Thirteen years after the sudden death of Andrea Pinarello, who lost his life due to a cardiac failure in Gorizia, at the end of the first stage of the Giro del Friuli for amateurs, the case is reopened.

The Court of Appeal of Venice, in fact, has accepted the request submitted by the wife and three children of the Treviso entrepreneur, son of the great Nani, and has decreed "the opportunity to conduct a further investigative examination": the Tribunal has ordered a medico-legal consultation within the civil lawsuit filed against the two doctors and the accredited private facility - and their respective insurance companies - where Pinarello had undergone examinations to obtain the certificate of fitness for competitive sports activity.

After the criminal investigation was archived, the Treviso Tribunal had rejected in the first instance the multi-million euro compensation request by the Pinarello family: the reasoning stated that "the mere presence of an error by healthcare professionals is not sufficient, but it is necessary that there be a causal link between this error and the damage suffered by the patient".

The Pinarellos, assisted by lawyer Alessandra Gracis, appealed the sentence in Venice: the fourth civil section of the Court of Appeal (president Marco Campagnolo, advisors Elena Rossi and Gianluca Bordon) decided to appoint the forensic doctor Franco Marozzi to proceed with the consultation, which must be presented by the next March 31st.

The case - according to the documentation provided by the Pinarello family - begins on May 11, 2010: during a specialist visit with a sports doctor and subsequent cardiologist consultation, Andrea was found to have an extrasystole in the electrocardiographic tracings, with a consequent prescription for an echocardiogram and a cardiac Holter, the results of which Pinarello delivers on September 14, reporting having experienced "some sporadic and always brief episodes of palpitation" a few days earlier.

On record is the testimony of the sports doctor who requests further investigations that still highlight "arrhythmic episodes". The entrepreneur undergoes another Holter and a cardiac magnetic resonance in Treviso, after which he visits a cardiologist in Milan: here he is diagnosed with a "possible myocarditic outcome".

Pinarello is hospitalized in Milan from March 7 to 10, 2011, to undergo an ablation intervention on the right ventricle, without considering the critical issues of the left ventricle.

On April 4, 2011, Andrea obtains the fateful certificate, accompanied by the verbal advice "to avoid physical exertion for a certain period and until a new check-up".

With that certificate, Pinarello participates in ten races, but on August 3 at the finish line of Tavagnacco-Staranzano, unfortunately, his heart gives way. According to the defensive thesis, the release of fitness was not preceded by two exams provided by the Cocis guidelines and an additional stress test, despite the cardiologist having had the intuition on October 5, 2010, to prescribe an MRI "to exclude right ventricular arrhythmogenic dysplasia".

Now, as reported by Il Gazzettino in its current edition, it will be up to the court consultant to answer a series of questions outlined in the provision: "whether, under the given conditions, both subjective (specific competencies of the healthcare professionals involved) and objective, as resulting from the documented clinical history of the patient made available to them, further post-ablation assessments were conceivable, such as 24-hour ECG according to Holter".

And further, "whether it was possible and in what terms to evaluate the pathological finding highlighted by the magnetic resonance, with reference to the arrhythmic focus in the left ventricle, what the possible mandatory clinical options were, taking into account all the results of the specific case, and whether their execution would have determined, according to the criterion of logical probability, a different outcome from the one that occurred".