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This year, February 14, St Valentine's Day marks 20 years since Marco Pantani was found dead in a Rimini hotel room. 

This article was part of a special series of features created a decade ago, in 2014, to look back at Pantani's career and his tragic death. It has been updated, with new photographs added. It was also published in .

Anyone who has followed cycling for more than 20 years will remember where they were on Saturday, 14 February 2004, wဣhen news broke that Marco Pantani had 🏅been found dead in a small Rimini hotel. 

The Italian news agency ANSA announced his death at 10:42 pm with a single-sentence news flash. The news spread around the world🌄 in minutes.

I was at the Tour Méditerranéen in southern France. 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Mario Cipollini had won the day’s stage, and I was enjoying dinner with photographer Graham Watson in a tiny Provence hotel﷽ in the south of France.

A call from the Reuters news agency shattered the peac🌠e –♛ Pantani was dead.

It signalled the start of one of the most inteꦬnse🉐 and emotional days of my career as a journalist. 

After quickly writing a profile of Pantani, I realised I had to go to Cesenatico. I’d been there for team presentations, training camps and the celebrations when Pantani had won the 1998 168澳洲5最新开奖结果:Tour de France. This time, it would be for his funeral.

Early the next day, I started to drive across the south of France and northern Italy, stopping to write a story for a British newspaper and other stories for a special issue of Cycling Weekly.

Pantan🌟i&rsquo🐼;s death had struck everybody and was global news.

Arriving📖 in Rimini late on Sunday afternoon, I headed to the mortuary. Along with a handful of Italian journalists, I talked to Felice Gimondi and saw the detached lid of Pantani’s coffin waiting in a room. From behind a door we heard the outpourings of grief of Pantani’s sister Manola and his father Paolo before the chilling noise of the power tool tightening the screws on the coffin lid. It is a moment I will never forget.

I then visited the Residence Le Rose hotel in Rimini, where Pantani had been found. The air was damp, as it often is in February. Rimini seem꧅ed a co♋ld, lonely place to die.

In Pa𓂃ntani's hometown of Cesenatico, I visited the church with several other journalists to pay my respect💦s. 

We had all known Pantani from the Giro and Tour. We had all been touched by his sensitive character and his s🦩uccess as a rider. However, when Pantani’s mother, Tonina, recognised Alessandra Di Stefano from Italian television, she began to shout at us: “You’re my son’s assassins. You killed him,” waving at us to leave the church.

The day after, during the funeral in the packed chap♛el along the Cesenatico canel, Pantani’s agent Manuela Ronchi was the last to read out a message, stunning everyone by quoting what Pantani ha꧙d scribbled on nine pages of his passport a few months previously. 

It was a confused defence against t🌱hose who had demonised him and accused him of doping.

It ended with a call for honesty and a plea for people to speak out, perhaps against doping in the sport. Tragically, Pantani’s final words fell on deaf ears – we n✅ow know the dop🔯ing continued.

Following the ceremony, Pantani’s coffi🐎n was carried to the cemetery a kilometre away by several of his former teammates. The crowd walked in 🔴silence, accompanying Pantani to his final resting place next to his grandfather Sotero, who had bought him his first racing bike.

It was dark by the time I’d finished writing my stories and been inter𝐆viewed by several radio stations. I had a four-hour drive home but decided to visit the cemetery one last time. 

Pantani’s body had been placed in a concrete tomb above ground, wi🔯th a plastic cover carrying his name. The cement was still wet.💟 People stood in silence until the cemetery closed at six o’clock.

When I returned to my ca🉐r, it was impossible not to shed a tea𓄧r and finally release my own emotions. Pantani was dead, and Italian cycling would never be the same.

The sense of grief and loss in Italy remains even 20 ye🃏ars later.