The Tragic Hero

This weekend the 2008 edition of the Tour de France started. The first few stages of this fascinating cycling race made me think back of my favourite riders from way-back-when, the "coureurs" who could make those 6 hour long mountain stages worth watching. History has seen many great riders, but my all-time favourite must be Italy's Marco Pantani.

Pantani's life, on and off the track, is intriguing to say the least. Journalist Matt Rendell wrote a great book about it called "The Death of Marco Pantani". Nicknamed "il Pirata" he was one of the most talented climbers in cycling history, Armstrong's main rival and an Italian national hero. His name however was also connected to doping scandals, he got caught red handed during 1999's Tour of Italy, retired from cycling in 2003 and sank into terrible depression and drug use. In 2004 he was found dead in a hotel room in Rimini, the cause of death was heart failure due to acute cocaine poisoning.

In his book Rendell points out Pantani was absolutely unable to cope with the amounts of attention his every move received in the media and the pressure to win from his fans. After the doping scandals he was involved in, shame and "the weight of the world on his shoulders" made his tendency to self destruct overpower his will to live.

Pantani's "tragic hero" life story does not stand on itself. In sports, but even more so in music, there are many examples of artists who are mentally unable to deal with excessive (media) attention and fame. It seems that some sort of internal mechanism kicks into gear that just wants to destroy whatever has been achieved, instead of enjoying it or expanding it. More recently, Amy Winehouse seems to be following the same path as Pantani, or Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Ian Curtis (pic), the list goes on and on.

This has always fascinated me. Is it a form of extreme insecurity, that when the eyes of the world are upon you, it becomes increasingly more difficult to progress or even sustain what you have achieved? That you need to escape from this insecurity (for instance by obsessive drug use) to make yourself feel better (even if only for a short amount of time) or to numb yourself to influences from the outside world? It's likely. Also, the realization that you are lived by the people around you, that you have no control over where you want to go and what you want to do, could explain why you take charge of and destroy the one thing no outsider could possibly control : your physical and mental wellbeing.

Why is this self-destruction mechanism present in some of us, and not all of us? I could name many artists in history that have lead a long life, died of natural causes and left a legacy of great inspirational works of art. To go back to Marco Pantani, Rendell's book points out that in Marco's childhood there were already clues of bi-polar disorder and manic depression, and that his jump to fame only accelerated the symptoms. So there must have been something at the root of it all. In other "tragic hero" stories you will find childhood/early teen experiences that explain the final chapter of one's life.

It is an assumption, but perhaps fame is not the cause for someone's demise, but merely the catalyst and accelerator of an already existing mental issue. So there is no escape. The tragic hero is doomed from the start.