Ulster Cycling News
21May/140

Pantani – The Legend Lives On

slaneAThe Giro d’Italia has come and gone but it has left a host of memories for the thousands of cycling fans who witnessed its historic visit to our shores. This year's edition of the race will produce its own heroes and villains but on a recent visit to Slane Cycles on the Andersonstown Road in Belfast I was poignantly reminded of one of my own heroes of our sport.

On a stand on the counter was the Bianchi used by Marco Pantani in 1998 when he won both the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France….the last person ever to achieve that historic double. Slane Cycles are a major Bianchi dealership and Andy Slane explained that they were able to borrow the bike in the lead up to and during the Grand Partenza in Belfast.

“We wanted to do something to mark this historic occasion and Pantani was perhaps the most flamboyant and popular cyclist of his era. And like that other great Italian cyclist Fausto Coppi his name was always associated with Bianchi. We were very lucky to acquire the bike for the period.”

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Slane Cycles also helped out in providing a state of the art Bianchi Sempre as part of a cycling exhibition at Stormont. The exhibition features a number of paintings by County Down artist Deepa Mann-Kler.

On the week leading up to the Giro Belfast hosted the premiere of “Pantani:The Accidental Death of a Cyclist”. This moving and compelling film charted Marco's life from a young boy with a passion for cycling through his amateur career to professional status, culminating in his tragic and lonely death in a cheap hotel room in Rimini.

The film's director James Erskine along with Matt Rendell author of “The Death of Marco Pantani” were on stage after the film for a Q and A session. Erskine summed up everything when he said, “He was a kid with a bike who came from nowhere. He wasn't well educated. He followed his dream and that dream destroyed him – he died miserable, alone and shattered. I think you can understand his despair, his paranoia.”

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Tommy Lamb

 

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