Description
Book SynopsisThe intimate biography of the charismatic Tour de France winner Marco Pantani, now updated to include the 2014 and 2015 investigation into Pantani''s death.
National Sporting Club Book of the Year
Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award
''An exhaustively detailed and beautiful book . . . a fitting, ambivalent tribute - to the man, and to the dark heart of the sport he loved'' Independent
On Valentine''s day 2004, Marco Pantani was found dead in a cheap hotel. It defied belief: Pantani, having won the rare double of the Giro d''Italia and the Tour de France in 1998, was regarded as the only cyclist capable of challenging Lance Armstrong''s dominance. Only later did it emerge that Pantani had been addicted to cocaine since 1999.
Drawing on his personal encounters with Pantani, as well as exclusive access to his psychoanalysts, and interviews with his family and friends, Matt Rendell has prod
Trade Review
[Rendell's] not inconsiderable acheivement is to convey the sordid reality of the Tour while simultaneously adding to one's yearning for its lost idealism - THE TIMES
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 - NEW STATESMAN
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 - OBSERVER SPORTS MONTHLY
An account of a journey into the depths of drugs in sport (and drugs in life) becomes a parable of modern sport and celebrity - SUNDAY TIMES
