On Valentine's Day (Saint Valentine's Day), Saturday, February 14, 2004, Marko Pantani is alone. Hidden in room 5D at the Residence Le Rose hotel in the Italian resort of Rimini, where he had arrived the previous Monday. Hotel guests say he was moody.
Pantani was 34 years old.
He could have been in his prime competitive years; Lance Armstrong, who was a year and a half younger than him, won five previous Tour de France races and will win the next two as well.
But at that moment, three years had already passed since the man whose bandana, shaved head, nose ring and earrings earned the nickname The Pirate was on the front pages (The pirate).
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In his prime, he was a knight and hero of professional cycling.
In the 2000 Tour de France, he went wild because of Armstrong's dominance and his own impotence, so he broke into the front and achieved a stage victory breathing the clean, alpine air of Courchevel.
To this day, it remains the most watched cycling broadcast in the history of Italian television.
During the morning, an increasingly agitated Pantani makes three phone calls with the reception. He complains that people from the next room disturb him, even though that room is empty. He calls the reception for the last time at 11.00 and asks the staff to call the police.
Pantani was built like a classic mountain rider - lean, petite, with sharp features and powerful lungs.
His ability to progress in places where the air is thin earned him victories at both the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France in 1998 - a double feat achieved by only six cyclists in history.
That's how he entered his name in the pantheon of greats along with Faust Kopi, Edi Merckx and Bernard Ino.
However, a lot had changed by that year in 2004. Pantini's body underwent changes, he was 20 kilograms more than his ideal racing weight.
He was still a superstar, but his image, at least for some, was already tarnished.
In 1999, when he had a full five-minute advantage two stages before the end of the Gito d'Italia race, instead of winning, he suffered a breakdown.
The morning before the start of the penultimate stage, the Italian police took him from the hotel where his team was staying.
Laboratory results showed that he was doped.
The members of his team saw off their leader from the hotel terrace with shouts.
Fans blocked the road to protest his exclusion from the race.
"I overcame two big accidents, but this time, from the moral side, we just hit rock bottom," Pantani said at the time.
It was that crossroads that led Pantani to Rimini.
His whole world sank into a darkness from which even he could not rise.
Later that evening, after consulting with the hotel owner, the receptionist went up to room 5D under the pretense of bringing clean towels. He knocked on the door, but there was no answer from the other side. After another conversation with the boss, the receptionist tried one more time. He unlocked the door with a universal key, pushed aside the furniture blocking the door from the inside, and found Marco Pantani lying beside the bed, dead in a pool of his own blood.
He left behind the glory with which he adorned himself in front of the fans who adored him.
Some questions remain.
Because not everyone worshiped Pantani.
Some may have even wished him dead.
Marko Pantani came from an ordinary, working-class family in Cezenatic, on the coast of the Adriatic Sea, about twenty kilometers from Rimini.
As a child, he did not get along well with other children, so his neighbor suggested to Marko's parents that they enroll him in a local cycling club.
This recommendation created one of the greatest mountain riders in the history of the sport.
Pantani was seen as a "breath of fresh air" compared to drivers such as Miguel Indurain and Jan Ulrich who dominated the time trial stages.
Those more romantic fans considered them "winning machines" that were difficult to beat, but also to love.
Pantani was like the antidote - a mountain rider who left his rivals fighting the air during mountain stages.
Whether it was because he loved to eat Nutella, or because he refused to wear a helmet and heart rate monitor, or because of his penchant for singing karaoke when other cyclists were tucked up in bed, Pantani was definitely different.
He was an outsider.
"He wanted to do with the bicycle what the painter did with his brush," said Pantani's biographer, cycling journalist Mat Rendel. in the documentary Pantani: Death of a Pirate, broadcast on BBC Sounds.
He not only enslaved millions of followers with his success, but also with the way he did it.
With his distinctive, dashing style, he climbed up the mountains, hunched over and with his hands on the lower part of the handlebars.
