Pantani Expulsion Heralds Dark Days (1999–2007)
The 1999 Giro should have been a formality for Marco Pantani; he could have won it comfortably riding well within himself and saved his main efforts for the Tour and a rare double-double. Instead he seemed intent on embellishing his reputation with a series of stellar performances that were adored by the tifosi but rather alarmed officialdom generally and the UCI dope controllers in particular. They finally swooped on the morning of stage 21, which started in Madonna di Campiglio, and tested Pantani. His haematocrit level was recorded at 53 per cent, which led to his summary and controversial expulsion from the race, a decision that ultimately sounded the death knell for Pantani’s career and sent him into a mental decline that, arguably, contributed to his death from an apparent cocaine overdose five years later. The circumstances of these blood tests and expulsion from the race have become a cause célèbre and possibly the most discussed and debated controversy in Giro history. And that debate seems as ‘live’ today as it ever was.
When Pantani woke up on the morning of that stage 21 there was no bigger sports star and celebrity in Italy. After the tough years of crashes and rehabilitation he was about to win his third Grand Tour on the bounce and financially the big time awaited. There was no hotter property but by lunchtime he was being bundled into the back of a car and driven off in disgrace. For a while the fans continued to believe and support him but the wider cycling world grew angry at being taken for fools. Up until stage 21 Pantani had been unstoppable as he reeled off four mountain stage wins of increasing brilliance – Gran Sasso d’Italia, Santuario di Oropa, Alpe di Pampeago and Madonna di Campiglio – which more than compensated for the time he lost to Laurent Jalabert and Serhiy Honchar in the two time trials. After crossing the line alone at Madonna di Campiglio he was over 5 and a half minutes up on second-place Paolo Savoldelli with just two stages left. Stage 21 was admittedly the Tappone but climbs such as the Gavia, Passo del Mortirolo and Valico di Santa Cristina would surely only underline his superiority and see his lead grow to even bigger, more legendary proportions.
The atmosphere was, however, a little tense after that stage win at Madonna di Campiglio and Pantani was the target, now open to both scepticism and criticism. The scepticism was beginning to mount because his day-on-day brilliance and effortless powers of recovery were testing the limits of credibility. The direct criticism, meanwhile, came from those who, although accepting his dominance, felt he and his team were stifling the race and that Pantani didn’t have to contest every stage victory to comfortably take the title. In the 20 stages up to this point not one breakaway had prevailed, which was killing the Giro as a spectacle. Pantani was becoming like Eddy Merckx in his absolute need to win everything. Certainly at the press conference that evening after stage 20 he felt the need to defend himself a little: ‘I hadn’t planned to attack today but Simoni had a go and then Jalabert and I ended up on Jaja’s wheel. I am not a rider who should be on Jalabert’s wheel in the mountains so I left. And when I was on my own I felt even better, I was in a state of grace. We didn’t light the fuse. It would have suited me to let the breakaway go. The others brought it back. When Simoni and Jalabert attacked it seemed right to take up the challenge.’
Pantani headed for his team hotel – the Hotel Touring in Madonna di Campiglio – while across the road the UCI medical team checked into the Hotel Majestic. Just about everybody saw them and as a result Mercatone Uno and the other teams staying at the Hotel Touring will have known what was coming their way the following morning. Later that evening Pantani, apparently unconcerned, was seen in the restaurant dining with Gazzetta sports editor Claudio Cannano. Or, rather, Cannano was dining, Pantani was contenting himself with a meagre rice dish. That evening he had already, it later emerged, tested his haematocrit levels with a simple centrifuge testing device which recorded a permissible level of 48.6 per cent. It was nonetheless a pretty high figure for the third week of a Grand Tour, when the level should have been plummeting, and some might well wonder why a ‘clean’ rider would ever own a centrifuge with which to conduct his own daily tests in the first place. Pantani’s own figure, it should be noted, was also higher than the one previous official spot test he had undergone during the Giro, on the morning of stage 12 well over a week earlier when he recorded 47.4 per cent.
