by Carol McGann
Before the race started it was announced that two riders had hematocrits over 50 percent: Nicola Miceli, who had been sitting in fifth and Pantani teammate Riccardo Forconi.
Tonkov’s start was nearly perfect. If his stiff climbing style made one wince, his time trialing was perfection. Two minutes later Pantani roared out of the start house looking all aggression and taking crazy chances on the corners. The first time check was a shock. Pantani was ahead by two seconds.
The result was a stunner. Time trial specialist Serguei Gontchar won, but Pantani was third, only 30 seconds behind. Tonkov was fifth, 5 seconds slower than the remarkable Pirate.
Pantani had been getting stronger with every passing day and now was capable of taking on the big power men on their own turf. Pantani won the Giro by relentlessly applying pressure at every opportunity. It was a performance that can only be described as incredible, it being rare that a small man can summon up the absolute horsepower needed to drive his bike through the wind as fast as the bigger powerhouses.
Italy was insane with joy over a man they loved for his courage in adversity and his swashbuckling, fearless racing style. There was no Binda-Guerra, Coppi-Bartali or Moser-Saronni duel to divide Italy’s loyalty, Pantani had the passionate love of the tifosi all to himself. This was a long-delayed fulfillment of the promise Pantani had shown when he won the Girobio in 1992.
Final 1998 Giro d’Italia General Classification: 1. Marco Pantani (Mercatone Uno-Bianchi): 98 hours 48 minutes 32 seconds
2. Pavel Tonkov (Mapei-Bricobi) @ 1 minute 33 seconds
3. Giuseppe Guerini (Polti) @ 6 minutes 51 seconds
4. Oskar Camenzind (Mapei-Bricobi) @ 12 minutes 16 seconds
5. Daniel Clavero (Vitalicio Seguros) @ 18 minutes 4 seconds
Climbers’ Competition: 1. Marco Pantani (Mercatone Uno-Bianchi): 89 points
2. José Jaime González (Kelme-Costa Blanca): 62
3. Pavel Tonkov (Mapei-Bricobi): 49
Points Competition: 1. Mariano Piccoli (Brescialat-Liquigas): 194 points
2. Marco Pantani (Mercatone Uno-Bianchi): 158
3. Gian Matteo Fagnini (Saeco-Cannondale): 156
As soon as the Giro was over, Pantani started to talk of riding the Tour de France. The events of the 1998 Tour traumatized professional cycling for years. The story was told in detail in the second volume of our The Story of the Tour de France, but a summary is necessary to understand many of the events in later Giri.
Doping was and is a part of the sport and while you may not be able to dope a donkey into being a thoroughbred, with modern drugs you can make a damn fast donkey. As we proceed through the sordid story of the 1998 Tour and later the 2001 Giro, the actions of the riders to protect themselves and their doping speak volumes.
On his way to the start of the 1998 Tour in Dublin, Ireland, Festina (Zülle’s team) soigneur Willy Voet was stopped by customs agents as he crossed from Belgium into France. Among the items found in Voet’s car were 234 doses of EPO, testosterone, amphetamines and other drugs that could have only one purpose, to illegally improve the performance of the riders on the Festina team. Bruno Roussel, the team director, expressed his astonishment at the facts surrounding Voet’s arrest.
Later, the police raided the Festina team warehouse and found still more drugs, including bottles labeled with specific riders’ names. Roussel said he was mystified by these findings and promised to hire a lawyer to deal with all of the defamatory things that had been written and said about the team.
Still in police custody, Voet began to sing, claiming that he had been acting on instructions from the Festina team management. Roussel said he was “shocked” at these statements.
Roussel and Festina team doctor Eric Rijckaert were taken into custody. While all of this was going on, the Tour de France was entering its sixth stage and Tour boss Jean-Marie Leblanc said that so far, the actions of the Festina team had not constituted an infraction of Tour rules and the occurrences outside of the Tour were not the Tour’s concern.
On July 15, one of the most important events in the fight against drugs in sport occurred. Roussel admitted that the Festina team had systematized its doping. His excuse was that since the riders were doping themselves, often with terribly dangerous substances like perfluorocarbon (Swiss rider Mauro Gianetti had nearly died during the 1998 Tour of Romandie after allegedly using the synthetic hemoglobin), it was safer to have the doping performed under the supervision of the team’s staff. That was too much and the team was booted from the Tour.
