The following feature concludes our ‘I love the 1990s’ series, as Stephen Farrand recalls Marco Pantani’s dramatic expulsion from the 1999 Giro d’Italia. It was the culmination of cycling’s era of excess, but it was also a missed opportunity. Pantani responded with denial, repeated again and again until his tragically premature death in 2004. His entourage responded with a silence that endures to this day. Two months later, Lance Armstrong dominated the Tour de France, and the cycle began all over again.
When Marco Pantani left the 1999 Giro d'Italia in disgrace, after being disqualified for a blood haematocrit above the 50 per cent limit, his final words on the steps of the Hotel Touring in Madonna di Campiglio, surrounded by police and media, were emblematic of the huge moment in his career and the decade that was coming to an end.
"I've started all over again after serious accidents before but morally this time we've touched the bottom. Now I just want some respect," Pantani said emotionally, before climbing into a car to try to escape the whole scandal that was about to engulf him and change his life forever.
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He was shocked and confused. He had seemingly cracked and was ready to quit the sport but refused to confess to his sins.
It was a huge moment in Italian cycling, a chance for change. If Pantani had told the whole truth about what had happened; about his wildly fluctuating haematocrit, the blood values hidden away in Professor Conconi's clinic, about the EPO abuse in professional cycling in the nineties, he could have set a new course for Italian cycling.
Instead he followed the path of omertà and of denial by suggesting there was a plot, that someone was out to get him, and somehow save the others, because he was too good. It was a denial that is still hurting Italian cycling.
June 5, 1999: a long and dramatic day
A tragic missed chance
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