In this episode of Our American Stories, we meet Tyler Hamilton, an Olympic gold medalist whose journey through the world of professional cycling is nothing short of incredible. Growing up with a love for the outdoors in Marblehead, Massachusetts, Tyler’s grit and high pain threshold led him from a skiing accident to the bicycle. He quickly found himself racing professionally, ascending to the sport’s highest echelons and becoming a vital part of the US Postal team, riding alongside cycling icon Lance Armstrong on the challenging routes of the Tour de France.
But behind the glory and the roar of the crowds lay a darker truth. As Tyler navigated the intense world of elite cycling, he was faced with the pervasive doping culture that shadowed the sport. This difficult crossroads forced him to confront his values, especially his family’s emphasis on honesty, and make choices that would ultimately reshape his life and expose hidden realities. His powerful story is a testament to integrity, revealing the quiet courage it takes to stand for truth, even when it means challenging the very foundations of a sport he loved.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 2: Let’s take a listen.
Speaker 3: My name’s Tyler Hamilton. I live here in Missoula, Montana. Grew up in Marbletote, Massachusetts. Great family, older brother, older sister, loved the outdoors and loved to spend time out in nature. First, it was my love for skiing that kind of got me excited at being outdoors. Him a ski racer. After an accident with the University of Colorado’s ski team, I broke my back and then started my cycling career kind of by accident.
Speaker 4: It happened fast. I was a bit of a late bloomer in cycling.
Speaker 3: But, you know, I’ve always had like a high pain threshold, and I think I was born with it.
Speaker 4: I don’t know. My parents are tough.
Speaker 3: My grandparents were tough, and so I think that was the biggest asset that I had as a bike racer: just, you know, that never-give-up mentality and just, you know, don’t listen to the pain. Growing up in Marble At, Massachusetts, in the seventies was pretty awesome. I was born in seventy-one. Yeah, I mean, my parents didn’t really put many demands on my brother or sister at all, you know.
Speaker 4: I mean, they’re like just trying to…
Speaker 3: do well in school and working hard, and they liked just competing in sports if we were interested in it. But whether or not we were successful in sports, it didn’t matter.
Speaker 4: It didn’t matter, you know.
Speaker 3: The most important thing for them was, you know, being honest, being a good sport.
Speaker 4: And just being, you know, transparent.
Speaker 3: My dad said if we did have a family chrish, it would probably be, you know, honesty. And, uh, yeah, I got in trouble here and there, but it was, I got in a lot of trouble when I was dishonest, a…
Speaker 4: lot of trouble.
Speaker 3: It was really exciting to get my first pro contract. I signed it in, what, the fall of nineteen ninety-four.
Speaker 4: It was the original Postal team.
Speaker 3: It was under a different title sponsor then, but it was the original US Postal team, and it was under the sponsor of Montgomery Bell. The next year, 1996, it became the US Postal Team. I thought I had no business, you know, racing professionally, but obviously people believed in me, and I got a call from Tom Weisl, the head of Montgomery Securities.
Speaker 4: And the leader of the team.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he offered me a contract. I think it was thirty thousand dollars back then. And at the time when he made the phone call, I was painting my neighbor’s house to make extra money to just make ends meet, and I thought it was just going to be, you know, one year, maybe two years of doing this, and then had finish up college and get a real job and do the nine-to-five thing. But next thing I know, I’m on the start line in the Toitter France, which I thought was way beyond anything that I…
Speaker 4: could possibly do.
Speaker 3: Fast forward two years from there, we’re trying to win the Twitter France, and that was. That was with Lance Armstrong.
Speaker 4: That was in ninety-nine.
Speaker 3: But, yeah, I mean, we were kind of the bad news bears of cycling in the early years: ninety-seven, ninety-eight, even ninety-nine, when Lance won. You know, we were on a small budget team. Most teams have big bus, big shiny buses. We had like two rented little campers. It stuffed all nine riders into both of those and staff members, and one again in two thousand and one, again in two thousand and one, and with Lance. And then at that point I was, I felt like I could see myself in the same role. I could look back three years in the look ahead three years and see myself doing the same exact thing, which is being like a domestique, a workhorse for Lance in the Tour. So it wasn’t a bad thing, but I was sure that if I stayed in that role, I would definitely regret it someday and regret the chance of going off and maybe trying for myself seeing…
Speaker 4: what I could do.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 4: The doping and the sport of cycling.
