“Man on the Run” by Manuela Ronchi is the story of the last few years of Marco Pantani’s life. The title works on two levels: after being slung out of the Giro D’Italia race on the penultimate day on a charge of suspected EPO use, whilst leading by a long way, Marco was hounded by demons – insecurity, shame, confusion, betrayal, distrust – all the way through a terrible cocaine addiction to his demise of an overdose.
It’s been two years since we lost Marco Pantani, il Pirata, the last great romantic of the road. Two years since that shuffling, hooded figure in the Rimini residence; a tragic, lonely end to a career that soared so high but burned too bright.
In “Man on the Run“, Manuela Ronchi – his last manager, his confidante – paints a portrait of a fragile, misunderstood genius, an artist undone by his era, his demons, and the weight of his own myth.
Now, let’s get one thing straight before we go any further; cycling in the ‘90s was drenched in EPO. The sport was running hotter than a V12 Ferrari with no radiator cap. It was a chemical arms race, and the peloton was mainlining oxygen vectors in hotel rooms from San Sebastian to San Remo. But if we’re going to get sanctimonious about it, we should throw away half the palmarès from that era. The fact remains: Marco Pantani was a one-off, a man who didn’t just win races, he won hearts.
Ronchi’s Perspective: The Man, Not Just the Rider
Ronchi, as one of the few who had direct access to Pantani in those last, difficult years, takes a different angle than most. This isn’t a forensic, clinical analysis of his races (for that, read “The Death of Marco Pantani” by Matt Rendell). No, this is personal. Emotional. At times, uncomfortable.
She shows us Marco, not as the tifosi saw him – dancing on the pedals, hands on the tops, head bobbing, stripping away his bandana before delivering the final, devastating coup de grâce – but as a man who, without cycling, had no compass, no purpose, and ultimately, no escape.
“He didn’t know how to live without cycling,” Ronchi writes. “The bike was his salvation and his curse.”
His story wasn’t just about racing. It was about a small-town boy from Cesenatico who never quite fit the mold of a professional athlete.
Too sensitive, too intense, too self-critical. A man who, for all his exploits on the road, struggled to survive in a world that expected him to keep dancing long after the music had stopped.
1998: The Perfect Year, The Beginning of the End
We can’t talk about Pantani without talking about 1998.
The year of years. The Giro, the Tour. The Mortirolo, Galibier, Deux Alpes. That Tour stage to Les Deux Alpes? If you were watching it live, you remember where you were. Ullrich, bonking. The sky turned black.
And Marco – out of the saddle, tearing strips off the mountain, eating time like a man possessed. In 48 kilometers, he obliterated the field.
Ullrich finished nearly nine minutes down. It was one of the great masterpieces of modern cycling.
But even then, the hounds were closing in. Festina had been booted from the race, the sport was cracking under the weight of its own hypocrisy, and Marco? Well, Marco was still soaring… until Madonna di Campiglio, 1999.
The Needle in the Haystack
If you want to understand Pantani’s fall, you have to understand Madonna di Campiglio, that fateful morning when a routine haematocrit test saw him ejected from the Giro while wearing pink.
A 52% reading, just two ticks over the legal 50% limit. No positive test. No failed doping control. Just a number. And suddenly, the hero of Italy was public enemy number one.
“The race was his life,” Ronchi writes, “and that morning, they took it from him.”
He never won another major race. Instead, there was a downward spiral of depression, isolation, and addiction.
Ronchi writes about the countless interventions, the friends who tried to help, the lies, the deceit, the hollow promises. It’s hard reading. If you followed Pantani’s career, you know where this story ends, but somehow, you still hope, right until the last page, that it might be different.
A Victim of His Era?
The great paradox of Pantani is that he was a product of his era, but also a victim of it.
Doping was endemic, yes, but so was the hypocrisy. Marco was the golden boy, the man who put bums on seats, but when the tide turned, he was abandoned.
The press, the authorities, even his own federation. He was left to twist in the wind while others with worse rap sheets were quietly shuffled back into the fold.
“There was a conspiracy against him,” Ronchi suggests. And there might well have been. Italy needed a sacrificial lamb. He was the biggest name in the sport, and they threw him under the bus. And once they’d made their example, they left him to rot.
The Final Days
The most haunting parts of “Man on the Run” are the final chapters.
Marco, alone. A shell of himself. Wandering from hotel to hotel, refusing help. The paranoia, the self-destruction. By the time he checked into the Residence Le Rose in Rimini, the writing was on the wall.
Ronchi doesn’t sensationalise it, she simply presents the facts. And the truth is, by that point, Marco Pantani was a man who had been discarded by the world he once ruled.
“He wasn’t the Pirata anymore,” she writes. “He was just Marco. And Marco didn’t know how to survive.”
Final Thoughts
This isn’t an easy book to read. It’s painful. Frustrating. At times, you want to reach through the pages and shake Pantani, tell him to pull himself together, to get back on the bike, to find another way.
Was he the greatest climber of all time? Maybe. But it’s not just the numbers, the records, the victories that make Pantani unforgettable. It’s the way he raced. The sheer audacity of it. The purity of the attack. That’s why we still talk about him. That’s why, two years on, we still mourn him.
Manuela Ronchi gives us a raw, unfiltered look at the man behind the myth. And if you loved Pantani – if you shouted at the TV, if you leapt out of your chair when he went on the attack – then you owe it to yourself to read this book.
Because Marco Pantani was more than just a cyclist. He was a tragedy. A legend.
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“Man on the Run” by Manuela Ronchi
- Publisher : Robson Books Ltd (29 Sep. 2005)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1861059205
- ISBN-13 : 978-1861059208
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