The intimate biography of the charismatic Tour de France winner Marco Pantani, now updated to include the 2014 and 2015 investigation into Pantani's death. National Sporting Club Book of the Year Shortlisted for the William Hill Sports Book of the Year Award 'An exhaustively detailed and beautiful book . . . a fitting, ambivalent tribute - to the man, and to the dark heart of the sport he loved' Independent On Valentine's day 2004, Marco Pantani was found dead in a cheap hotel. It defied belief: Pantani, having won the rare double of the Giro d'Italia and the Tour de France in 1998, was regarded as the only cyclist capable of challenging Lance Armstrong's dominance. Only later did it emerge that Pantani had been addicted to cocaine since 1999. Drawing on his personal encounters with Pantani, as well as exclusive access to his psychoanalysts, and interviews with his family and friends, Matt Rendell has produced the definitive account of an iconic sporting figure.

The Italian love affair with sport is passionate, voracious, all-consuming. It provides a backdrop and a narrative to almost every aspect of daily life in Italy and the distinctively pink-coloured newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport is devoured by almost half a million readers every day. Narrating the history of modern Italy through its national passion for sport, Sport Italia provides a completely new portrayal of one of Europe's most alluring, yet contradictory countries, tracing the highs and lows of Italy's sporting history from its Liberal pioneers through Mussolini and the 1960 Rome Olympics to the Berlusconi era. By interweaving essential themes of Italian history, its politics, society and economy with a history of the passion for sport in the country, Simon Martin tells the story of modern Italy in a fresh and colourful way, illustrating how and why sport is so strongly embedded in both politics and society, and how it is inseparable from the concept of Italian national identity. Showing sport's capacity to both unite and deeply divide, this book reveals a novel and previously unexplored element of the history of a society and its state, which will be an essential read for sports fans, historians and students alike.

For eight years, the Tour de France, arguably the world’s most demanding athletic competition, was ruled by two men: Lance Armstrong and Floyd Landis. On the surface, they were feature players in one of the great sporting stories of the age–American riders overcoming tremendous odds to dominate a sport that held little previous interest for their countrymen. But is this a true story, or is there a darker version of the truth, one that sadly reflects the realities of sports in the twenty-first century? Landis’s title is now in jeopardy because drug tests revealing that his testosterone levels were eleven times those of a normal athlete strongly suggest that he used banned substances, and for years similar allegations have swirled around Armstrong. Now internationally acclaimed award-winning journalist David Walsh gives an explosive account of the shadow side of professional sports. In this electrifying, controversial, and scrupulously documented exposé, Walsh explores the many facets of the cyclist doping scandals in the United States and abroad. He examines how performance-enhancing drugs can infiltrate a premier sports event–and why athletes succumb to the pressure to use them. In researching this book, Walsh conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with key figures in international cycling, doctors, and other insiders, including Emma O’Reilly, Armstrong’s longtime massage therapist; former U.S. Postal Service cycling team doctor Prentice Steffen; cycling legend Greg LeMond; and former teammates of both Landis and Armstrong. Central to the story is Lance Armstrong’s relentless, all-consuming drive to be the best. Also essential to this narrative is Floyd Landis, the unassuming, sympathetic hero who was the first winner of the Tour de France after Lance–and the first ever to face the threat of having his title revoked. More than anything else, this book will ignite anew the debate about whether there is room in the current sports culture for athletes who compete honestly, whether sports can be saved from a scandal as widespread as this, and what changes will have to be made. With a compelling narrative and revelations that will stun, enlighten, and haunt readers, David Walsh addresses numerous questions that arise in that crucial space where sports meet the larger American culture.

This book considers the manner in which the making and implementation of law and governance is changing in the global context. It explores this through a study of the deployment of the global anti-doping apparatus including the World Anti-Doping Code and its institutions with specific reference to professional cycling, a sport that has been at the forefront of some of the most famous doping cases and controversies in recent years. Critically, it argues that the changes to law and governance are not restricted to sport and anti-doping, but are actually inherent in broader processes associated with neoliberalism and social and behavioural surveillance and affect all aspects of society and its political institutions. The author engages with concepts and arguments in contemporary social theory, including: Dardot and Laval on neoliberalism; Agamben on sovereignty; Hardt and Negri on globalisation; and others including Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, and Louis Dumont. The work seeks to answer a question posed by both Foucault and Agamben; that is, given the growing primacy of the arts of government, what is the juridical form and theory of sovereignty that is able to sustain and found this primacy? It is argued that this question can be understood by reference to the shift from a social or public contract that was understood to be the foundation of society, to a society that is constituted by consent, private agreement and contract. In addition, the book examines the juridical concepts of the rule of law and sovereignty. Commencing with the Festina scandal of 1998, the Spanish case of Operación Puerto and concluding with the fall from grace of the American cyclist Lance Armstrong in 2012, the principal processes examined include: - The increasing crossing of the borders between different legal regimes (whether supranational or simply particularised) and with it the erosion of what we knew as state sovereignty and constitutionalism; - The increasing use of judgment achieved through the media and how this arrives at new configurations of moral panic and scapegoating; - The creation of a need for rapid outcomes at the expense of the modernist value or version of the rule of law; - The increasing use of new and alternative methods of guilt, proof and ultra-legal detection.

The issue of doping has been the most widely discussed problem in sports ethics and is one of the most prominent issues across sports studies, the sports sciences and their constituent disciplines. This book adds uniquely to that catalogue of discourses by focusing on extant anti-doping policy and doping practices from a range of multi-disciplinary perspectives (specifically ethical, legal, and social scientific). Doping and Anti Doping Policy in Sport offers an important critique of contemporary anti-doping policy and should be essential reading for any advanced student, researcher or policy maker with an interest in this vital issue.

'Maunder's book is more than just a biography of the rise and fall of a complicated man . . . It is also a critique of the damage that myth-making and the media can do to an athlete; a study of what happens to a demigod when thrown from Mount Olympus' The Times Charly Gaul is a forgotten cycling legend. Once a household name across Europe, the diminutive Luxembourger won the 1958 Tour de France and the Giro d'Italia twice. A unique rider, Gaul was supremely gifted at climbing and resilient even in the foulest weather. His pedalling style was smooth and swift, and he could set an unmatchable metronome rhythm on a mountain climb. 'Mozart on two wheels,' was how one contemporary writer described him; another dubbed him 'The Angel of the Mountains'. At the end of his cycling career Gaul disappeared, becoming a hermit living in a forest in Luxembourg. What drove Charly Gaul into a recluse's life? In Angel of the Mountains, Paul Maunder seeks to uncover the truth about Gaul, his psychology and the circumstances of his withdrawal from society. In rediscovering Gaul's enigmatic life, we find not only an unlikely hero but also a larger truth about the nature of sporting success.

If it's on the bike, it's in the book. The world of cycling is one of death-defying feats and obscure mechanical oddities, heroics and geekiness in equal measure. In Cyclopedia, renowned two-wheel aficionado and acclaimed sports writer William Fotheringham delves deep into this world to unearth rare nuggets of amazing facts and enthrallling anecdotes. This essential book is an A-Z compendium of everything you could ever want to know about the bicycle, from the history of the Tour de France to Chris Hoy's dominance of the Beijing velodrome, from the origins of the quick-release system to the diet that powered Graeme Obree to the world hour record, from Lance Armstrong's rise and fall to the slang words used for performance-enhancing substances, from the literature of cycling to the perils of vicious dogs. Cyclopedia has all the equipment, the races, the chases, the faces, the places, the drugs, the sex, and the scandals to convert any amateur cyclist into a fully fledged bike expert.