The way he eluded other cyclists, seemingly without a drop of sweat.
The pirate drove without any hesitation - all or nothing, glory or death.
After winning a pivotal stage of the 1998 Giro d'Italia atop the Montecampion, he clarified his own sporting strategy, whatever it was.
"I thought that my tactics would work or I would blow everything.
"I had no choice. I had to see, to determine who was the strongest," He said Pantani.
In the 1994 Tour de France, Pantani broke the record for the fastest ascent of the Alp d'Oise, the mythical ascent to the heavens, along 21 steep serpentines.
In 1995, he again found a way to break that record.
Then in 1997, he fell just four seconds short of his own record.
These three ascents of the Alp d'Oise have never been surpassed by anyone in Tour de France history.
The coronation came a year later.
The tour that was run in 1998 was controversial - the Festina team was officially caught transports illegal drugs to improve the performance of cyclists, so he was thrown out of the race, while the cyclists were arrested.
The peloton went on strike.
The race was in deep trouble and needed a hero.
And there Pantani is, three minutes behind reigning champion Jan Ulrich in the yellow mother.
The day was cold and wet, and Pantani completely turned the race around.
Pantani attacked Ulrich on the Galibia climb, caught up three minutes behind and raced down the mountain, risking almost apocalyptic weather conditions.
In his style, Ulrich rode to safety, believing that Pantani would falter on the final climb.
That didn't happen.
During the telecast, we could see how Pantani made his way through the fog towards the mountain peaks and the finish line of the race.
By the end of the 15th stage, he had built a nine-minute lead over Urlich, whose calculation turned out to be completely wrong.
Pantani's gamble paid off.
Now he wore the yellow shirt, all the way to Paris.
Although it didn't seem like it at the time, 1998 was the pinnacle of a career that suddenly and precipitously began to collapse 10 months later.
Pantani dominated the 1999 Giro and looked certain to win just two stages before the end, when he was eliminated from the race.
The rest of the caravan - the drivers, the media and the tifos (the most ardent Italian fans) - were in shock.
The pirate was not allowed to be crowned in front of the Italian audience.
His hematocrit level was two percentage points above the 50 percent limit that - in the absence of a reliable test to detect the banned drug erythropoietin (EPO) - was imposed for the health of cyclists.
Some cyclists who would fail this test simply accepted the fines and bans that they understood as a professional risk and continued with their careers after serving the fine.
Others, like Scotland's David Millar, would became advocates of clean cycling.
But for Pantani, who was only temporarily removed from the sport because he failed a "health test", this was the beginning of the end.
Those who were close to him say that it was then that he began using cocaine regularly.
Indurain is addressing after Pantani's death in 2004, summed up the next five years in his life with two simple sentences:
"When the results of the hematocrit test arrived, he was suspended for only 15 days, but it complicated his life so much that he was never able to recover. He was never the same."
Although he retained much of his popularity with fans, Pantani found himself in constant conflict with officials - the governing body of cycling organizations and the Italian government.
He became paranoid, convinced that he was the victim of unfair targeting in the process of cycling trying to become a clean sport.
He began to be treated in clinics for drug withdrawal and treatment of depression, and in October 2003 he was released to the fans. said that they could "forget about Pantani the athlete".
While on vacation in Cuba, Pantani scrawled his own passport.
"The champion I was no longer exists," Pantani wrote.
"He is far from the man I have become now. If the fans continue to support me, it's not because of affection, but because of my reputation."
"They humiliated me for no reason. I visited the courts for four years. Rules - yes, but the same for everyone".
Four months later he was dead, and these words reached the public when his passport was found in the hotel room.
The news of his death made headlines.
At the funeral, his mother Tonina accused the journalists who were present and loudly addressed them: "You should be ashamed of my son's death." What are you doing here?"
More than 20.000 people gathered in the streets of Cezenatic as his coffin passed on the way to the church.
