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Marco Pantani (†34) was affectionately called ‘Il Pirata’ by Italian cycling fans. Pirate because he often wore a headscarf during his illustrious career. The nickname also fits the controversies in his life. To this day, the question remains whether the professional cyclist who was found dead on Valentine’s Day 2004 with a cocaine overdose actually committed suicide.
His mother is determined to find the truth. After Maroc’s death, Tonina Pantani invested her money in private investigators and lawyers to seek justice. She can’t believe that her son suffered from depression due to his wild career, resorted to hard drugs and eventually fell apart.
Giro exclusion as a career break
For Mama Pantani, Marco was always the gifted athlete who had and still has Italy at his feet. The cycling star who last achieved the double victory of the Tour de France and the Giro in 1998. Who impressed with achievements such as his record climb to the Alp d’Huez: Pantani needed only 36:50 minutes to conquer the legendary mountain. This period, dating back to 1995, remains untouched to this day.
But Pantani was the controversial character who adamantly claimed not to dope – until he was convicted. His Tour victory has been tainted by the fact that it took place in the year of the Festina scandal, when an entire team was banned from the Tour de France for doping.
In 1999, Pantani crushed his opponents during the Giro. When it turned out that he had too many red blood cells – an indication of the widespread EPO doping at the time – he was excluded. The break in Pantani’s career and the origin of one of the two theories that his death in 2004 was not a suicide.
Will the procedure be stopped soon?
Because the Neapolitan mafia would have bet a lot of money on Pantani’s victory in the Giro d’Italia in 1999, a common theory claims that his blood values were falsified. Today there is little doubt that Pantani was doping. Nevertheless, the death was re-investigated in 2014. In 2017, the procedure was stopped because the suspicion of murder was not substantiated.
The case was reopened again in 2021. In addition to connections with the Camorra, information from the Pantani family also played a role in a new investigation. But Mama Pantani apparently doesn’t believe in the mafia theory after all. Her assumption is that her son was silenced because he knew too much about doping practices in cycling. The cocaine overdose was given to him.
However, media reports in Italy say the latest investigations have not yielded any additional information about what happened in a hotel room in Rimini on February 14.
Source : Blick
I’m Emma Jack, a news website author at 24 News Reporters. I have been in the industry for over five years and it has been an incredible journey so far. I specialize in sports reporting and am highly knowledgeable about the latest trends and developments in this field.
