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  'Il Pirata' Pantani seeks to steal the show
Posted: Monday July 27, 1998 10:00 AM
Special from L'Equipe, the French sports daily PARIS (L'Equipe) -- The morning before the first stage in the Alps, which could change the whole Tour de France, Marco Pantani took the discussion to new heights. Are you ready for the big day? "Not ready, no, because I still am very uncertain. I'm not 100 percent. I'm dragging along the efforts I made in the Giro and in the Pyrenees. To do something big, you have to know how to concentrate, and that state is hard to maintain durably. And I'm going to have to be in great shape. There are going to be many climbs." But that's not something that bothers you. "Normally it wouldn't, but starting today, one's abilities to recuperate will matter more than any other consideration. I know a lot of people will cheer for me, my parents, my fan club, my friends from Cesenatico, because the Deux Alpesski resort is very close to Italy. I'll try to put on a show for my crowd. But they're intelligent fans, who would understand if I faltered at some point. So I'll have a quiet approach for this stage." You complained about this Tour de France's lack of character, about the absence of hard climbs, but paradoxically, you're in a position to win it in one single stage. "Winning the tour? It's possible, because in cycling, nothing is impossible, but it will difficult to overthrow Jan Ullrich, because he still has the edge with one last time trial on Saturday." Felice Gimondi says that one of your great qualities is that, in the mountains, you know how to preserve energy. "He said that? I don't have the same characteristics as the other athletes in the tour, they let their power speak for themselves, use bigger gear ratios in the climbs. I'm more agile, at the onset of climbs, I suffer, like everybody else, when the pace is fast. I need a climb to be really steep." In the public's opinion, you are the hope of ridding the tour rid of its ills, if only for a moment, through your exploits. Are you aware of that? "I've understood that us competitors are living a difficult situation. There are times I tell myself I'd better go back home because we're treated like animals, but I can't do it because it would be interpreted as a flight. That told, when people are faced with the tour's high altitude classics again, to real cycling, they'll forget about the rumors, the mess there was, and let the race's emotions win them over and overcome them." You said you were treated like animals, but by whom? "Not by the public. On the contrary. These past few days, we saw a lot of banners saying 'Reintegrate the Festina team.' That's due to a solidarity that let us know about one thing: the public doesn't care about what happened around the Festina team and their trainer's arrest. They want us to go get Richard Virenque and put him back in the race. On the other hand, I think we're been roughed up by the press." All of the press? "Not all of it. No, a certain press. I've read little, but I've watched TV a lot, Italian TV, and French TV, mostly, and I noticed they all tried to outbid the others, to blow it out of proportion. Some people used the tour, its importance. Problems in sport exist, and I say sport. All sports. Not just cycling. There have always been problems. Every era has had its problems. It's normal, necessary, to want to solve them, but when I see that a rider that hasn't done anything is treated like a delinquent, simply because they found forbidden products in his masseur's car, it gives me the shivers! If tomorrow they come search my room, they won't find anything but I'll leave the tour and go back home. Because I'm not a delinquent. I'm a competitor, someone who makes a lot of sacrifices for his work, but [as a] last resort, I don't need [drugs] to be Pantani. To think that they took Virenque, Alex Zuelle, champions, and that they treated them like murderers... In jail for two days... I was told they'd been told to take their clothes off, humiliated! I would have understood it if they'd been caught in the act, with drugs. I agree with making the man who made a mistake, who cheated, pay. The man who was in the car with all the drugs." They talked about a traffic. "If there was a traffic, it should be punished, but it's not normal to use such police methods with athletes who've given a lot to the Tour de France. Virenque said he never did anything, never took those drugs. But everybody wants to make him say the opposite. That's what upsets me and what I can't stand." Was that the real reason for the strike?
"This tour has generated a lot of problems for us. If I hadn't been there, the other morning in Tarascon, Laurent Jalabert wouldn't have taken the start, and neither would Luc Leblanc have. And two or three teams wouldn't have taken the start. I told them to do whatever they wanted. I don't feel intelligent to the point of wanting to give other people orders or advice. I simply said, 'I will do whatever the majority decides on.' At the beginning, everybody said, 'OK, ,we're not going. Let's go on strike.' My technical car had already left. And then I noticed that a group of 80 riders had hit the road. So I joined Jalabert, Leblanc and other important riders, who were discussing close to race director Jean-Marie Leblanc's car. Their position hadn't changed, but there were only four of five teams left. If we'd stayed there, we would have looked bad, we would have made a mistake. I said, 'Come on, let's go, and let's talk about what we can do all together tonight.' And we took the start. Jalabert is one of a very few who has some personality, who doesn't let a group condition him. It was normal for him to want to express this personality, but at some point, there were too few of us left to keep this position." Only an overall move would have justified a strike? "The justification was: Stop. Riders have been winning stages for three or four days with the press hardly printing the results at all. The Tour has become more of a judicial and penal case than a sports event." Yes, but how can we evacuate the suspicion, forget that the products we're talking about are lethal, not believe that we all have some responsibility to assume, as small as it may be? "This situation is complicated for everybody but the journalists should talk about the race, first and foremost, then try to explain the problems." How can the French cycling federation's president ask journalists to ask you only about the race? "Of course, things are too serious for us to talk about them in front of 10journalists. The best thing to do is for us to finish this Tour, to get it over with and then reconsider all the rules. Also, I still think that it's not fair to attack the weakest, because we riders are the weakest. The most popular, the weakest..." It's not the Tour of shame. Is the shame that Festina case? "Maybe we don't know everything because attorneys haven't told us everything but if we believe what we're read, it seems to me there has been a kind of exaggeration, that things got out of hand to the point where all the riders' dignity has been harmed, riders who shouldn't be portrayed as diabolical." You've seemed more serene since you won the Giro d'Italia (Tour of Italy). "It took a weight off of my shoulders, that load of bad luck which I've carried along these past few years. But I didn't come out of the Giro in a state of euphoria. I'm just like I was before." Do Italian fans see you differently? "I'd tend to say they're more happy about that victory than I am. I think I've given them sensations that they'll carry along all their life. They'd seen me struggling against bad luck for so long, they though it was legitimate. But in my mind, I'd proved that I could win the Giro before. Ever since my second-place finish in 1994, behind Yevgeny Berzin and ahead of Miguel Indurain, almost without a team behind me, since even Chiappucci was trailing behind me." Then there was your strange meeting with Charly Gaul, a mythical figure who reassures us about one thing, the existence of a relationship between yesterday and today's cycling. "When I competed as an amateur, I gathered some information about former champions, Gaul, Fausto Coppi, Eddy Merckx, Gino Bartali, which was easy because newspapers talk about them a lot. I admired Gaul, and one day a friend in Luxembourg gave me his address. I drove there and paid him a visit on my own, I wanted to get to know him." He must have been flattered. "A few months later, he was at my fan club's party in Cesenatico, and during the Giro, before the last day's time trial, he sent me a fax saying, 'don't be afraid of anything. Whatever happens, you've already won.' Gaul is a surprising guy." What did you say to each other, the first time? "We talked a lot, and came to the conclusion that only man and his courage matter, in the end." Copyright (c) 1998 L'Equipe
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Marco Pantani looks to dominate in the Alps 