The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour De France: Doping, Cover-Ups, and Winning at All Costs (33 page)

When I crossed the line I was dimly aware of the big crowd going crazy. Then I saw Haven. I saw her beaming smile, which was getting bigger by the second.

Gold.

Our world exploded in happy pandemonium. Our phones were blowing up with congratulations and offers; back home in Marblehead I heard people were going bonkers. I could picture my parents: my dad hugging everybody in sight; my mom quieter and more dignified but her eyes shining with pride.

Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton.

That night I didn’t want to take the medal off; it felt so good, looked so beautiful. I set the medal on our bedside table, woke up in the middle of the night, and picked it up to make sure it wasn’t a dream.

My agent started receiving calls: sponsors, talk shows, speaking engagements. In Athens, corporations wanted to pay me just to hang out for a couple of hours in an Olympic hospitality tent. It felt crazy, getting paid to stand around and rub elbows for an hour or two. But I took the check. If I felt guilty about it, I pushed that feeling down by telling myself all the usual things.
It was a level playing field. I worked the hardest, and whoever works the hardest wins. After all I’d been through, I deserved this
.

I kept touching the medal, running my fingertips over it, feeling the weight in my hand; I couldn’t keep my hands off it. I think what I loved most about it was the feeling of permanence. Winning a gold medal was something nobody could ever take away from you.

I was getting my massage when I heard the door-hinge squeak. I opened my eyes to see the solemn face of my team director, Álvaro Pino. I gave him a smile, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Tyler, come see me when you’re done here,” he said.

It was twenty-nine days after the Olympics, and I was with my Phonak team in a town somewhere in Spain’s Almería province. Haven had gone back to the States for a friend’s wedding; my team asked me to ride the Tour of Spain. My form was good, and now I had a chance to cap my comeback with my first grand tour victory. The race had gone okay: I’d won a stage but lost some time in the mountains. I figured Álvaro wanted to talk race strategy.

When the massage was done, I got up, dressed, and hustled to Álvaro’s room. He bade me sit down, and looked at me with big, concerned eyes.

“The UCI called. They tell me you have a positive A test for transfusion of another person’s blood.”

I almost laughed. Because it was crazy—as Álvaro knew. He’d been the one to arrange our team transfusion before the Dauphiné. Why would anybody use anybody’s blood but their own? The test was wrong. No way.

“I know, Tyler, but—”

—That can’t be right. Are they sure it’s me?

“They’re sure.”

—Are they sure the test is positive?

“That is what they tell me. The A sample. They will test the B sample next.”

—There’s no fucking way.

Álvaro tried to soothe me but I was exploding with questions—where’s their proof? What’s this fucking test? Who do I call? Where is this lab? We told the press I had stomach troubles and I dropped out of the race. We found team owner Andy Rihs, who was at the race. He looked in my eyes and asked if I’d done it. I didn’t blink. I looked in his eyes and told him I was innocent.

I went to my hotel room, took a deep breath, and dialed Haven. I tried to make it sound like a glitch, a harmless fluke that would soon be fixed, but I could hear the tremble in her voice, and I’m sure
she could hear it in mine. Haven was no fool. She knew precisely how serious this was, and she knew we were now in a race: we had to get this taken care of before the media found out. Once it hit the Internet, the story would be everywhere, and I’d be stained. I told Haven everything was going to be okay, and I tried to sound convincing. I hung up the phone and sat in silence.

This was the moment, the fork in the road. Everyone who gets popped experiences it: that eerie calm before the storm, those few hours when they can decide to tell the truth or not. I’d like to tell you that I thought about confessing, but the truth is I never considered it, not for one second. Confession felt impossible, unthinkable, an act of insanity. Not just because I’d spent years playing the game, telling myself that I wasn’t a cheater, that everybody did it. Not just because it would mean the shame of being exposed, or the loss of my team and contract and good name, or having to tell my parents. Not just because confession would implicate my friends, possibly end the careers of my teammates and staffers—after all, it wasn’t like I’d done all this solo. But mostly because the charge didn’t make any sense to me. The UCI was claiming I had someone else’s blood in my body—and I was 100 percent sure that I didn’t. Should I ruin my life and others’ lives by pleading guilty to something I hadn’t done? To me, the answer was clear: No.
^*

Andy, Álvaro, and I huddled, and tried to figure out a strategy. We all knew the protocol: the testers take two samples, an A sample and a B sample. My A sample had tested positive; the B sample hadn’t yet been tested. If the tests matched—and they almost always did—then I was officially, publicly positive, automatically suspended, and would have to fight the test with USADA, the anti-doping
organization that has jurisdiction over every American professional cyclist. Our thoughts immediately went toward disproving the test for blood transfusion, which, we were discovering, was a brand-new test. In fact, I was the first person to test positive. Rihs was supportive, said he’d help me get the best lawyers, the best doctors, even spend his own money to fund an independent scientific investigation of the test.

Then it got worse. Two days after the Tour of Spain positive, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) informed me that my A test from the Olympics had also tested positive. My heart sank. This wasn’t some random glitch of the test; it was a pattern. Now they had two results, two glowing test tubes, two uphill battles for me to fight.