Yet, almost as a metaphor of how the pros handled irrefutable facts regarding their doping, Festina team members Richard Virenque and Laurent Brochard called a news conference to assert their innocence and vowed to continue riding in the Tour. A day later they relented and the team, including Zülle, withdrew from the Tour.
The Tour’s next act showed how completely everyone was willing to look the other way when they passed the train wreck of the Festina mess. Fifty-five riders were subjected to blood tests and none was found to have illegal substances in his system. The Tour then declared that this meant that the problem was confined to a few bad apples. What it really meant was that for decades the riders and their doctors had learned to dope so that drugs didn’t show up in the tests. And, in 1998 there was no test for EPO or human growth hormone. The team doctors protested that the Festina affair was bringing disrepute upon other teams and their professions. The fans hated to see their beloved riders singled out and thought that Festina was getting unfair treatment.
Back in March, a car belonging to the TVM team had been found to contain a large supply of drugs. That case was reopened. A few days later Roussel accepted responsibility for the systematic doping within the Festina team.
On July 24, the day of Tour stage twelve, more Festina riders and staff were arrested and the first TVM arrest occurred.
So how did the riders handle this? They became indignant. They were furious that the Festina riders had, like any other arrestees, been forced to strip in a French jail and were fuming that so much attention was focused on the ever-widening doping scandal instead of the race. On July 29, stage seventeen, the riders staged a strike. They started the stage slowly and sat down by their bikes at the site of the first intermediate sprint, Pantani being one of the strike’s leaders. After some talk with officials, they rode slowly to the finish with several TVM riders at the front holding hands, making the solidarity of the peloton clear.
There were more arrests. Several teams, including all four Spanish squads, were feeling the heat and quit the Tour. It was thought that the Festina scandal might just ruin the Tour. It didn’t. It didn’t ruin the Tour because Marco Pantani electrified the world with a fabulous performance that took a lot of the attention away from the doping scandal.
1997 Tour winner Jan Ullrich had allowed himself to become disgracefully deconditioned over the winter. With the arrival of the hard mountains in the later stages, Pantani put on a magnificent one-man show, ultimately beating Ullrich by 3 minutes 21 seconds and becoming the first Italian to win the Tour since Gimondi in 1965. He became the seventh man to do the Giro/Tour double, joining Coppi, Anquetil, Merckx, Hinault, Roche and Induráin. Pantani had gained renown and was one of the world’s greatest sports celebrities.
Italy, no, the entire world went absolutely crazy over Pantani. On local club rides, cyclists would climb Pantani style, in the saddle, hands on the drops. Pantani now had fame and more money than he could spend.
1999. Starting in Agrigento in Sicily, the 1999 Giro route made its way north, mostly on the Adriatic side. When it hit Le Marche, the race headed west for a trip into the Alps, then east across Italy into the Dolomites for the final drama in the high mountains. The drama in the high Dolomites did decide the race, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves. The race was made for climbers. Or perhaps, a climber. The most popular
sportsman in Italy, by a wide margin, was Marco Pantani and a second Giro win for the Pirate would send the tifosi into delirium. With five hilltop finishes and a large serving of mountains, it looked like Pantani’s race to lose. His spring looked good with a win in the Vuelta a Murcia and a third place in the Giro del Trentino.
The problems uncovered by the Festina scandal remained unresolved and two riders with hematocrits over 50 percent were not allowed to start.
The first day’s racing under the hot Sicilian sun was slow. Ivan Quaranta took the first stage with some smart sprinting, becoming the first Pink Jersey. Cipollini won the second stage and the lead, followed by Jeroen Blijlevens doing the same in the third stage.
After a trip up the instep of the Italian boot, the Giro hit its first hilltop finish in stage five. José “Chepe” González, Andrea Peron and Danilo Di Luca were able to escape early in the ascent of Monte Sirino. Zülle, back to racing after serving his suspension because of his part in the Festina affair, was driving the pack, trying to close the gap.
