I heard just the news on TV:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/other_sports/cycling/3489569.stm
Strange how this has no replies as of yet. There’s pleny of cycling fans on the boards, so let’s give this one a little nudge up the ladder.
Poor Marco. He got the entire hypocritical anti-doping brigade on him, and was made a paria. I guess in the end, having to be clean all the time meant he couldn’t keep up. And he certainly wasn’t able to live with the shame of it all.
I don’t care what they say about him, or what he took. If you win the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France in one year (1998), you are a true cycling hero.
Arrivederci, il elefanti. You will be missed. 
Yes, strange. The first thing that comes to my mind is that sport is all about the best and the first, nothing else…
Clearly, this man had sporting abilities beyond everybody elses capabilities but don’t forget we are talking about a human being here. We tend to forget. And : he was weak he couldn’ t cope with the accusations and the pressure (now: regarded as obvious for sporting people), true or wrong, now he is no more.
Who will challenge Lance ? I hope Ullrich can.
Oh, there’s a few contenders for this year’s tour, I think. Beloki, Vinokourov, and indeed Ullrich. Hell, perhaps Hamilton can even make it onto the podium, he sure has the potential.
Not betting any money on Michael Boogerd, much as I’d like to see him win.
Coldy :
Frank van den Broucke will hehehe 
My understanding is that Marco’s death scene was littered with suicide kinda hints. Empty medication bottles and notes and such forth.
Oddly enough, I hear tell that Marco Pantani was the one rider who Lance Armstrong felt genuinely “scared of” for whatever that’s worth.
But man, all that EPO crap. When Pantani failed his “red blood cell ratio” test in 1999, that really was the death knell for him - in terms of endorsement prestige that is. I hear tell he was dropped like a stone after that, and his contract was worth just 1/10th of what it was in 1998.
Interestingly, a year ago he checked himself into a health clinic in Italy for “depression and drug addiction” problems. But I never heard (from any of my reliable sources) just what those drug problems were - other than they were recreational in nature, and not sport enhancing. In effect, Marco Pantani did everything wrong that he could possibly have done after the 1999 failed test. Instead of coming clean, and confessing to everything he had taken over the years, and thereupon wiping a clean slate and trying to win back the public’s favour by competing as a spokesperson for “clean cycling”, it appears he chose to sink into a mire of self downward spiral.
Such moments in life, (it seems to me) are the true test of one’s mettle. It’s never easy dying on one’s sword in public, but if you do so, at least you get to fight another day and you have the admiration of the public for coming clean. But Pantani never did that. He just sank further and further into drugs and it would appear he chose to take his own life at the end of it all.
Very, very sad for mine. To have won the Giro and le Tour in one year should have set him up for life - if only in terms of goodwill. Somehow, he squandered it all. Very sad.
Poor man. To die alone in a hotel room.
I salute you, Marco. You were great.
I was a big fan of the pirate. To see him whizz up a category one in a small gear was awe-inspiring. There’s a grace about the out-and-out climbers that you just don’t get with the big boys pushing their large gears up the climbs.
The Tour he won started here in Ireland. He was last after the opening day time trial in Dublin but it was worth re-surfacing the roads of the Wicklow mountains just for him. While much about that Tour was detestable, Pantani’s performances were thrilling. While in retrospect the experience has been tainted, it doesn’t make him any less beautiful.
I thought about him on my cycle into work this morning. When I’m racing the traffic (I know, I’m a sad little kid), my misguided self-image is mostly Pantani-inspired.
Marco, wherever you’re going, give 'em hell.