The following morning Pantani was called to give a sample at the comparatively late time of 7.25 with the rider required to appear under UCI protocol ten minutes later. In the event he wasn’t tested until 7.46 a.m. Pantani was tested with three UCI doctors present and the samples immediately taken to a room at the Majestic, along with the others, to be evaluated. Unlike tests for a specific doping agent – the presence of a banned substance in the blood – haematocrit testing takes a matter of minutes. By 9 a.m. the press had somehow been tipped off regarding a Pantani positive and were converging on the Hotel Touring although for a few minutes the man himself was unaware. That soon changed and when informed an enraged Pantani punched his bedroom window in fury and cut his hand. The police were called and he and his team immediately lodged a complaint of fraud which required police action. Meanwhile, at 10.12 a.m. the result of Pantani’s test – 53 per cent – was officially released and he was withdrawn from the race. As an exercise in clutching defeat from the jaws of victory it could scarcely be bettered.
Just after 1 p.m. Pantani, apparently close to a state of collapse and, guarded by uniformed police officers, stopped briefly on the steps of his hotel to address the media:
I have already been controlled twice [presumably he was also referring to the pre-race test as well]. I already had the pink jersey. I had a haematocrit level of 46 per cent [it was in fact 47.4 per cent]. And today I wake up with a surprise. I believe there is definitely something strange here. And I have to say that starting again this time ... I’ve started again after serious accidents but morally this time we have reached rock bottom.
With that Pantani was bundled into a car and driven away from the Giro at high speed. Still fuming, they stopped at the Santa Maria della Scaletta Hospital in Imola and requested a blood test. The hospital obliged and issued a certificate confirming that their tests showed Pantani’s level at between 47 and 48 per cent. At roughly the same time Pantani’s samples collected at Madonna di Campiglio were being retested in a laboratory in Como, along with the other samples collected from other riders. A result of 53 per cent for Pantani was confirmed. Those samples were then seized by the police to be examined independently by Professor Vittorio Rizzoli, Director of Hematology at the University of Parma. Again 53 per cent was the level recorded. At a later date, when this was challenged, DNA from Pantani was used to confirm that the samples being examined were unquestionably his.
The Pantani expulsion was a huge story and soon all sorts of other information came to light such as his sky-high haematocrit levels when involved in the Milano–Torino crash in 1994. Further massively strong circumstantial evidence of long-term EPO use came when La Stampa obtained confidential details of hundreds of blood tests for a dozen or so top Italian riders in the mid-nineties, including Pantani. These demonstrated highly suspicious readings. In 1994, when he finished second in the Giro, he had recorded a level of 40.7 per cent on 16 March but on 23 May – midway through the Giro – it had risen to 54.5 per cent. The awful reality began to dawn on Italian fans and others that Pantani had been systematically cheating – doping – from early in his career. Still he raged although perhaps that anger was at being caught rather than the implications per se. While he was under a dark cloud others – much lesser riders who were very possibly doping themselves – rode on. Such thoughts were enough to spark an alarming mental decline in Pantani and he was later diagnosed as being bipolar, with all this being further aggravated by his copious use of recreational drugs, notably cocaine. In the ensuing years there were very occasional moments of lucidity and hints at a comeback but generally it was very much a downhill trend.
It is nonetheless a controversy that refuses to go away and further fuel was thrown on the fire in March 2016 when Italian police in Forlì, having interviewed members of the Mafia, confirmed in a 30-page report that they believed a branch of the Camorra Mafia in Naples had been actively involved in plotting Pantani’s disqualification in 1999 in order to avoid paying out on massive illegal wagers on Pantani’s victory. According to those police reports, the Mafia was suspected of bribing unnamed members of the medical staff that carried out the tests on behalf of the UCI in Madonna di Campiglio. It was suspected, so the report alleges, that they used a technique of deplasmation to raise Pantani’s haematocrit above the 50 per cent limit. The doctors concerned have always denied any wrongdoing and the Italian police confirmed that, because of the statute of limitations, they will not be pursuing the case further. This latest train of inquiry came to an end in July 2016 when the case was formally closed and archived by High Court judge Monica Galass who concluded that the evidence obtained was not capable of identifying perpetrators of any alleged offences – conspiracy, sports-fixing, threats and extortion.
What we do know for certain now, after the French Senate investigation of old blood samples in 2013, is that Pantani was using EPO at the 1998 Tour de France, and we also have the compelling evidence of his sky-high haematocrit level at various other stages of his career.
Meanwhile, at the 1999 Giro, on stage 21 Ivan Gotti worked himself into a powerful three-man break with Roberto Heras and Gilberto Simoni to comfortably take the GC from Paolo Savoldelli, with Simoni in third place.