During the last five kilometers of the climb, Di Luca and González took turns attacking each other, really hard, resulting in Peron’s dispatch. Close to the top González dropped Di Luca and took the stage win. Laurent Jalabert and Pantani, leading the first chase group, just made contact with Di Luca at the line. With the first hint of who was here to race, the General Classification had taken this shape:
1. Laurent Jalabert
2. Danilo Di Luca @ 7 seconds
3. Davide Rebellin @ 14 seconds
4. Paolo Savoldelli @ 16 seconds
5. Marco Pantani @ same time
In fact, Pantani was feeling super. Pantani and his team took advantage of the windy weather by making an attack that split the field so badly that half the peloton never regained contact. Excellent riders like Pascal Richard, Richard Virenque and Roberto Heras were caught napping and lost anywhere from two and a half to over seven minutes.
The next morning, the Italian Olympic Committee (CONI) sent technicians to make unannounced blood and urine tests on riders of three teams. As usual, the riders screamed bloody murder, complaining about “unhygienic” conditions. Perhaps the riders feared a competent authority performing the tests rather than the toothless UCI. Pantani led the usual call for a strike that was silenced by the team directors who said that CONI was within its rights. Further angering the rest of the peloton, the owner of the Mapei team said his team was happy to work with CONI. The other riders were so incensed they reduced Mapei team member Andrea Tafi, one of the finest riders of his time, to tears with their taunts and insults. Two of the riders tested in the CONI blitz were positive for dope. From inside their doping-culture bubble, the riders couldn’t see how sick their attitude was.
Pantani, Jalabert, Cipollini, and Oscar Camenzind held a press conference and said that if the CONI intruded any further upon the testing regimen, which heretofore had been the responsibility of the UCI, they would stop racing. Camenzind tested positive for EPO in 2004 and retired after receiving a two-year suspension.
The stage eight ascent to a hilltop finish at Gran Sasso in Abruzzo was ridden in near freezing rain. Once on the climb, Pantani’s team drove hard, catching all of the early breakaways. Not content with dropping Pink Jersey Jalabert and most of the rest of the peloton, Pantani put his hands on the drops and headed for the sky. He didn’t jump hard. He just got out of the saddle and rode the peloton off his wheel. The last man on Pantani’s wheel was Ivan Gotti, who looked perfectly miserable.
As he climbed, Pantani looked back at Gotti and yelled at him to pull through, but Gotti was suffering all the tortures of Hell just hanging on, and taking a pull with Pantani while he was in full flight was probably beyond any rider in the world. Finally Gotti did go to the front and the pair predictably slowed. Enough of that! Pantani shot away and, clearly not sparing the watts, put lots of time between himself and everyone else.
Pantani came in alone, and to the joy of his ecstatic fans, became the leader of the 1999 Giro d’Italia. Scattered behind him, anywhere from a half to a full minute, were the other Giro hopefuls: José Maria Jiménez, Gotti, Dario Frigo and Alex Zülle.
The General Classification stood thus: 1. Marco Pantani
2. José Maria Jiménez @ 38 seconds
3. Ivan Gotti @ 45 seconds
4. Dario Frigo @ 54 seconds
5. Laurent Jalabert @ 55 seconds
Jalabert, a former time trial world champion, won the 31-kilometer time trial at Ancona in Le Marche. Pantani also blistered the course, coming in third, only 55 seconds slower than the Frenchman. Jalabert took back the lead, being ahead of Pantani by one-tenth of a second.
This extraordinary time-trial ride of Pantani’s began setting off bells and whistles among the more clear-eyed racing fans. Pantani, a light, small racer, weighed only 125 pounds (57 kilograms). His climbing was remarkable because his power relative to his weight was astonishing. But to continue to believe this small man could naturally generate sufficient wattage to drive his bike fast enough in time trials to challenge the larger, heavier chrono specialists required a suspension of rational doubt.
The next day CONI officials showed up to perform more blood tests on riders. UCI boss Hein Verbruggen had earlier told the riders they didn’t have to submit to the tests. Only riders from the Mapei team gave samples. Gotti, among others refused.
At Cesenatico, Pantani’s hometown, the Giro finished stage eleven and started stage twelve. The only change to the standings was that Jalabert won an intermediate sprint and now had a four-second lead on Pantani.
