Customer Reviews

The Death of Marco Pantani: A Biography

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

First off, this is a good book, but it depends what you want out of it. Maybe I just prefer the cycling writings of John Wilcockson. For me, I like something like "23 Days in July" about the ups and downs, real life of a bike racer so that I feel like I am living it. This is the 3rd of the 3 Pantani books I have read and what I can say about it is; if you want to dig very deep into whether or not the guy "doped" than this is for you. If you want a book that really celebrates the champion's accoplishments balanced with what brought him down, without a ton of science thrown in, then I would recommend "Marco Pantani: The Legend of a Tragic Champion" as the best of the 3 books out there. Rendell's book is tied for second with Ronchi's overall. Ronchi's book really sheds more light onto his personal life and is also worth the read.

All good books, but I am on my second read of "tragic champion" and it probably won't be my last.

Overall, I feel Rendell thought Pantini was guilty of cheating and he made a point of proving it, which he did. Problem is, it was proven in heavy detail and took up too much of the book.

Rendell does a good job of chronicling the young Pantini and the promise he showed in his early races. He also details his family life and the seeds for his later emotional issues. Rendell works analytically and steps through the events related to Marco's medical evidence of doping, his mental and social issues, and his eventual death. I have read other reviews in which readers expressed disappointment that Pantani's pro racing victories are not highlighted more in the book. I think the title explains Rendell's focus and as long as the reader in interested in learning more about Pantani as a man in addition to a cycling champion, I think this is a very good read.

I struggled through this chronicling of Pantani's storied career. The author detailed every one of Pantani's races while he was a teenager then barely mentioned his early Tours de France. If I could stand more Pantani trivia, I'd buy the other two biographies to compare them with this. A disappointment.

As other reviewers have noted, Mendell taxes the reader with way too many details initially. The first half of the book reads like Book II of the Illiad, presenting an exhaustive list of names and places surrounding Pantani's childhood and cycling beginnings. A historian might be impressed, but the average reader will probably yawn. The remainder of the book is no less dizzying, but by then Rendell has sufficiently focused on the key characters and events in Pantini's life to keep the reader hooked and clarify his thesis.

Pantani represents much of what is wrong with modern day sport: gifted and talented athletes are often shaped and molded by those around them (and more importantly their self and nationalistic interests) often times before they have formed any view or concept of themselves. In Pantini's case the results were devastating, leading first to detached self delusion and later to drug induced insanity and death.

As for doping, there is no shortage of insight into the subject for the interested reader. Rendell effectively demonstrates that doping is implicit at every level of professional cycling starting with the riders (or 'victims'), to the fans, teams and all the way to the governing bodies themselves. Cycling is broken - anybody who thinks otherwise is as delusional as Pantini himself was.

More a book about self-destruction than a book about cycling, although if you aren't familiar with Pantani, you may not find yourself drawn into the story.

Marco Pantani was the best cyclist in the world in 1998, winning the Tour de France and the Tour of Italy. He was also one of the most exciting cyclists of recent generations, winning with spectacular, risky accelerations during the hardest mountain stages. His fame in Italy transcended cycling and sports.

He was busted for doping the following year while leading the Tour of Italy, and, if Rendell's investigations are valid, all of Pantani's professional achievements are tainted by consistent use of EPO to enhance the oxygen-carrying capacity of his blood.

Pantani did persist in his cycling career after the bust, famously winning a stage of the Tour de France on Mt. Ventoux against Lance Armstrong when the two reached the finish stretch alone, and Armstrong chose not to contest the finish. But Pantani was on the way down, professionally and personally, while Armstrong continued to ascend. He became a heavy coke user, binging repeatedly until finally barricading himself in a hotel room and coking himself to death.

It's a well-researched and well-told, unfortunately true, dark story of self-destruction. And you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about blood testing.

First third of the book is a bit slow but turns into a great read

"What no one has so far attempted is to examine the entirety of Marco's existence... to place the vital questions at its heart: what did Marco mean to Italy and the outside world, and what did his meaning to others ultimately mean to him? Did he, or did he not, abuse doping products? Was his suspension at Madonna di Campiglio, as he claimed, part of a plot? Was his death a private, individual tragedy, or one in which sport played the decisive role?"

Above is an excerpt from the Prologue, providing for the reader an idea of the intention of this biography. If you are interested only in having Marco's extraordinary expeditions in the mountains and the glory of his victories read back to you, then don't bother reading The Death Of Marco Pantani. This book explores much deeper into Marco's life as an athlete and as a man. Those who criticize this book for being too "scientific" or too "informative" are the people who are still hypnotized by Pantani's incredible moments on the bike, and who perhaps do not want to accept the truth about those very moments. Anyhow, the provided excerpt should be more than enough for you to decide whether or not to read this. It is a very good book.

I do bicycle time-trials myself, and so find almost anything written about cycling interesting. Pantani was a gifted, tragic figure, but it seemed that success in cycling was all he had to sustain his ego, and the sad consequences are an object lesson to any one of us whose reason for being is so dependent on contingent circumstances. If you like endurance sports, you'll like this book.

Dennis Fried Small Dog, Big Life: Memoirs of a Furry Genius

Great book - on a true icon -and how difficult life is whether elite or average joe..
I'm off to get some yellow tyres!!

Ok, if you want the scoop - just the raw data/info on Pantani, this is a good book. He's got lots of data on blood values. And there's lots of data (no doubt pulled from the various police investigations) regarding the whens and wheres and whos of Pantani's last days. So if you just want info and don't care about how that info is written for you, then this book is for you. But ...

The writing is so bad it is laughable. It looks to me like a ton of good research and data was handed to a college student (at best). At times, the book seems like it's written in English, then translated poorly into Italian, and then translated poorly back into English. During the much of the beginning, Rendell tries to be very poetic in his description of racing and Pantani, but it is done in such a cheesy, over-the-top manner that I just wound up laughing through the parts that Rendell probably thought were just grand. He also just rambles through much of the book in a way that makes me think of him doing a book reading in a completely monotonous voice that never changes pitch, tone, or speed. He also makes lots of strange omissions and/or mistakes with numbers and times. Going through an analysis of Pantani's testing times, for instance, Rendell seems to totally screw up the math for how long it took Pantani to show up for his tests and how late he was. Then he'll throw out data regarding Pantani's testosterone level as 8.5, and state that it is "suspicious" and indicates doping, but fails to give us background on what a normal number would be or why 8.5 is suspicious.

In sum, read it if you love cycling and/or Pantani, but don't expect much from the writing.