Pantani to win the Giro?

Linky. You really couldn’t make this stuff up!

He can’t ‘win’ it. He was excluded before the end. If he had won it and been removed/taken away from him- yes.

But how can you ‘win’ something that you didn’t already complete?

The suggestion is that GC should stand as it was on the night before he was excluded, with the rest of the race being null and void. Lunacy.

Pantani’s family hired a lawyer that argues that men forced their way into Pantani’s hotel room and made him to drink water diluted with lethal amounts of cocaine against his will.

Since he was by all accounts hoovering up industrial quantities of the stuff by then, the idea of him being ‘forced’ to take cocaine ‘against his will’ is pretty laughable (if it wasn’t so sad).

is pretty laughable (if it wasn’t so sad)

Pretty much sums up the whole sorry mess.

Doubt it’ll lead to anything though, suspect it’s just that Pantani stories are good for selling papers over there.

its an interesting question to ask why only he was caught when everyone was doing it

Hora the last day of a Tour – especially when you are 5 minutes clear- is a procession with a sprint rather than a real stage. he was never going to lose 5 minutes even if they raced. Had he been there he would have won and the winner knows this hence why he will give it up.

No matter- Anything can happen, he didn’t complete the race. How can you award the winners prize if the person didn’t complete the race? The article note its the sponsor company thats pushing for this no? So its not a foregone conclusion.

Forget all this though- it has been proved that he did use EPO so he wasn’t a clean rider anyway- regardless of whether he was at the moment or not. Its not as though a totally clean rider was robbed is it.

And Gotti was clean? 🙂 It really is a sorry mess.

Leave it all in the past.

Anything can happen

Feel free to list the grand tours that were decided on the last day.
Were you not of the opinion none of them were clean then Hora?
I agree what is happening is daft but I was trying to explain why a rider would accept Pantani won the race. You are free to disagree and everyone knows your a road knowledge is only surpassed by your knowledge of women 😉

Fignon Lemond 😉

But that was stupid.

Junkyard – for a result to be overturned due to a allegation/claim of falsified drug test on a rider known to use said-drug and was also confirmed posthumously that he had used said-drug to be given a race win for a race he never completed.

Come on. Barking.

Fingion – LeMond

Edit: too slow, can’t spell

Heard Matt Rendell – author of the Death of Marco Pantani – discussing this. Apparently there is no new evidence for either the investigation into his death or his expulsion from the Giro. His death was the third time he’d ingested huge quantities of cocaine, but medical intervention had saved him on the previous occasions. Has interviewed the drug testers and doesn’t see any grounds for the mafia stories either.

Basically MP was using both performance and recreational drugs for a number of years

Feel free to list the grand tours that were decided on the last day

It wasn’t the last day, it was the penultimate stage. The next stage was a 190k mountain stage won by Roberto Heras. Still almost certain that Pantani would have won, especially considering the remarkable speed with which he was going up mountains.
Anyway, there can’t have been anything funny going on because the exclusion decision was made by UCI president Hein Verbruggen, a man of unimpeachable integrity and a friend of Lance Armstrong 🙂

Erm, check your facts guys.

Pantani was kicked out with 2 stages to go and before the final mountain stage. And the lead did change hands again that day – Gotti had been in third before Pantani was popped, but moved ahead of the new leader (cant remember his name) to win the race.

The fact that Gotti was popped soon after may explain his ambiguity about the victory

Salvoldelli took over the lead for stage 21 and lost it on that stage too. (Edit: though he refused to start the stage in the jersey.)

Didn’t Gotti spend time in prison on doping related charges soon after that?