The UCI performed blood tests and found nothing amiss. But La Gazzetta knew about the “surprise” tests in advance and published the names of teams who would be tested. The riders and their handlers knew how to reduce a rider’s hematocrit in advance of a test. They would take saline solution injections along with aspirin and in no time the hematocrit was within the legal limit.
Stage thirteen came before the only rest day, taking the Giro over the Apennines to Rapallo on the Ligurian coast. Even though the roads were tough, there was no change to the top of the leader board. Jalabert hung on to his Pink Jersey by just four seconds, saying he knew he’d have to give up the lead when the Giro faced the first real day in the mountains.
Jalabert didn’t have to wait long for the roads to rise. The first stage when the racing resumed was into the Piedmontese Alps. Paolo Savoldelli, soon to be nicknamed Il Falco Bergamasco (“The Falcon of Bergamo, his hometown), took off on the final climb, the Madonna del Coletto, and then used his breathtaking descending skills to carve a path ahead of everyone else to Borgo San Dalmazzo. Just behind him, the trio of Pantani, Daniel Clavero and Gotti arrived. Pantani was again the maglia rosa.
Pantani was looking like the boss of this Giro: 1. Marco Pantani
2. Paolo Savoldelli @ 53 seconds
3. Ivan Gotti @ 1 minute 21 seconds
4. Daniel Clavero @ 1 minute 22 seconds
5. Laurent Jalabert @ 1 minute 45 seconds
Set ’em up and I’ll knock ’em down. That seemed to be Pantani’s motto when he destroyed the peloton on the climb to Oropa, a 1,180-meter-high mountain west of Milan. Hoping for a stage win, Jalabert had gone early with Roberto Heras and Nicola Miceli. His fellow breakaways weren’t going fast enough, so Jalabert dropped them. Eight kilometers from the summit, Pantani looked to have a jammed chain. He was an excellent mechanic and without any sign of panic, performed the repair himself.
While he was stopped, attacks started going off the front, the pace of the race at that point being white hot. Savoldelli tried to orchestrate a fair play slowdown rather than take advantage of Pantani’s mechanical. Pantani’s teammates waited for their leader and pulled him up to the peloton. Pantani relentlessly made his way through the scattered riders, even blowing by Roberto Heras, a fine climber. Now only Jalabert w
as away and with three kilometers to go, Pantani overtook him, winning the stage by 21 seconds.
The General Classification now: 1. Marco Pantani
2. Paolo Savoldelli @ 1 minute 54 seconds
3. Laurent Jalabert @ 2 minutes 10 seconds
4. Ivan Gotti @ 2 minutes 11 seconds
5. Daniel Clavero @ 2 minutes 12 seconds
There were four important stages left: the stage eighteen time trial followed by three high mountain stages in the Dolomites. Jalabert said he hoped to regain the lead in the time trial but felt he was really racing for second place because Pantani would take so much time out of him in the remaining mountain stages.
Jalabert couldn’t do it. He was only able to pull 57 seconds out of the Pirate. Savoldelli, however, turned in a wonderful ride, coming in second to Gontchar and beating Jalabert by 24 seconds. That left Pantani the leader by 44 seconds over Savoldelli and 69 seconds over Jalabert. Tight race.
From here on there would be no good news for Jalabert. The next stage ended at the top of Alpe di Pampeago, eight kilometers of ten-percent gradient with a stretch that tilts to sixteen percent. On the penultimate climb, Passo Manghen, Pantani had his men turn the screws and at the crest of the Manghen there were only twelve left in the maglia rosa group. Savoldelli tried a suicide descent but couldn’t get enough time to distance himself once the Pampeago ascent began. Midway up the Pampeago, Jalabert was dropped. Gotti looked awful while Gilberto Simoni looked cool and at the front, Stefano Garzelli was doing yeoman’s work for the teammate on his wheel, Pantani.
About four kilometers from the summit, Heras attacked and drew Pantani. Pantani waited a few seconds before countering with a display of climbing power that was simply unbelievable, showing that no one could climb a mountain on a bike like he could. Gilberto Simoni was the first chaser in at 67 seconds, his ride confirming his promise as a coming talent in Grand Tour racing.
