The absence of the Giro d’Italia encourages one to look back over Mays past to fill the void, and few editions draw the eye quite like 1998.
As if to make certain, the YouTube algorithm directs you straight there. Reel after reel of grainy VHS tape has been lovingly digitised and uploaded to a very modern form of reliquary. Hour upon hour of pirated RAI television coverage marks the various mysteries – glorious, joyful, luminous, sorrowful – of Marco Pantani’s lone Giro victory.
To watch the tapes again now is to prise open a time capsule from an age of innocence (or maybe simply ignorance.) The 1998 Giro was the final Grand Tour of that prelapsarian time before the Festina Affair. Back then, a cycling fan could open a magazine and read a feature about a new wonder drug called EPO without making the obvious connection between that elixir and the performances of the rider on the cover. Once Willy Voet was stopped by customs agents somewhere near Neuville-en-Ferrain, that cognitive dissonance could no longer be reconciled.
All of that was still in the future in that scented May of 1998, when the central planks of the Pantani myth were being laid down. His bard was the late RAI commentator Adriano De Zan, and it’s his rasping voice that drags us back in some 22 years later, opening each broadcast in media res with the same inverted salutation to his audience: ‘Gentili signore e signori, buongiorno…’
De Zan, who started in the Giro commentary booth back in 1955, was approaching the end of his career – he would cover two more editions before his death in 2001 – and there is an almost Homeric quality to his performance. At times, it is not so much television commentary as the recitation of an oral poet, each word enunciated to a point where the consonants seem to be stretched across three syllables. ‘Altrrro scccatto di Pppannntttannni.’
On occasion, in his excitement, De Zan mangles a name or loses track of a time gap, and his co-commentator Davide Cassani fussily interjects with a correction. But Cassani misses the point. The blind poet sees with perfect clarity. The minutiae of a bike race are measured in seconds won and lost, but its epic dimensions are measured in grand gestures.
The hero of De Zan’s verse is Pantani, but his odyssey around the peninsula is punctuated by encounters with adversaries who enjoy their own periods of aristeia. Michele Bartoli is the antagonist in the early jousts down the Tyrrhenian coast, before Alex Zülle emerges with real menace at Lago Laceno. The Swiss rider’s air of invulnerability seems total in the Trieste time trial, but then the Marmolada exposes a heel, and his challenge is abruptly cut down.
In the dying days, the final trial is provided by Pavel Tonkov, Pantani’s apparent opposite. Expressionless of face and heavy of pedal stroke, Tonkov is the perfect foil. De Zan is a blatant homer, but while he makes little secret of the fact that he is cheering on Pantani, he is never so crass as to root against the opposition. On that interminable, decisive mountaintop finish at Montecampione, De Zan erupts instinctively – ‘Attenzione, attenzione!’ – when Pantani finally shakes off Tonkov, but he catches himself moments later: ‘Chapeau to Tonkov, who didn’t shy away from this head-to-head contest.’
He always makes a point, too, of singling out for a mention those minor characters he deems to have fought particularly well, like Daniele De Paoli, who emerges from obscurity to finish a still-eclipsed 8th overall. But the narrative is always anchored around Pantani, doomed by the cycling gods to a succession of misfortunes on the Giro but now, finally, unbound to fulfil his destiny.
When Pantani crosses the line in the Lugano time trial to seal the Giro, De Zan’s voice crackles all over again and he wonders if there’s any reason why the little man can’t win the Tour de France too. Why not indeed?
22 years on, it’s hard to watch the 1998 Giro without a grim sense of dramatic irony. We know how the story ends, and it isn’t with Pantani in pink or even with Pantani in yellow. We know from Willy Voet the dark explanation behind Zülle’s final week collapse. We know from Operacion Puerto, the San Remo blitz and other inquiries that many of the epic’s other protagonists carried grim secrets of their own. We know that Marco Pantani lies in a crypt in the cemetery in Cesenatico, dead at 34 years of age from a cocaine overdose.
For a teenager in north Cork without satellite television, the 1998 Giro was a race more imagined than witnessed. It might as well have been the Trojan War. A 30-second highlight package – a glimpse, nothing more – on a late-night news bulletin provided a daily ration until the next issue of Cycling Weekly filled in some of the gaps. Plenty more have been filled in since.
By all logic, that additional knowledge should have divested the 1998 Giro d’Italia of any appeal. In a race awash with EPO, cheats and their enablers prospered. Nothing to celebrate, at least not in the disingenuous way that RCS Sport now does, by designating a ‘Montagna Pantani’ on each year’s Giro route, thereby celebrating the myth of the climber while blithely ignoring the part the culture of professional cycling played in his senselessly premature death.
The RCS marketing team misses the point. The human being, in all his imperfection, was always more compelling than some sanitised version of his legend. When the illusion of Pantani the bike rider was dispelled at Madonna di Campiglio a year later, we still found ourselves rooting for Pantani the man. The stakes were much higher in the real world. Where once we had willed him to drop Tonkov, now we hoped against hope that he might escape the demons that were tearing his life apart. He never did.
And yet, despite everything, it’s still impossible to look away when the 1998 Giro comes on the screen. Between the riot of colours, the steep hairpins, the painted messages on the road, the hand-to-hand combat, and the timbre of De Zan’s voice, it always demands your full attention. It sucks you back in. The feeling provoked is neither of nostalgia nor of derision. It’s a lot more ambiguous than that. That’s the thing about the epic poems. They mean something different every time you go back to them.