Back in 2004, cycling’s last ever Giro-Tour double winner, Italy’s Marco Pantani, died of what was deemed to be a cocaine overdose and the country, and the cycling world for that matter, went into mourning for one of the greatest climbers of all time.

Fast forward ten years and Rimini’s head prosecutor, Paolo Giovagnoli, had reopened the case in September and hearing are now proceeding and a Christmas deadline is looming.

Pantani evidently had problems with drugs off the bike and he had performance enhancing drug issues on it too. In 1999, he was thrown out of the Giro despite leading the race overall. This came just a year after he did the infamous Grand Tour double.

Pantani’s life began to go off the rails after his humiliation at the Giro. He was involved in 4 car accidents between 1999 and 2000 and he had two cocaine overdoses before his fatal one in 2004.

Pantani’s parents Tonina and Paolo argued foul play over the last 10 years and paid lawyer Antonio De Rensis to look into it. De Rensis collected information, presented it to Giovagnoli and convinced him to reopen the case with a focus on the voluntary homicide of Pantani.

His theory, according to reports by Italian newspapers in August, is that Pantani let known men into his room early in the morning on Valentine’s Day. The men hit Pantani, forced him to drink cocaine diluted in water and carried his body down the stairs of the bi-level room.

De Rensis identified a water bottle in the room that was never analyzed. Francesco Maria Avato, a legal medical expert also hired by the Pantani’s, identified wounds on his body caused by others, not by a fall.

La Gazzetta dello Sport says that Giovagnoli is speking to people who were close to Panatani. Doctor Giovanni Greco and friend Michael Mengozzi have already spoken to him.

“Pantani had a compulsive behavior when it came to cocaine,” Greco said in the 2004 case.

“He’d isolate himself for days, consuming impressive quantities, smoking it and inhaling it.”

Mengozzi arrived at the hotel Pantani was staying in at 10:15pm, just 15 minutes before the media broke the news of his death, making him a person the prosecutor may be interested in.

Mediaset TV aired a video, which De Rensis could use in court. The video was aired with interviews with journalist Davide Dezan and Parma’s ex-head of police scientific investigation.

“There are people walking in the room with no gloves and no protection, and they touch everything,” Dezan said. “We enter the bedroom, there is a [water] bottle that has never been taken into consideration and that could have been used to force Marco to drink a lethal amount of cocaine as has been suggested.”

“These images show, unfortunately, that there was little attention when entering the scene,” added Garofano. “The doctor that wants to touch an object without gloves, that worries me. It shows little care about contaminating the scene.”