The 2000 Giro began inauspiciously when Evgeni Berzin, the 1994 winner, was withdrawn from the race on the eve of the start because his haematocrit level was above 50 per cent. Berzin was by now a busted flush anyway; he had finished 52nd the previous year, and he immediately parted company with his team Mobilvetta Design-Formaggi Trentini. An inglorious end to what had once been a significant career. Pantani, meanwhile, at least made it to the start line after a difficult winter which included more cocaine binges, interspersed with more cogent periods when he trained hard in the winter sun on Tenerife and hinted briefly at past glories. But he was in no condition to lead the Mercatone Uno team and was instead going to ride as a gregario di lusso for Stefano Garzelli, a versatile rider who was useful on all terrain and a good enough climber to win the 1998 Tour of Switzerland. He was no Pantani – although there was a striking similarity in looks – but as it turned out he was good enough to win the race.
Cristian Moreni, later to write his own footnote in the sport’s doping history when he tested positive in the 2007 Tour de France for testosterone, featured prominently in the early stages of this Giro before the race settled down and Francesco Casagrande took ownership of the pink jersey. Casagrande, a consistent one-day and Grand Tour performer, led the UCI world rankings that year and was considered the favourite by many but he came with baggage, having been banned for nine months in 1998 for testing positive for testosterone at the Tour of Romandie. Garzelli clung on to the jersey until stage 20 but came under increasing pressure and the cracks had started to appear on stage 19 between Saluzzo and Briançon in France when the peloton spent much of the day climbing at high altitude on the Colle dell’Angelo and the Col d’Izoard. Pantani, banishing his demons and demonstrating his class for one of the last occasions on a bike, played a fine hand on behalf of Garzelli by attacking hard on some sectors of the stage to unsettle Casagrande while dropping back on others to assist his ‘leader’ Garzelli, who maintained an even tempo during a gruelling day in an attempt to conserve energy for a formidable-looking 34km mountain time trial the following day.
The Mercatone tactics worked well with Pantani taking second in the stage and a fresh-looking Garzelli riding home alongside a visibly fatigued Casagrande 25 seconds later. The pay-off came the following day when Garzelli put more than 2 minutes into Casagrande in the time trial over the Col de Montgenèvre to move into a comfortable lead with just one stage left. The race was his but, as he posed for pictures with Pantani – who had finished 28th overall – the media dubbed him ‘il Piratina’, ‘the Little Pirate’. The perceived hierarchy was still Pantani followed by the others. Neither the public nor the media had fully grasped the depths of Pantani’s decline. Nor, indeed, had Garzelli who immediately took steps to find himself a new team believing there would be no chance to ride for GC at Mercatone and defend his title next year when Pantani was expected to be fully restored as team leader.
2001 and the San Remo drugs raids
By 2001 doping was clearly rife in the peloton and although a rudimentary test to identify EPO was introduced earlier in the year, the authorities still appeared to be fighting a losing battle as riders began regular micro dosing – rather than occasional big injections – to cheat the system. The cycling authorities, often much maligned but becoming proactive at this stage in the drugs war compared with some sports, were, however, on their case and were backed up in Italy at least by the government making doping a criminal offence. The 2001 Giro became a battleground remembered now for the mass raids in San Remo in the same way that the 1998 Tour de France is remembered for the ‘Festina Affair’ and the raids that followed. The evidence of widespread doping was overwhelming and, although it was still fiendishly difficult to bring matters to court and enforce a ban, there was at least a willingness to try. The race as such in 2001 featured a battle between the great new hope of Italian cycling – the apparently ‘dope-free’ Dario Frigo – and the increasingly wily old fox Gilberto Simoni. Frigo, a talented all-rounder and particularly strong in the time trials, had warmed up for the Giro with wins at Paris–Nice and Romandie and was seen as big contender, along with Simoni and Garzelli. As for Pantani, the tifosi and media alike waited with bated breath. The first thing was to get him to the start line in one piece and that at least was successfully accomplished. For the best part of two weeks Frigo generally held sway but he lost a little ground to Simoni on the first big mountain stage and then failed to capitalise fully on the long 55km TT centred on Lake Garda so that by the time they reached San Remo and stage 17 the writing was on the wall. Frigo might only have been 15 seconds behind in second place but with two demanding days in the mountains to come there was, barring accidents, no way he could realistically challenge Simoni. Indeed, he would do well to hang on to his podium place.
