While today is for most the Feast of St Valentine, for me and for cycling fans the 14th of February will always have a different emphasis.

I can still remember that feeling when I heard that Marco Pantani had died today 10 years ago. Knowing that he had lost the fight against the troubles that plagued his adult life.

I grew up in a house where cycling was the official religion. March meant the classics season, watching Museuuw, Ballerini and the Mapei team fight on the cobbles of Northern Europe. May meant the Giro d’Italia and July meant the Tour de France.

I’d sat next to my dad and watched the monotony of the tail end of the Miguel Indurain years, as Big Mig ground out wins in the time trial stages and controlled the race in the mountains. I remember Indurain cracking on Les Arcs in ’96 and Bjarne Riis ending his reign, and then in ’97 when Jan Ullrich stabbed Riis in the front and rode away from him in the mountains to take the victory.

But for all the brute force of Indurain and Ullrich, it was a long way from the romance of cycling of the past, and the everything-or-nothing of Bernard Hinault, Jacques Anquetil or Charly Gaul. And then there was Pantani.

I remember the first time I saw Marco Pantani attack in the mountains. It was stage 14 of the Giro D’Italia over Passo di Monte Giovo in 1994. I remember my dad talking about the gears that he was riding as he rode through the Dolomites. They meant nothing to me at the time, but I remember Pantani riding with his hands on the drops, out of the saddle, dropping through the gears without changing his cadence. Watching youtube videos of the stage today reminds just what an audacious attack it was, and a flash of brilliance that we would see again and again from Marco in the coming years.

His 1998 Giro-Tour double was a triumph of brilliant amateurish daring in the professional era. Compared to the strength of Jan Ullrich’s Team Telekom or Alex Zulle’s ONCE team, Pantani’s Mercatone Uno were minnows. And following the years of riders like Miguel Indurain taking calculated wins in the long time trials and working with his team to control the race in the mountains, Pantani attacked and attacked and attacked.

It was a supercharged performance in a supercharged era by a talented but volatile champion.

While I grew up as a child in the 90s with a bedroom wall covered in the posters that used to come with Cycling Weekly each week (usually a week late when we lived in Cyprus), I know just as much as anyone how tarnished the victories are of the riders that I worshiped.

But Marco Pantani’s problems ran much deeper than the EPO that fuelled the superhuman performances of the 1990s peloton. Alongside the highs came the crashing lows. On the road it was everything or nothing. And for all the great attacks and the scenes of Pantani marauding through the mountains and the drops of his Bianchi, there were just as many that blew up. And it was the same off the bike. The forces that propelled him and drove him on to victory were the same ones that could bring him crashing down when that top step on the podium didn’t arrive.

Marco fought with his demons all of his adult life and those demons finally took his life in a hotel room in Rimini on 14 February 2004. He was found dead of acute cocaine poisoning with a passport filled with tortured notes written by Pantani.

20,000 mourners attended his funeral in his hometown of Cesenatico to say goodbye to the greatest climber of his age.

I hope that Marco is finally at peace in the great peloton in the sky. Thanks for all the memories.