The Death of Marco Pantani

Author:

By Matt Rendell

Awards:

William Hill Sports Book Of The Year Award Short Listed 2006

Format:

Hardback (Paperback)

Availability:

Out of print. Try our second hand search facility.

Price:

£16.99

Tagged with:

Cycling, Biography, Marco Pantani, Tour de France

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Further Details

• Published: 22nd Jun 2006
• ISBN: 0297850962
• Pages: 336
• Size: 234mm x 156mm

From the Publisher:

At 9:30 pm on 14 February 2004, former Tour de France winner Marco Pantani was found dead in Rimini. It emerged that he had been addicted to cocaine since Autumn 1999, weeks after being expelled from the Tour of Italy for blood doping. Conspiracy theories abounded - that he was injected in his sleep by a business rival, that the Olympic Committee had framed him, that Italian Industrialists had engineered his downfall, etc etc.

If none of these is entirely true and none of them fully explains Pantani's personal tragedy, none of them is foundationless. This book will debunk the myths and make surprising revelations. About Pantani's personal tragedy, but also about the world of cycling. Matt Rendell has access not only to court transcripts but to many of Pantani's friends and the doctors who treated him.

But Pantani's life is about much more than drug addiction. Lance Armstrong described him as 'more of an artist than an athlete - an extravagant figure...' Despite being plagued with injuries he won both the Giro and the Tour in 1998, something very few cyclists even attempt. He was an inspirational icon, and the remarkable wins against all odds make gripping reading.

From the Critics:

“[a] sad, exhaustively detailed and beautiful book...This book, unflinching though it is, serves as a fitting, ambivalent tribute - to the man, and to the dark heart of the sport he loved”

Chris Maume, The Independent

“an excellent book about the life and death of il Pirata, The Pirate, as Pantani was known. Rendell has interviewed dozens of those closest to Pantani to paint an intimate and sympathetic - if unsentimental - picture...this is also a work of meticulous investigative journalism that shatters whatever doubts anyone could still have about systematic doping in cycling”

Xan Rice, Observer Sport Monthly

“Superficially [Pantani] appears to be a familiar type of sporting self-destructor. Like George Best, Diego Maradona, Alex "Hurricane" Higgins, and so on, he was prodigiously gifted; like them, he couldn't handle success and its aftermath. But, if Rendell is right (and the evidence does seem conclusive) unlike them, he was a pharmaceutical creation almost from the beginning. He was "cycling's greatest cheat"...It is the pursuit of this revelation that makes the...book so readable”

Bryan Appleyard, New Statesman