It was in San Remo that the 2001 Giro fell apart. The stage itself was uneventful in racing terms although it did spawn two positives for EPO in Pascal Hervé and Riccardo Forconi, the latter of course being Pantani’s gregario and room-mate in 1998 when he had famously been pulled from the time trial for adverse haematocrit levels. It was later that evening in San Remo, though, that the Italian police went to work with a vengeance, with 200 officers descending on the team hotels and car parks in coordinated raids, sparking off a mass panic among the riders and team helpers as illegal substances were flushed down lavatories and thrown randomly out of windows.
Obtaining prosecutions was a difficult and long process. Banned substances were found in Frigo’s room and he was immediately kicked out of the race but it was four years before he received a suspended six-month prison sentence and $14,500 fine. By that time he was also facing charges in France after a boot full of performance-enhancing products was found in his wife’s car at the Tour de France. Giuseppe Di Grande and Alberto Elli also received six-month suspended sentences and $14,500 fines after the San Remo raids while Domenico Romano and Ermanno Brignoli each received shorter suspended sentences. Trainer Primo Pregnolato copped an eight-month suspended sentence and a $7,260 fine. US Postal rider Gianpaolo Mondini was subsequently sacked after growth hormones were found in his room. Former Giro champion Ivan Gotti received a suspended sentence and an undisclosed fine when doping products were found in the campervan driven by his father while initially Pantani, who decided to withdraw from the race after San Remo pleading a fever, was banned for six months after an insulin syringe was discovered in his room. This ban was later lifted on appeal. It was the tip of the iceberg and, frankly, a frightening snapshot of the doping subculture that existed in professional cycling and the Giro at the time.
Emergency meetings were held between defensive riders, team directors and organisers apparently shocked by the scale of the problem. At one stage it seemed the rest of the race would be cancelled but eventually a compromise was agreed whereby only the next stage was lost. ‘The Giro has lost an arm and I have lost part of my heart,’ declared race organiser Carmine Castellano but generally the sport went into denial. UCI President Hein Verbruggen, instead of supporting the Italian police, complained of their draconian attitudes while, with an election to win, Italian presidential candidate Silvio Berlusconi promised that when he was in power no such raids would be tolerated. Eventually the race limped shame-faced back into Milan and, with Frigo eliminated from the scene, Simoni promenaded home unopposed well over 7 minutes ahead of second-place Abraham Olano with Unai Osa completing the podium. It had been the roughest of rides and nobody was quite sure what would happen next. Cycling and the Giro were in a very dark place.
In fact, the Giro simply muddled on. It was too big a national institution to fold and historically the truth is that it has always enjoyed, and prospered from, a little infamy. Nor was it suffering in isolation; there was a growing realisation of just how prevalent the problem was generally in cycling and soon a long list of doping scandals at the Tour de France was, to a certain extent, to divert the attention away from the Giro’s problems in that respect.
It was still going on, though, no question of that, and although the 2002 Giro in fact offered up a compelling race on face value the heavy doping undertones continued. Nicola Chesini left the race abruptly after stage five when police found performance-enhancing drugs in his hotel room, while Roberto Sgambelluri and Faat Zakirov became the first professional cyclists to test positive for NESP, a refined and stronger version of EPO. Bigger-name riders also found themselves in trouble. Stefano Garzelli, the Giro winner just two years earlier, tested positive for the banned diuretic and masking agent probenecid and was kicked off the race. He protested his innocence long and hard, claiming a spiked drink, but was sent home and later received a nine-month ban. Meanwhile, before the start of stage ten it came to light that the previous year’s winner, Simoni, had tested positive for cocaine in an out-of-competition test shortly before the start of the race. Simoni claimed it might have been related to a visit to the dentists and tried to brazen things out; indeed, he won the hilltop finish at Campitello Matese on stage 11 but the arrival of police officers at the team hotel that evening wanting to know more about the circumstances of his cocaine positive persuaded Simoni that he should withdraw from the race. The list of recent Giro winners, Pantani, Gotti, Garzelli and Simoni, was beginning to look a little tarnished to say the least.
