"Yes, I remember Pantani just when he was Pantani.  He had hair on the sides of his head.  He wasn't Il Pirata yet, the Pirate.  This was before the bandana and the colored bicycle tires.  He had his own workman like way of getting up a mountain.  It looked like something he just liked to do, and, you know how they like to put music to videos on YouTube, the best is the Japanese version, like the shakuhachi, wood flute music as if you were watching a dolphin turn over, rolling in the sea.  Not that bumb bump bump disco techno EuroTrash music, like workout time, or something...  His head wasn't shaved, just got male pattern balding of a respectable sort, I mean, not quite like you picked a clerk up from an office and suddenly found the guy could fly up a mountain, but something like that made him interesting.  This was before the whole persona, or the whole, as they might say, 'necessary ego' happened.  Then came the bandana, the team built around him.  I'm sure it fucked him up, when he, quote unquote became somebody.  I'm sure he had plenty personality on his own, but then that sport, which I used to be childishly interested in during my lazy years of pleasure and lack of direction and all that, like it had to make him into marketed stuff.

"Lance, I think they should just leave him alone, and even keep their applause of him somewhere safe.  Why go after him... Only because they have some sort of sworn duty or job.  They were all doing it.  How could they not?  If you could and write a better book, well, everyone else would do it too.  Man versus Nature, I guess.  These guys danced up mountains, the main spectacle of the Tour de France, and ninety seven percent of it was just them, but they all had to do the last three to just see who was who.  Yes, of course...   (a pause in the recording, a long silence, a look off into space, a glassy eye) They... or some of them, well, you could get addicted, one could get addicted to...  that kind of infusion that would let you recover easily and ride the next day like you were a kid again.  Chemistry.  I hold nothing of it against anyone.  That whole period of the late Eighties and into the Nineties and into the Thousand, they all had a special kind of sugar to take, and in fact it worked rather well with all the Billboard advertising they wore on their chests and thighs, bright almost neon colors.  Funny little caps, but all of it, tradition.  Tradition.  And they are tough guys, selected athletes, a natural gift completely rare...

"Lance, I think you have to forgive him most of all.  Pantani, the whole ego, then having to defend all that, having that empire, getting busted so terribly on the even of his greatest victory, really, what is fair?  Was it fair to catch him? Well, yes, I mean, of course it was, but...  It was the nascent days of catching the EPO usage, the high hemoglobin, you can't fault anyone, and must praise them...  He knew it.  Live by the sword, die by it, but it was a terrible fall from which that poor little guy couldn't recover, kind of backed him into an alley.  One of the last races, that stupid kid, what's his name, bald head, Pantani Ego Junior crashed into him on a descent, and old little Saint Marco sat somewhere on the side of the road, steep road, just sort of dumbfounded, stunned, and he had tried so hard to make a clean comeback, and indeed was good old Pantani, with all that Il Pirata ego crap stripped off him, and he sat there with, I think, a good bruise on his shin, and maybe wondering, what is, what is this all about, what is life about.

"Poor kids.  Don't make examples of them because they chose crime, crime in quotes.  They all had class, they just all felt a need to bump it up by one half of one half of one percent.  The pressure was on.  They had no choice."

"But again, it's the ego, that clinging to... but then again, this was their careers, and so they had to.  Or face defeat, because it's a sport with such fine tiny tiny tiny margins, that one moment of two minutes when the legs or the cardio just fade, a sport of empires, like, Cancellara is absolutely right, fighters like Spartacus."

"Pantani, though, they say he got addicted to the needle, or to the drug, and that it plausible.   Thus, the cocaine."

"All of them were used.  The sponsors, the hype, the gear, the tv, and they were left as they were by it all.  But don't blame them.  They were just advertising."