Life became a nightmare. I flew to Lausanne, Switzerland, to watch the lab conduct the test of the B sample. When the media swarm started humming with news of my positive test, I held a press conference in Switzerland alongside Rihs, and we said all the right things—we’d do whatever it took to clear my name. I tried not to lie too much. I know that sounds crazy—I mean, there I was, having doped consistently for eight years, professing my innocence—but I instinctively tried to keep things as close to the truth as I could. I felt like I was an actor trapped in a terrible play, with no choice but to move ahead.

“I’ve always been an honest person since I grew up,” I said. “My family taught me to be an honest person since I was a kid. I’ve always believed in fair play.… I’ve been accused of taking blood from another person, which if anybody knows me, knows that that is completely impossible.… I can guarantee you the gold medal will be staying in my living room until I don’t have a cent left.”

Underneath my brave front, though, I felt powerless. I knew all too well how these things could be handled, if you had the connections. Back in 1999, when Lance tested positive for cortisone, it was handled quietly with Tour officials, and solved with a prescription. Back in 2001, when Lance had the suspicious EPO test at the Tour
of Switzerland, the same thing had happened: he’d had meetings with people at the lab and it all went away. Lance worked the system—hell, Lance
was
the system. But who could I call? Who would help me?

No one.

After the press conference, I checked my messages and texts. I was hoping to hear some messages from my Postal or Phonak friends, the guys who understood what I was going through. I wanted to hear some “hang in theres” or “thinking about yous.” But I didn’t. My phone was filled with messages and texts from journalists. That was it. Haven would be in the States for another week. I was alone.

Not knowing what else to do, I traveled back to Girona. I felt like a fugitive. I wore my sunglasses and pulled my ball cap low, imagining the accusing stares:
There he goes. Cheater. Doper
. I walked down the narrow street and unlocked the gate to our shared courtyard. I was never more grateful that Lance wasn’t around. I walked upstairs to our apartment and locked the door behind me. I sat down on one of the stools next to the kitchen counter, and I stared at the floor.

I don’t know how long I sat there. A day? Two days? I didn’t eat. I didn’t sleep. I didn’t cry. I felt dead inside, a zombie. I stared at the floor for hours, trying to accept that this was happening. Trying to get ready for what lay ahead. I stared at the floor and tried to harden my mind.

I’m not gonna let this beat me. I’m not going to become an angry or bitter guy. Nothing is going to change.
Nothing is going to change
.

I’m going to get through this. It might take a while, but I’ll get through.

I’m still Tyler. I’m still Tyler. I’m still Tyler.

Getting popped makes you go a little crazy. You’ve spent your career inside this elite brotherhood, this family, playing the game alongside everybody else when suddenly—
whoosh
, you’re flushed
into a world of shit, labeled “doper” in headlines, deprived of your income, and—here’s the worst part—everybody in the brotherhood pretends that you never existed. You realize you’ve been sacrificed to keep the circus going; you’re the reason they can pretend they’re clean. You’re alone, and the only way back is to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers so that you can, if you’re lucky, grovel your way back to rejoining that same messed-up world that chucked you out in the first place.

When Marco Pantani got popped in 1999 and 2001, he got depressed, and ended up overdosing on cocaine in 2004. Jörg Jaksche suffered from depression after his bust; so did Floyd Landis. Jan Ullrich was treated in a clinic for “burnout syndrome.” Iban Mayo maybe had the best reaction: when he was busted he quit bike racing, and I heard he became a long-distance truck driver. In the days after my positive test, I fantasized about doing something like that, maybe getting a job as a carpenter.

But I couldn’t quit, not now. Neither could Haven. So we set out to clear our name. It was our old reflex of getting ready for a big race—except now we had to deal with mountains of legal and scientific paper, trying to destroy this test before it destroyed me.

We poured all our energy into the project. We hired the best sports-doping lawyer we could find, Howard Jacobs, and set up an office in our Colorado house. We dug into the history and reliability of the test, especially when it came to false positives. We found that false positives can be caused by a number of conditions, including chimerism, a rare fetal condition that can result in a person having two distinct blood types, also called “vanishing twin.” While we never claimed that I was a chimerical twin, the press had a field day making jokes about my “vanishing-twin defense” as if that were the centerpiece of our strategy. The press didn’t understand that our job was to throw the kitchen sink at the test, to cast its credibility into doubt. (Law, I was discovering, works like bike racing: try everything, just in case it works.)

Early on, we received some good news: I’d be keeping the Olympic gold medal. For an unexplained reason, the Athens lab had frozen the B sample, rendering it untestable and therefore failing to confirm the positive A test. This was good news, not just for the gold, but because it showed that the lab was sloppy.

We also learned a disconcerting story about a Swiss man named Christian Vinzens. According to reports in Swiss newspapers, Vinzens had attempted to extort Phonak officials before the positive results went public by claiming to know which Phonak riders, including me, were going to test positive; he was demanding payment from team officials in exchange for making the problem go away. While we were never able to prove any causal link between Vinzens and the test, it added to our sense that there was more to this story for us to uncover.

Meanwhile, our friends and families supported us 100 percent. People were incredibly kind: they wrote letters, sent emails, even donated money. A high school friend started believetyler.org; red wristbands were sold that said BELIEVE.
^†