Depressingly, doping was becoming the story, the constant narrative. It was a modern and extremely ruthless way of cheating but those tempted to look back at the ‘good old days’ should reflect that doping, in effect, was the logical conclusion of the ‘whatever it takes’ attitude that has always existed in cycling and especially the Giro and Tour de France. Skulduggery on the road has always existed in the Giro, the blatant taking of tows, organised teams of supporters pushing riders up mountains, while officialdom has sometimes moved in mysterious and inexplicable ways to favour some riders and not others, cancel some stages and not others. The Giro has always been a brutal, ruthless environment and doping was the unsurprising, some would say inevitable, result of those attitudes. No wonder some modern-day riders struggled to marry the reverence shown to, say, Coppi and Anquetil, who both admitted to doping during their careers albeit in a less sophisticated form, to this sudden clampdown on their own doping activities. Senior directeurs sportifs, once given to regaling their troops with stories of the old days, were now having to sack riders for similar misdemeanours. It was the new reality and cycling was struggling dreadfully to adapt, a process that in many ways is still continuing although there have been encouraging signs in recent years.
In the 2002 race itself Garzelli had looked the most likely rider from the off but after his unscheduled departure the maglia rosa reverted to the East German-born rider Jens Heppner, not a big name then or now although he has achieved a certain infamy in recent years as one of the names released by the French Senate in 2013 as being positive for EPO at the 1998 Tour de France. Heppner enjoyed his 11 days in pink but was immediately found out when the Giro hit the Dolomites, where a young Australian, former world mountain-bike champion Cadel Evans, rode strongly to briefly claim the race leadership. The following day was another mountainfest with five categorised climbs and Evans suffered a dramatic collapse, which opened the door for Paolo Savoldelli, a very fine climber and notably the best descender of his generation, so much so that he earned the self-explanatory nickname ‘il Falco’. Savoldelli had served notice of his Grand Tour potential with a second place overall in 1999 but since then had been troubled with a back injury and was rarely seen at his best. Hard on the heels of Savoldelli was Tyler Hamilton who was set to become one of the most notorious dopers of his generation with no fewer than three competition positives and bans. On this occasion Hamilton overcame a number of crashes to show remarkable endurance and finish a strong second place overall behind Savoldelli with Pietro Caucchioli in third place.
Pantani’s last stand
Outwardly the 2003 Giro was quieter on the doping front with the only scandal being the retrospective disqualification of Lithuanian Raimondas Rumšas who had finished sixth overall, when a test midway through the race eventually came back positive for EPO. For this race Marco Pantani was again the centre of the pre-race hype with the irony of him somehow being seen as the poster boy and saviour of a badly damaged event somehow escaping those most closely involved. The Giro was undoubtedly in trouble. For the second year in succession Spanish TV had declined to cover it and, with no domestic TV back home to advertise their sponsors’ interests, the Spanish teams had no compunction about boycotting the race. Pantani, ahead of the race, at least looked in reasonable physical condition which probably encouraged unrealistic expectations. In the absence of Savoldelli and Evans, who had both opted to concentrate on the Tour, the favourite was clearly Gilberto Simoni who had eventually been cleared of his cocaine charge. Apparently the cocaine had somehow been contained in boiled sweets a friend had brought back from Peru.
Initially the new big-name sprinter on the block, Alessandro Petacchi, enjoyed the best part of a week in the pink and indeed the quick men monopolised the headlines for a while with Mario Cipollini nipping in for the two stage wins he needed to surpass Alfredo Binda’s all-time record. He broke the record on stage nine from Arezzo to Montecatini amidst much celebration. Cippo raced one more Giro in 2004, the only time he didn’t win a stage, and after announcing his retirement in April 2005 was allowed to ride a ceremonial Prologue at the 2005 Giro when he wore a fluorescent skinsuit which listed his 42 stage wins.
After the sprinters had briefly commanded centre stage, the GC race took over in 2003 with Garzelli relieving Petacchi of the pink jersey before Simoni took a firm grip on the leadership and race on stage 12 when the Giro featured the Zoncolan climb, with its 20 per cent sections, for the first time. The steeper it became the more confident and dominant Simoni appeared, but for much of a spectacular day the crowd were treated to one last glimpse of the genuine genius of Pantani as he attacked and counter-attacked in trademark fashion. Only right at the end did his lack of true racing form and condition kick in as he faded a little but fifth place still represented a very decent effort on such a crucial stage. Never again was Pantani to be seen at the sharp end of a bike race. It was a poignant moment. Simoni continued on his way and really rubbed salt into Garzelli’s wounds by beating him in the stage 15 time trial which really should have suited the latter. Simoni was on his way and he signed off with his third and final stage win of that year’s Giro with an imperious flourish in the mountains on stage 18, the Tappone, which was an old-fashioned snowy epic with the Esichie and Fauniera in almost wintry condition. Simoni made the stage so hard and fast that 35 riders missed the cut, which on this occasion officialdom chose to implement.
