When Marco Pantani attacked on a mountain, he did the thing that should not work: he stood up, threw the bandana down, and accelerated away from the best climbers in the world on the steepest part of the climb. In 1998 he won the Giro and the Tour in the same season, the last rider to manage the double. On his day, going uphill, Il Pirata looked less like he was racing than escaping.
The mathematics behind it is the cleanest in cycling. On a steep climb, against gravity, what matters above almost everything else is power-to-weight — the watts you can sustain divided by the kilograms you carry up the hill. Pantani was small, around 57 kilograms, and he produced a climbing power that, set against that weight, gave him a power-to-weight ratio at the absolute edge of the sport. Light, strong, and willing to suffer past where others stopped.
The honest part
You cannot write about Pantani's era without the rest of it. The late 1990s were the height of EPO, and the climbing performances of that period — his among them — sit under a shadow that has never lifted. In 1999, leading the Giro and seemingly on his way to another double, he was thrown off the race at Madonna di Campiglio over a blood value. Five years later he was dead, at thirty-four, alone in a hotel room in Rimini. It is a genuine tragedy, and it should be told as one, not as a footnote to the highlight reel.
So the numbers of that climbing era are not a clean benchmark, and we should stop treating them as one. What survives, and what is useful, is the principle underneath.
What to actually take from it
Power-to-weight is real, and on a long climb it is the number that decides where you finish. But there are two ways to improve it, and only one of them is safe. You can raise the power — through threshold and VO2max work that lifts sustainable output. Or you can drop the weight. The first is almost always the better lever for an amateur, and the second is where riders get into trouble.
Chasing extreme leanness, under-fuelling to hit a climbing weight, is how amateurs walk into low energy availability and the cascade of problems — hormonal, skeletal, immune — that comes with it. It wrecks the very power you were trying to express. The lesson Pantani's story leaves, read honestly, is to build the watts and to fuel the body that makes them. Get faster up the hill by getting stronger, not by getting dangerously light.