare and precious and thrilling thing that should be acknowledged, and remembered. But we shouldn't forget the sordid way Pantani left this world. He lived as an Angel. He died as a drug addict. He died because he was a drug addict. That I managed—with a great deal of help—to quit drinking and taking drugs makes me feel enormously, stupendously, ridiculously lucky and grateful. Why couldn't Pantani quit? Here are better questions: When will the family and friends and fans and country that loved him, and those who merely loved the idea of him, stop making up fables? How can a country be so stupefied by grief that it can't admit the truth? That its hero's demise was neither mythical nor profound, but merely stupid and sad and sick and utterly wasteful? A woman crosses herself, kisses the medallion of the Madonna hanging from her neck, then pulls out a digital disposable camera. She snaps a shot of the flowers arrayed in front of Pantani's memorial—the lilies, gladiolus, carnations, plastic roses and daffodils, the peonies, the black-eyed Susans, the sunflowers. She wears a shapeless, dark-blue dress and her face is heavily lined. She might be Her husband wears shorts and Nike sandals and he, too, crosses himself, then kisses the cross around his neck. A young man is with them, perhaps 20, perhaps 30, perhaps mentally disabled or palsied, and he moves with the un-self-conscious clumsiness of a very small child. His head rocks from side to side and every half-minute or so, he exclaims 'Pantani! It is late afternoon on a hot Wednesday in early July, another windless, cloudless day. For 45 minutes, couple after couple, family after family follow the path marked by signs the cemetery's management has taped to walls and posts—Marco Pantani Viale NO. There are no other signs in the cemetery. All the visitors cross themselves. Most take out digital cameras or cell phones. Some leave notes, keepsakes. One man rode his bike miles here, then left his shirt, on which he wrote, 'Certain summer days in Cesenatico seem to reflect the light the way a pirate lit up his people. I remember when we met. So this year we've come to the cemetery. At his funeral, the mass of mourners stretched 2 miles, in lines six across. There were reports that 30, filed past his casket. Today, a typical day at the Cesenatico cemetery, a hundred people come to cross themselves and to take pictures and to telephone friends back home to tell them where they are. Now there are just too many people. One couple leaves the memorial, another couple arrives. More crossing, more disposable cameras, more flowers. At this very moment, no doubt, families are packing their cars in Rome and Naples and Venice, preparing for a journey to the final resting place of the funny-looking little man who achieved so much and died so horribly wrong, so horribly alone. It is cloudless and windless, oppressively hot, and a sheen of sweat covers the faces of every single one of the mourners, or fans, or deluded pilgrims, or vultures, or whatever they are. The older couple and their son, or grandson, are still here. She weeps, her husband stares at the flowers. The boy makes his sounds. Does he know whose name he sings? Does he understand why the great champion is gone? Is his dull, ragged mourning less profound than those who make a martyr of the fallen cyclist, or is this the sound of genuine sorrow, at perfect pitch? A hot, still day, cloudless and windless, broken only by the sounds of cameras clicking and the man-child's sad, sad song. This article ran in the December issue of Bicycling. How to Rest Tired Legs. Hamstring Stretches are Key for Strong Cycling. What Is the Average Cycling Speed? How to Be a Rider—with Anna Yamauchi. Pantani won the stage in a time of Marco Ventura. Steve Friedman. Watch Next. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. Member Exclusive.

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