After the race much of the debate still centred on Pantani. He had finished 14th and enjoyed that one very fine day in the mountains. Perhaps it wasn’t all over for him? Perhaps the magic could be rekindled and he could secure a guest ride for a team in the Tour de France? Still people were not seeing the reality of the situation. While talk of a Tour de France ride continued in June, Pantani was forced to book himself into a rehabilitation clinic in an attempt to cure his now chronic cocaine addiction. It was over for him; he was spiralling out of control. There was never and could never be another ride at the Tour. Later that year he spent a good while in Cuba where his ‘friend’ Diego Maradona had gone to be cured of drug-related health problems, but with no structure to his life, no training or racing, Pantani was dangerously adrift. For a while he was off the radar but somehow, although shocking, it was no surprise when on 14 February 2004 came reports that he had been found dead in a hotel room in Rimini, the victim of an apparent cocaine overdose. He was 34.
Italian cycling was still reeling three months later when the 2004 Giro got underway on 8 May. Happy chance provided two storylines to divert and entertain the cycling public. The first was the classic new young star on the block rising to the occasion to usurp his team leader and win the race – this time Damiano Cunego, from Verona, who was inevitably quickly dubbed ‘il Piccolo Principe’, ‘the Little Prince’. Cunego started the race very much as Saeco’s Plan B to Gilberto Simoni but that is not how he viewed the situation and he was to be proved right. Secondly, a muscular, snarling sprinter punching great holes in the peloton in the sprint finishes is always good value and for a few years around this time Alessandro Petacchi was the sprint king, and at the 2004 Giro he won no fewer than nine stages, bringing to mind some of the stage-winning orgies of earlier years and quickly making up for the absence of the newly retired Mario Cipollini.
Cunego was an exciting prospect, a climber who could time-trial adequately and didn’t mind the rough and tumble of the one-day Classics and Monuments. A junior world champion at just turned 18 in 1999 he was well established with Saeco who he joined in 2002. Going into the 2004 Giro, aged 23, he had won the traditional warm-up, the Giro del Trentino, and was undeniably in good form but there was nothing to really suggest he would pose a threat to Simoni. Indeed, the name Cunego scarcely warranted a mention in the previews but despite that the race very quickly developed into a two-way tussle between the erstwhile colleagues. Simoni enjoyed four days in pink but Cunego was still riding brilliantly and, save for a brief intervention from Yaroslav Popovych, took over the maglia rosa again up to stage 18 which included the Gavia and a summit finish at the ski station Bormio 2000. Stage 18 always felt like it would be the crucial stage and it was where Simoni would certainly have been expected to put his upstart young colleague in his place. This was prime Simoni territory and Cunego, well into the third week of a Grand Tour for the first time in his career, would surely begin to falter.
The stage was ignited by an attack on the snowy Gavia by Garzelli, who was riding strongly, but the elite bunch, led by Saeco, eventually caught him at the foot of the Bormio 2000 climb at which point Simoni launched his attack, the move that everybody expected would decide the race. Simoni, though, wasn’t climbing with the fluency of old; in fact he was labouring by his standards and couldn’t shake off an elite group of Serhiy Honchar, Emanuele Sella, Dario Cioni, Julio Alberto Pérez Cuapio and Cunego who, lest we forget, had been back in pink for two days and started the day fully 2 minutes 38 seconds ahead of Simoni but only 1.14 ahead of Honchar.