Speaker 3: I mean, I remember hearing about it back in probably like 1994 when I was on the U.S. National Team, and then first year pro in 1995. I remember hearing a little bit about it, but every once in a while you read like a small blurb and it was like doping was happening over in Europe. You know, it wasn’t happening stateside. But I didn’t really realize it until I got to the highest ranks in 1997, when we did the Tour de France for the first time, and that’s kind of when I kind of gave into it. A team doctor came into my room for your, a few months into the season. We just finished a really difficult five-or-six-day stage race in southern Spain. I was just like a starfish on the bed, laying on the bed, and the team doctor walked in and told me like how proud he was of me, but that I had started taking care of my body, and you know, that’s when I happened. He was wearing this fly-fishing vest and pulled out a little red egg, egg-shaped capsule, and he told me what it was, and he told me that it was a testosterone and then what I needed to do. Yeah, so that’s how it started. I didn’t want to be, I didn’t want to participate in any of that, but I feel like at that level that was, it was either say yes to it, and at that point I knew a lot of my teammates were open. It was a hard decision, but I made the decision really quick, and then I thought about the consequences of it, like almost daily. It was also like he was inviting me into onto like the A team basically, you know, it was like the team within the team. Before that, I felt like I was on the B team, just trying to prove myself. And then all of a sudden, I think the team saw that that I was talented enough, they believed in me enough, saw that I was hungry enough, and that’s when I kind of got it, invited onto the whatever you could call it. We didn’t have an A and B team, but hypothetical A team, and that was a couple of months away from riding in my first Tour de France, and so that’s, you know, I was like, “Okay, I’m being invited onto this team. I need to, even though I know it’s wrong, I need…”
Speaker 4: to take this opportunity.
Speaker 3: So started with the red egg testosterone, and then I don’t know if, a month later, my first injection of EPO, which raises your red blood cell count.
Speaker 4: But you really wouldn’t feel it. You really wouldn’t feel anything. It was just a small little prick under your skin.
Speaker 3: Then, but if you did it consistently, you know, a few times a week over three, four weeks, eventually you’d feel a little bit of a difference. You know, going uphill felt a little bit more off the while riding a little bit faster at the same heart rate.
Speaker 4: And, yeah, you could feel the difference.
Speaker 2: It made it.
Speaker 3: I mean, out of all the things I did, that was the biggest game changer.
Speaker 4: EPO.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, within cycling, it was a bit of an arms race. I mean, doping was prevalent. I mean, at first, I didn’t really know how prevalent it was, and then I quickly realized that it wasn’t just myself and a few of my teammates on Postal; it was every team was doing it.
Speaker 4: It was rampant, and you…
Speaker 3: know, riders are changing teams on a yearly basis. Directors changed teams, team doctors changed teams, so, like, in general, the secrets were out, you know. When I first started doping in 1997, I mean, the teams would travel with it to the races, divvy it up to riders, and then send them a home with it in a little like care package.
Speaker 4: So it was very open.
Speaker 3: Wild West days that they weren’t worried about getting caught, you know. And then things came, like, kind of cracking down. While in the ’98 season, that’s when they had the Festina affair.
Speaker 4: They caught it: French team.
Speaker 3: I think it was at the Belgian border crossing over, and it was one of the staff members had a carload of performance in Hanston drugs.
Speaker 5: Last night, Jean-Marie LeBlanc, the director general of the Tour de France, issued a statement saying that Team Festina, the number-one team in the world, has been removed from this year’s Tour. Now this comes on the heels of an admission by the lawyer for Bruno Roussel, the team manager, that there was a doping plan in place for the use of performance-enhancing drugs under strict medical supervision.
Speaker 3: And that’s when Rogers went to jail. People became a lot more secretive. People just seemed like they just became a lot more worried. The EPO test came out, and the team doctors quickly figured out how to eat it and how to still take EPO without getting caught, and that meant kind of smaller-type doses and maybe a little bit more casistently.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and then under the…
Speaker 3: Scan, it goes through your body, clears through your body quicker. It was, oh, now in the vein instead of under the skin. Yeah, all these little tricks I didn’t like. Most cycles wouldn’t know this, but, like, all the doctors knew, and they they knew how to beat the test, so, like, before you even thought about it that there was handing you a cheet sheet basically.
Speaker 1: And you’re listening to Tyl Or Hamilton tell a heck of a story about his life in cycling, his family, and so much more, including how doping came to be and how it became just all a part of cycling life. I love what he said about his parents and their motto, the family crest: be honest. I got in the most trouble when I wasn’t honest. More of Tyler Hamilton’s story, his book, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France, Doping Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs.
Speaker 2: The story continues here on Our American…
Speaker 1: Stories, and we continue with Our American Stories and former Olympic gold medalist Tyler Hamilton’s story.
Speaker 2: Let’s pick up where we last left off.
Speaker 3: There were a few times during my career when, yeah, I knew I wasn’t clear to take a test, and when they had anti-doping out-of-competition at anti-doping tests, like, that’s when things became a lot more difficult. One time, I remember I was back home in my hometown of Marblehead, and got my wife and I, at the time, got a knock on the door.
Speaker 4: It was a pretty loud knock, and it…
Speaker 3: sounded like the knock you didn’t want to hear. So instead of opening that door, we just hit the deck, stayed low and stay quiet, and basically avoided a test.
