Those who like their history black and white, with coherent moral conclusions and all loose ends tied up, would do well to avoid looking too closely at the Tour de France in any year, but particularly this year. On Sunday morning, all the contradictions and messiness inherent in the way the Tour treats its past will be raised for the umpteenth time, when the race’s second stage starts in the little Italian seaside town of Cesenatico. This was once the home town of Il Pirata, Marco Pantani, one of the Tour’s biggest stars of the postwar era, banned for using drugs, yet enduringly popular, and still widely loved.
Twenty years after he was found dead in a hotel just up the coast in Rimini, and 26 years after he took the legendary double of Giro and Tour, the Pirate signs with his motif of stylised skull and crossbones will be brandished this weekend as they always are. Fans will throng to his museum and statue, just as they still ride the sportive named after him and turn up to watch the Memorial Marco Pantani race. His is the Tour’s classic cautionary tale, a play in five acts: meteoric rise, hubristic zenith, dramatic downfall, sordid death, blurred legacy.