A rare sprint finish on a mountain stage loomed and Cunego was always the best equipped to win that. The two Saeco riders were at odds and/or simply not communicating. Simoni’s assault on the pink jersey had come to nothing but he was in denial; he still believed he was the main man and his team’s best bet. That moment had long gone but still he seemed to be looking for a long lead-out and stage win which additionally would earn him a 20-second time bonus. With one more mountain stage to come that would at least vaguely keep Simoni in the game. In his mind, anyway. Meanwhile, the cards had fallen perfectly for Cunego. Simoni’s big push had been a tame affair; he just didn’t look to have the legs, and as the leader of the Giro Cunego now had absolute licence to press on and close out the race. Technically you could argue that he started to lead out Simoni but he deceived nobody. Very quickly Cunego produced a savage acceleration and the reigning champion just couldn’t get in his wheel as the young tyro pulled away to beat Cioni and Honchar by 5 seconds with Simoni a further 4 seconds back. Cunego was quickly surrounded at the finish line by journalists who reported that as Simoni passed the huddle he pointed at Cunego and shouted, ‘You are a bastard ... you are really stupid.’
There was clearly no love lost and the following day Simoni joined forces with Garzelli to attack his ‘team-mate’ and race leader on the Mortirolo, with Slovenian Tadej Valjavec adding firepower to the breakaway. Cunego was potentially exposed and vulnerable but, paced by the Saeco gregario di lusso Eddy Mazzoleni, he pegged the breakaway at about 1 minute and in fact when Garzelli led the breakaway over the line Cunego was only 52 seconds back. He had defended his lead well and, with just the sprint stage into Milan remaining, was now unassailable. Italy had its new cycling hero although it is interesting to reflect on the generous reception ‘the Little Prince’ received after staging a coup within his team compared to that afforded to Stephen Roche.
For a long time the perceived wisdom concerning Cunego was that he burned himself out in 2004, when he raced and won all around the world, and his comparatively disappointing subsequent results represent a classic case of too much too young. His was seen as a potentially great career that never quite took off. That seems a harsh assessment. Many professionals would give their eye teeth for the three Monuments victories in the Giro di Lombardia, an Amstel Gold victory and the silver medal in the 2008 World Championships he recorded after his victory in the Giro. But what puts Cunego’s achievements in a different light is the findings of an Italian court after a hearing in 2013 and early 2014 into alleged doping activities of the Lampre–Merida team which superseded the old Saeco squad. Not only was there not a shred of evidence against Cunego, there were in fact written notes in team records that Cunego repeatedly refused to have anything to do with the Spanish doctor, José Ibarguren Taus, who was allegedly at the hub of the doping activities. Not many riders from this era have had their results, performances and racing integrity validated in this way and his struggles against some riders we now know to have been doped up to the eyeballs should perhaps be considered more sympathetically in this light.
Doping or no doping, the 2005 Giro d’Italia was a furiously ridden race and compelling spectacle with the resilient and independently minded Paolo Savoldelli again proving that you don’t always need a powerful team to emerge victorious. Savoldelli had demonstrated his ability to look after himself previously. In the controversial 1999 Giro he had eventually finished second despite riding for a Saeco team built largely to accommodate the needs of their sprinter and perennial stage-winner Mario Cipollini, while in 2002 he won the Giro even though his Index–Alexia team also tried to promote the needs of sprinter Ivan Quaranta. Come 2005 and Savoldelli was back at the Giro with the Discovery Channel team but the American-based squad was very much targeting Lance Armstrong’s attempt at a seventh straight Tour de France and keeping their big guns back for July in France. When it came to the big mountain days Savoldelli was going be playing a lone hand.
The 2005 Giro was also nothing if not cosmopolitan with the 20 teams of the newly created Pro-Tour all entered which resulted in 140 non-Italian riders going to the start. Simoni and Cunego were still riding for the same team although it had now been rebranded Lampre–Caffita. Both also appeared to be in outstanding form so the potential for internal argument and strife was high again and provided an interesting dynamic. The young Ivan Basso was another rider to be reckoned with, along with another highly rated young Italian, Danilo Di Luca.
Initially there was something for everybody in a varied course and the leadership swapped hands regularly with five riders disputing the pink jersey in the first ten days, with one-day specialist Paolo Bettini winning or regaining the jersey on no fewer than three occasions. The big GC shakeout, however, came on the mountainous stage 11 from Marostica to Zoldo Alto when stage winner Savoldelli looked superb, closely followed by Basso who was projected into pink. Cunego suffered a collapse in form and finished over 7 minutes adrift alongside Garzelli who was still feeling the effects of a heavy crash on stage seven. With Cunego no longer a contender, at least Simoni now had complete authority within his team again and the stage was now set for a fascinating second half of the race. Savoldelli took over the leadership on stage 13, which was possibly a mixed blessing given the absence of a team really capable of defending the jersey, but he really had little choice. Riding in an elite group behind the break on a testing day that included five major climbs, it was clear that Basso was struggling with a stomach ailment and kept dropping off the back even though the other riders weren’t pressing overly hard. Basso eventually finished 1 minute behind and Savoldelli found himself in pink. The following day on the Stelvio the ailing Basso fell out of GC contention altogether when he lost 40 minutes but, although the threat from that quarter had now disappeared, Savoldelli now had to contend with a Simoni who was getting stronger and more bullish by the day, a lively Di Luca and a relatively unknown Venezuelan, José Rujano, who tipped the scales at just over nine stone and was, predictably, an outstanding climber.