Initially, the investigation showed that the cause of death was an accidental overdose of cocaine.
But that was not the final verdict on his death.
A second investigation was launched in 2016 after Pantani's family alleged that a group of people had beaten him, forced him to inject cocaine, and then killed him.
The court rejected this theory saying that it is a "fanciful assumption".
But in November 2021, it was sensationally announced that Italian authorities were re-opening an investigation, the third in total, into the circumstances leading up to Pantani's death - his disqualification from the 1999 race, five years before he was found dead.
The focus of this investigation was on the involvement of the mafia in the whole case.
The investigation was triggered by two new, almost accidentally discovered pieces of evidence.
"Completely unrelated to Pantani's case, in 2016 the police, by wiretapping two men, learned that the Camorra, a Neapolitan mafia, was involved in Pantani's death," investigative journalist Lorenzo Bodrero told the documentary. Pantani: Death of a Pirate.
Rumors of mafia involvement in Pantani's death - and its alleged connection to the large sums of money organized crime would have lost if he had won the Giro in 1999 - have persisted for years.
And then the police came across evidence that seemed to support such a theory.
There was also the testimony of Fabio Miradosa, a dealer who procured drugs for Pantani until the end of his life and who knew him well.
"It was his supplier, the one who sold him cocaine," Bodrero explained.
"He was convinced that Marko did not die of natural causes. Miradosa said that Pantani used cocaine, but that he was not the type of user who would be killed by it after just a few days."
As for the positive blood test at the 1999 Giro, a notorious criminal claimed that his Mafia contact had predicted the race's dramatic finish.
"If you have money, bet against Pantani because he will not reach the goal in Milan," was the alleged advice.
Matt Randell, Pantani's biographer, was always suspicious of mob involvement.
"If Kamora wants to set something up, she will in any case not contact the employees of the hematology department at the hospital in Como," he told BBC Sounds.
"It's not theirs modus operandi. They are generally a bit more raw when it comes to things like this".
But the government commission that dealt with the activities of the mafia, was not sure about that.
"Today, after so much time, the possibility that the mafia influenced the test results is still open," said Nikola Mora, the president of the Parliamentary Commission for the Fight against the Mafia in December.
The commission found "several serious" anomalies in connection with the blood sample taken during the 1999 Giro.
They discovered that the tube containing Pantani's blood sample was labeled with his name, even though the rules dictate that the anonymity of the driver whose test is taken be respected.
The test tube had to contain only an identification number that would be known only to selected officials.
The commission also found that Pantani's blood sample was taken an hour earlier than it was determined during the previous procedure, which created another window of time during which he could be manipulated.
"After precisely determining the time of taking the blood sample from Marco Pantani at 7.46:XNUMX, it was determined that it was possible to manipulate that sample," she concluded commission.
Of course, it was also possible that the test result was a consequence of Pantani's actions.
And that the tests really revealed a doped athlete.
Christophe Bassons, a French professional cyclist who insisted on a clean sport, estimates that 95 percent of runners used EPO at the time.
As the technology for detecting erythropoietin developed, his claim became more and more realistic, considering that urine samples from the 1998 and 1999 Tour de France races were subsequently tested.
Thus, it was established that the code 18 drivers found erythropoietin - Pantani was among them - and that the results of another 12 cyclists were marked as "suspicious".
However, some of the cyclists of that time were skilled in handling blood tests for hematocrit, so they managed to stay within the prescribed limits by avoiding control and introducing EPO at precisely determined time intervals.
It's hard to say that Pantani was completely clean, but it seems that on the day he was escorted out of the hotel, and therefore out of the Giro, he felt he had cheated no more than any of his rivals.
His mother says that Pantani also left some notes that confirm this.
"He didn't write that he didn't take anything, he never wrote that," she told BBC Sounds.
"He said he was doing what he was allowed to do, but he never said he didn't take anything. That day he said he felt fine."
