Remembering Marco Pantani’s record-breaking ascent of Alpe d’Huez
A cat runs out in front of Marco Pantani as he descends the Valico di Chiunzi during the eighth stage of the Giro d’Italia. Pantani, as so often in his career, crashes and abandons the race. It is May 24, 1997.
But few riders in the history of the sport have embarked on as many comebacks as the Italian climber. On July 19, 57 days after his crash, he produces the finest performance of his troubled career, springing clear of his rivals and ascending Alpe d’Huez’s storied bends in 37 minutes and 35 seconds. It is still the fastest any human being has climbed the mountain.
Marco Pantani, alone, makes his way up Alpe d’Huez on July 19, 1997. (Pascal Rondeau /Allsport)
When the route for the 2026 Tour de France was announced in October, the double day in Alpe d’Huez was the most striking aspect. Stage 20 on Saturday is the Queen Stage, with ascents of the Col de la Croix-de-Fer, the Col du Télégraphe/Col du Galibier double (anyone who has ridden here knows it’s effectively one 35km climb) and a finish up the Col de Sarenne, the backdoor route up to Huez — steeper, narrower, and prone to landslides.
Stage 19 on Friday takes the more traditional route to Huez, and with not too much climbing for the peloton to tackle beforehand. Recent visits — such as in 2022 when Tom Pidcock won from a breakaway — have seen the Alpe arrive as the final challenge in a brutal stage. This week the riders should reach it in a relatively fresh state, with the advantages of modern-day training methods, fuelling and aerodynamics. Pantani’s 37:35 dangles in front of them as the most tantalizing of sporting carrots.
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As stage 13 of the 1997 Tour de France got underway, no one was thinking about Pantani much. The day before, 22-year-old Jan Ullrich had eviscerated his opponents in a 55km time trial in and around Saint-Etienne. The young German was already in the yellow jersey, but his margin of victory in the time trial — three minutes and four seconds over second-placed Richard Virenque — made his lead virtually unassailable. The focus among the press the next morning was on how many Tours Ullrich would win in his career. Five? Seven? 10?
Pantani had finished second to Ullrich on stage 10, a 252km monster, with 6,000m of climbing, that finished up the Arcalis climb in Andorra. Ullrich, clad in the German national champions jersey, looked unstoppable, his seated attacks demonstrating the raw power that made him the most realistic candidate to be the “new Eddy Merckx.” Pantani, still regaining fitness after his Giro crash, was best of the rest.
Jan Ullrich climbs to victory, and the yellow jersey, in Andorra in stage 10 of the 1997 Tour de France. (Gero Breloer / picture alliance via Getty Images)
But Pantani’s relationship with Alpe d’Huez was bigger than form, or talent. He only won 24 races in his career, but two of them were up the Alpe. In 1995 he defeated yellow jersey and eventual race winner Miguel Indurain on its slopes. Two years later he does the same to Ullrich.
Pantani had targeted this stage from the start of the Tour and his Mercatone Uno team helped set the pace as the peloton made their way from Saint-Étienne to the foot of the Alpe but even once there Pantani bided his time in the early skirmishes.
The start of Alpe d’Huez is always a complicated moment for any rider as the road goes from pan flat through the village of Le Bourg-d’Oisans to the steepest part of the climb from the famous left-hand turn up to the first hairpin. Go too hard there and your whole effort can be ruined. In 1997, it was Ullrich’s Team Telekom squad and Virenque’s Festina team who took up the furious pacesetting, with one rider from GAN, Cédric Vasseur, taking a flier off the front before getting engulfed by the peloton.
Speaking to French television after the stage, Pantani confirmed he had struggled on the early hairpins: “We started the climb a bit fast; I fell back a bit in the first few kilometers, but once I reached the head of the group, I started to pace myself, and in the end, I was right.”
Marco Pantani, back right, follows Jan Ullrich and Richard Virenque on the lower slopes of Alpe d’Huez. (Patrick Kovarik / AFP via Getty Images)
Soon the race had thinned down to four elite competitors. Ullrich in yellow, Virenque in polka dots, Pantani (who had thrown his yellow cap to the crowd just after the first hairpin — always a sign he meant business, sometimes he would symbolically discard his diamond nose stud too) and Tour de France champion Bjarne Riis, who had had to cede leadership of Team Telekom to Ullrich.