Savoldelli rode with much panache and cunning to resist all comers and was helped in that by Basso. Basso was now riding for stage wins, which enabled Savoldelli to concentrate on defending his lead within the lead group and, with his peerless descending to call upon, he could generally make up any time lost when distanced on a climb. He arrived at the penultimate stage with a 2 minutes 9 seconds lead over Simoni and exactly 3 minutes over Rujano but was far from safe. The new race director Angelo Zomegnan, in only his second race in charge and keen to make an impression, had come up with something very different as a finale with a final stage that included the first-ever appearance of the Colle delle Finestre climb, a 19km brute rising to 2,178m with an average gradient of well over 9 per cent. Additionally, the last eight kilometres, the steepest part of the climb with sections well over 15 per cent, was an unpaved white track, what the Italians called strade bianche. Zomegnan had listed the climb as categoria speciale. Bookending the stage were two separate ascents into Sestriere and coming so close to the finish of the race there was the potential for all sorts of drama.
Savoldelli had to have his wits about him and he stayed calm riding his own tempo when Simoni, Di Luca and Rujano, a trio with enormous firepower, predictably attacked hard up the Finestre. The temptation was to go with his closest rivals but that’s exactly what they wanted. In a group of four they would have systematically worked him over and Savoldelli could well have cracked altogether on such a climb. Instead, head down, he kept tapping out his own rhythm. Over the top of the Finestre and the lead trio were well out of sight but Savoldelli produced one of the great descents in Giro history to peg that lead back to just over 2 minutes and then, on the final climb into Sestriere, the pacesetters started to pay for their day-long efforts. Simoni and Di Luca both began to slow as they cramped which allowed Rujano to slip away for the stage win. Simoni rallied a little, Di Luca hit the wall again and at the summit Savoldelli, seeming to grimace and smile at the same time, eventually crossed the line just 1 minute 29 seconds behind Simoni. A second Giro title was his.
If 2005 was a great race and spectacle with few caveats – there were actually no positive tests connected with the race although nobody doubted that doping was still occurring – the following year witnessed an astonishing climbing masterclass from Basso who had shown 12 months earlier what a force he was in the mountains. This time Basso, riding for the CSC squad, took a firm grip on stage eight, one of three mountain stages he won, as he routed the field and took the GC by over 9 minutes. He was imperious and, of course, given the climate of the time, there were those who were deeply suspicious. After the Giro Basso was strongly fancied to complete the Giro/Tour double but was one of those riders who withdrew on the eve of the Tour de France when their possible involvement in a blood-doping ring revolving around Dr Fuentes was revealed as details of the Spanish police Operación Puerto emerged. Basso denied all knowledge until May 2007, when he admitted to having been a client of Fuentes since 2004. Basso insisted that, despite being aware of Fuentes’ blood-doping operation, he had not himself been involved and that he rode and won the 2006 Giro riding clean. His victory remains in the record books but later that year he was handed a two-year ban from the sport.
What with the reigning champion Basso prevented from racing, the doping debate very much dominated the 2007 race. Sprinter Alessandro Petacchi retrospectively had all five of his stage wins scrubbed from the record books and was banned for a year after testing positive for sabultamol. Italian climber Leonardo Piepoli also tested positive for salbutamol – in fact he produced a higher reading than Petacchi, but was cleared, although within two years he left the sport having acknowledged his use of PEDs at the 2008 Tour de France. The race winner Danilo Di Luca also aroused suspicion when a random test on the evening of his race-clinching stage win on Monte Zoncolan recorded irregular hormone levels compared with his mandatory blood test some hours earlier at the race finish. The results were highly suggestive of a blood transfusion but on this occasion a CONI commission concluded there was insufficient evidence to ban Di Luca.