The injustice suffered, because of which he could not defend the title in front of his fans, was probably the beginning of his sudden return to cocaine addiction and isolation.
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There are other anomalies regarding the circumstances of his death that have never been fully explained.
According to Professor Giuseppe Fortuna, who taught forensic medicine at the University of Bologna at the time, a dose of cocaine six times higher than the lethal dose was found in Pantani's body - an amount that is impossible to ingest if you use cocaine recreationally.
Fortuni was the pathologist who conducted the forensic tests in Pantani's case.
Suicide was ruled out as the cause of Pantani's death at the time - the coroner believed Pantani would have used the prescribed medication he had on him at the time.
Although Miradosa, Pantani's dealer, may not have been the most reliable witness, he did have doubts about the circumstances under which Pantani's body was found.
"I am convinced that Marko was killed. He was trying to get to the truth. He was looking for something," he told the Parliamentary Commission for the Fight against the Mafia.
"From my experience, but also based on the photos and videos I watched, Marko did not consume drugs in that room.
"There were no paraphernalia for smoking cocaine in the room, and that was the way Pantani consumed cocaine. But that's why cocaine was on certain parts of his body that suggest he snorted it.
"Marko did not snort cocaine, and those who were at the scene of the crime were not aware of that fact," concludes Miradosa.
Tonina Pantani was persistent in her demands for a new investigation into her son's death.
"I am convinced that Marko did not die in that place. There are too many different things, strange things. It wasn't his habits," she told BBC Sounds.
"He used to fall asleep in front of the TV. In that hotel, the TV was in the living room. I'm sure he wouldn't have fallen asleep above (on the mezzanine within the hotel room with the bed he was found in), but down there.
"Upstairs, everything was in order, there was no mess. But that's why there was chaos down there. The room was completely ransacked. I asked the hotel manager if I needed to pay for the damage, but he told me: 'No ma'am, nothing was broken, everything was just messed around'. What the hell were they looking for anyway?"
"I saw Marko in the coffin. I touched him, his hands. How could he make such a mess without even a scratch on his hands. He had scratches on his face. I wonder if he was beaten before he died."
Tonina also claimed that her son's baseball cap was missing, while two jackets that did not belong to him were also found in the room.
There are more details.
A 2007 book claimed that two aluminum containers found at the site were actually containers containing Chinese food - which Pantani hated.
Another entrance to the hotel was reportedly not covered by cameras, raising the question of whether anyone could have entered and exited the hotel undetected. Residence Le Rose.
A certain amount of his money - some say 20.000, others 12.000 euros - was not found in Pantani's room.
Any of these details could be crucial in shedding light on what happened in Room 5D.
And they could represent a dead end.
There are also other, comparative explanations.
Could Pantani, paranoid and drugged, dismantle the entire room by himself?
During a vacation in Cuba, a year before, he broke all the furniture under the influence of cocaine.
John Foote, a professor of modern Italian history at the University of Bristol, is among those who are skeptical about the doubts about Pantani's death and the original verdict.
"I'm quite sad that this case is being reopened," he told BBC Sounds.
"For me, this is a classic case of excessive cocaine ingestion, and the evidence is quite strong.
"I thought, well, we're going down a dead end again and he won't have peace again.
"They will dig into this story again, and there was nothing special".
The latest investigation into Pantani's death tries to separate theories from reality.
It still takes place behind closed doors in Rimini.
It is not known when the results of this investigation will be published.
It is very likely that no one, except Marco Pantani himself, will ever know what really happened in that hotel room in Rimini.
The truth is probably buried with this man, but the legend lives on.
"An exceptional guy; he didn't breathe, he didn't sweat, he didn't panic. "He never tried, but he probably could fly," Rendell recalled.
"And what could he have been in another world, another life?
"The life he led and the sport he competed in at that time prevented us from getting an answer to that question."
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