When it came to Pantani’s failed blood test at the 1999 Giro, a well-known criminal claimed his mafia contacts had foreseen the race’s dramatic finale.

“If you have money, bet against Pantani because he’s not getting to [the finish in] Milan” was their reputed advice.

Matt Rendell, Pantani’s biographer, has always been dubious about the rumours of mafia involvement.

“When the Camorra wants to fix something, what it does not do is somehow establish contact with the employees of the haematology department of a hospital in Como,” he told BBC Sounds. “That is not the modus operandi. It’s slightly cruder than that, on the whole.”

But a government commission looking into mafia activities was less sure.

“Today, after this time, the possibility that the mafia may have altered the Giro d’Italia’s results remains an open hypothesis,” said Nicola Morra, the president of the Parliamentary Anti-mafia Commission, in December.

“We have not been able to close as we would have liked. That is, by being able to exclude it.”

The commission had found “several and serious” anomalies around the blood sample taken at the 1999 Giro. They found that the test tube containing Pantani’s blood had been marked with his name when, under rules imposed to guarantee riders’ anonymity, it should have been only identifiable by a number to a select few officials.

The commission had also found that Pantani’s blood sample was taken an hour earlier than indicated in a previous court case, opening a window of time in which his sample could have been tampered with.

“By correctly placing the time of the sampling from Marco Pantani at 07:46, It is possible to manipulate the test tube,” the commission stated., external

Of course, it could be that Pantani’s test result was entirely self-inflicted. That the drug testers caught up with a doper.

Christophe Bassons, a French professional cyclist who insisted on riding clean, estimated that 95% of riders were on EPO at the time.

As detection technology improved, his estimate was somewhat backed up by retrospective testing of urine samples collected from the 1998 and 1999 editions of the Tour de France.

Eighteen riders were found to have tested positive for EPO, external – Pantani among them – with another 12 riders’ results labelled as “suspicious”.

However, some riders of that era were also adept at managing their haematocrit blood tests to stay within the prescribed limits, by dodging drug testers and timing their consumption of EPO.

Pantani was highly unlikely to be a completely clean rider, but it seems he felt, on the day he was led out of his team hotel and out of the 1999 Giro, that he wasn’t cheating any more than his rivals.

His mother says Pantani left notes that back this up.

“He didn’t write ‘I didn’t take it’, he never wrote that,” she told BBC Sounds. “He said he’d do what he was allowed to do, but he never said ‘I didn’t take any’. He said that [on that day] he was OK.”

The perceived injustice of being unable to complete the defence of his title in front of his home fans could have been the start of Pantani’s downward spiral into cocaine addiction and isolation.

There are other anomalies around the circumstances of his death that have never been fully explained.

According to Professor Giuseppe Fortuni, at the time a lecturer in forensic medicine at the University of Bologna, Pantani’s body contained more than six times the lethal dose of cocaine – a quantity that’s almost impossible to take recreationally. Fortuni was the pathologist who carried out tests on Pantani’s body.

But suicide had been ruled out at the time of Pantani’s death – the coroner felt that if that had been his aim, Pantani would have used the prescription drugs that he had with him at the time.

While Miradossa, Pantani’s drug dealer, may not be an altogether reliable witness, he cast doubt on the circumstances Marco’s body was found in.

“I’m convinced that Marco was murdered. He was trying to find the truth. He was looking for something,” he told the Italian government’s Anti-mafia Commission.

“From my experience and from the photos and videos I have seen, Marco did not take drugs in that room.

“There was no equipment for smoking cocaine, which was Pantani’s preferred method of taking it. But there was cocaine in places on his body that suggested that he had sniffed it.”

Miradossa concluded: “Marco didn’t sniff, so whoever did the crime scene wasn’t aware of this fact.”

Tonina Pantani has been central to the push for further investigation into her son’s death.

“I’m convinced Marco didn’t die right there. There were too many things. Strange things…not his habits,” she told BBC Sounds.

“He would fall asleep in front of the TV. In that hotel, the TV was in the hall with couches. I’m sure he didn’t sleep above [in the mezzanine of the hotel room where the bed was and his body found] but below instead.

“Upstairs was all tidy, no mess. But below was chaos. The room was turned upside down. I asked the hotel manager whether there were damages to be paid; he told me, ‘No madam, nothing was broken, everything was simply disassembled’. What the hell were they looking for?

“I saw Marco in the coffin. I touched him, his hands. How on earth did he make such a mess in the room without a scratch? There were scratches on his face that made me wonder whether he’d been beaten before he died.”

Tonina also claimed that her son’s baseball cap was missing, while two jackets that had been found in the room didn’t belong to him.