Well some of his family seem to think so.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-28637575
I would like to know what is in the documents.

It must be very upsetting to be Marco Pantani’s mother. He was by all accounts a lovely boy. He became a great racing hero. Everyone was enormously proud of him.

Then he was caught cheating, his mind gradually unhitched itself and he did an amazingly vast amount of cocaine. He eventually died, alone, desperately unhappy and having taken an awful lot of cocaine. It was very sad, and rather sordid. There is plenty of blame to go around without wild theories.

🙁

I’m going to go with this just being a conspiracy theory (without having seen the documents obviously). There’s nothing about the Pantani story that doesn’t make it seem like a “perfect” set of circumstances to launch a fragile young man into a rapid descent into death.

I did it.

He was 34? I’d wager he looks closer to 50 in that picture.

Why would someone kill him and make it look like an overdose? It doesn’t make sense.

“It must be very upsetting to be Marco Pantani’s mother”
she has always thought he was murdered, she hired the PI who have given her a “answer”

All very sad thou.

There may be a specific Italian definition which would allow a supplier of cocaine to someone who subsequently dies to be arraigned for murder.
Although I would imagine that mostly its his family attempting to find a reason for his death.

saw on the french tv last night that the amount of coke in his system was 6 times higher than mortal dose . as it says in the bbc link , he would have had to drink it and that amount would have burnt his mouth , throat etc…

he would have had to drink it

I’m pretty sure that the coroner concluded that he was in the habit of:

(a) eating it in pellets mixed with bread; and

(b) pushing it up his bum.

Matt Rendell’s book was fairly harrowing about all this.

There may be a specific Italian definition which would allow a supplier of cocaine to someone who subsequently dies to be arraigned for murder.

The dealers ended up being arrested and most/all of them did time. They are prosecuted for a sort of manslaughter offence as someone died due to their actions (the same reason Patrick Head and Frank Williams were prosecuted over Senna’s death). However, the latest accusations are that someone intentionally murdered him.

Have you seen the film Pantani: Accidental Death of a Cyclist?

In there is a fairly well put together theory that his positive dope test (which actually was just a haemocrit > 50% so technically not absolute proof of doping) was rigged.

The idea being that to get pinged for being >50% you had to be really stupid since it was so easy to manipulate the levels with saline injections etc. The theory put forward in the film is that he was just too dominant. Attack after attack in the mountains which just demolished the field, made everyone else look amateur. Stacking up stage wins, denying other riders their moment of glory. Basically says that someone had it in for him and rigged his dope test or tipped off the testers to visit when they knew he would just have doped.

His world fell to pieces after that.
I doubt anyone will ever prove anything either way but I suppose the idea that a flawed hero was “got rid of” is probably more palatable to his devoted fans than the idea that a flawed hero simply took his own life.

In much the same way that Diana’s devoted fans find it easier to believe she was “got rid of” by “The Establishment” than to accept that a pissed bloke drove a car very fast into a concrete wall.

The thread title reads so much better if you get Taggart to read it in your head….

Matt Rendell says this is nonsense. Apparently he had previously overdosed 3 times and needed reviving before the one that finally did for him. I don’t know if the judge feels there is a case for 3 attempted murders too.

Lance did it…

^^^^^^^^this