Pantani was climbing, as ever, with his hands in the drops and out of the saddle, the powerful Ullrich able to stay in his seat and keep up, and happy to let Virenque close gaps when Pantani upped the pace, turning a huge gear by modern standards. “I always use a 39 (front chainring), yes, 39. I was a 39 x 19, 17, 16, it depends a bit on the climbs, let’s say. Anyway, 39, 19, 17, 16, those gear ratios,” Pantani said after this stage, ratios that would horrify riders in the 2020s.
Present Red Bull-Bora-hansgrohe DS Patxi Vila, who rode as a professional in the 2000s, told The Athletic this week that “Back in the day I used to put on a 25 or 30 (rear cassette) when it was like an impossible mountain, like I remember myself climbing the first time Mortirolo (In Italy) with a 39×25. Then we put on a 35 and it was like: ‘Woah.’ I think science and cycling science has much more knowledge nowadays and we just make better choices, and that’s faster, no?”
Riis was the first to lose contact with the group with five of the 21 hairpins ticked off. Six turns later and Virenque reached his limit and dropped back, leaving Pantani and Ullrich alone.
But even Ullrich, on his way to winning the yellow jersey and in the best form of his career, could only hold Pantani’s wheel for a few hundred metres more. The little Italian quickly built up a lead of more than 20 seconds, with a typically exuberant crowd the biggest danger to his chances of victory. At one point Pantani was forced to angrily shove a fan in a headdress who gets too close.
It’s striking too, just how many race motorcycles are around Pantani as he climbs to victory. Not great for the lungs, almost certainly useful for going up the climb slightly quicker.
Marco Pantani shoves an over-exuberant fan on his way to victory in 1997. (Patrick Kovarick / AFP via Getty Images)
Pantani’s time of 37:35 for the 14.5km route was 25 seconds quicker than he had managed in 1994 — he was the fastest rider that day but Roberto Conti won the stage from a breakaway — and 30 seconds faster than he managed in 1995, his breakthrough global win. It’s worth noting here that some regard the 1995 ascent as the quickest — as based on the modern, slightly shorter, 13.8km route, Pantani was five seconds faster in 1995 than he was in 1997, with his 1994 ascent 20 seconds further back. But those are the three fastest times; however you cut it, Alpe d’Huez is Pantani’s mountain.
He looked set to dominate mountain stages from 1995 onwards, but a horrific head-on crash with a car at Milano-Torino in October of that year almost ended Pantani’s career. It took him almost a year to return to the peloton.
The 1997 win at the Alpe was Pantani’s first victory since the crash in Turin. It was proof he could still win at this level, and he could one day win the Tour de France. It remains, even on grainy 1990s video, a masterclass of going uphill on a bicycle.
But proof in the context of 1990s cycling is a loaded word. The 1997 Tour was the end of the sport’s long age of innocence. A year later, the 1998 Tour (won by Pantani) almost collapsed in on itself under the weight of the Festina Affair, when its team helper Willy Voet was stopped by customs officers on his way to the race’s start in Dublin with a car full of doping products. It began a chain of events that quickly pulled back the curtain on cycling, a sport that had fully embraced systematic team-led doping.
Pantani never tested positive in his career, although he was removed from the 1999 Giro d’Italia — while leading the race with just two stages remaining — for having a too-high red blood cell count (to protect their health, riders were not permitted to have a haematocrit of more than 50 percent; Pantani’s when tested on the morning of stage 21 was 52 percent).
At that point Pantani was the Giro and Tour de France champion, yet would win just two more races (both Tour de France stages in the 2000 edition) in his career. He died of a cocaine overdose in a hotel room in Rimini on February 14, 2004, aged 34.
Marco Pantani won the 1998 Tour de France — the high point of a troubled life. (Joel Saget / AFP via Getty Images)
There are plenty who can’t rewatch this era of cycling, but there are others who can still recognize the efforts made, however they were constructed. As Matt Rendell writes in his book The Death of Marco Pantani, “Watching contemporary sport means acknowledging surface reality as an interim state, prone to reevaluation, even far in the future.”
The three other protagonists on the Alpe on that afternoon in 1997 — Ullrich, Riis and Virenque — all confessed to doping during their careers. Riis’ 1996 Tour win, and Ullrich’s 1997 victory remain in the record books, unlike Lance Armstrong’s seven successive Tour wins between 1999 and 2005.
Pantani, like Ullrich, was connected with the Operación Puerto case that broke in 2006, the bookend to a decade of turmoil for the sport.
But 37 minutes and 35 seconds lives on as a high-water mark of the places 1990s cycling took itself to. Knowledge of the era’s low points can’t erase the aesthetics of Pantani dancing up Alpe d’Huez. Even people cast as sporting villains can perform heroics.