Speaker 4: You were able to get at the time…
Speaker 3: I think you were able to have two miss tests before you got in trouble. Being a teammate with Lamps was, was, uh, of, I mean, I would say it was a challenge. You know, he was, he was a boss. He was the unofficial boss of the team, you know. I mean, even he was high, he was had more power than even our director, for sure. So, yeah, I mean, that came with consequences. It was just like he was the boss, and he laughed at his jokes. He didn’t, you know, you didn’t never talk to over him, and you try to sympathize with him when he was having a bad day.
Speaker 4: Or when things weren’t going great.
Speaker 6: And it was it was stressful because you kind of always had to be in your toes, and when you weren’t, and you maybe were, like, in his eyes, a little bit disrespectful or weren’t paying enough attention.
Speaker 3: And, yeah, things happen sometimes and wasn’t always the funnest, but, yeah, he also brought a lot of energy to the team. He had tons of energy, for sure. He was always making up, you know, funny sayings, and calm. He called, like to call a lot of people out, you know, with the exception of himself, maybe, but he called a lot of people out. And, you know, sometimes I was fun, but a lot of times it wasn’t, you know, just bullying. And, you know, if a rider went too fast, it was all not normal pandermal.
Speaker 4: As they would say, not normal, you know.
Speaker 3: But, but, yeah, well, I mean, we were we were all routing too fast at times. Eventually, in my career, yeah, I believe it was in 2002, 2003, I worked with a doctor by the name of Ufe Nana Fuentes. We called him Ufe. He was basically blood oping doctor. He h extract blood, store it for you like a lot of other cyclists and athletes, and then reinfuse it back into you when your when your body was depleted.
Speaker 4: So we’d usually…
Speaker 3: Text back and forth. Rarely, rarely, wo we talked to each other on the phone, but we definitely spoken code a lot. So, you know, to get give a blood bag, you’re going to give a present. Sometimes I have a present to give to you. I’d maybe say that in a text message. And, and I do remember this one time I texted him, like, “Hey, Ufe, I need to give you a bike,” meaning a bag of blood, basically, and he took that, literally took that, and said, “Oh, so great, I need a new bike.” And, yeah, I kind of got myself into a little bit of a pigeonhole. But, you know what, I had an extra training bike. I think I believe it was a Curbello, and, yeah, that made its way to Hoofed Meona Fontes. After that, I didn’t promise him anything else. Didn’t want to say I’m going to give you a car.
Speaker 3: So, yeah, I mean, I’ve had all sorts of problems with my teeth due to me grinding down grinding them down during my career, during painful moments. The first big accident I had where I started grinding severely was in the 2002 Cheered Italia, bombing down a descent, and the pins on my cassette on the back wheel snapped off. And it’s basically the same effect as like breaking your chain, so sprinting out of a corner, and that happened, and I went flying over my handlebars, laying on my shoulder, and I didn’t find out till the day after the race ended, you know, two and a half weeks later, that I’d broke basically the top of my arm, in my in my shoulder socket. So, yeah, I spent the rest of the race in a ton of pain. Whether it was riding, whether I was on my bike or off the bike, or even sleeping, I was grinding my teeth constantly, grinding, grinding, grinding. The same thing happened the next year in the 2003 Toward France. I crashed on stage one, and a mass crashed and broke my collarbone. Continued in the race, did the same thing, ground my teeth the whole way. I finished fourth overall, and on a stage, that off-season, I went to see the dentist, and, yeah, then I got it to have my whole mouth reconstructed, all caps on every tooth. So it’s been a process. And actually, in about an hour, I got to go to the dentist to get a new cap replacement.
Speaker 4: So sometimes people say, “Was it worth it to keep going?”
Speaker 3: You know, I got a lot of a lot of people praised me for keeping keeping going in the Tour de France and three, and it seemed like I got a lot of attention back in the United States, and, uh, and I didn’t really realize until I got back to my hometown of Marble At, Massachusetts, and, uh, they’d like a huge parade for me, and a couple thousand people came out and they gave me the key…
Speaker 4: to the town.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know, from the outside it looked really glamorous and, you know, how lucky for me. But, you know, on the inside, I was really struggling. And there I was having a smile and, you know, speak in front of, you know, thousands of people there in my hometown. And probably a month later, I was diagnosed with depression. At the hot really at that peak of my career, so I had this relationship with this deviant doctor Ufimana Fuente. Is he…
Speaker 4: Uh.
Speaker 3: It was the 2004 To France. You know, he text back and forth, arranged the meeting where he’s going to drop off a bloodbed, and I want to infuse, you know, a bag of my blood that I’d, you know, given to him maybe a month or two before. And they came to my hotel room. I got the infused blood infusion, and then probably about an hour later, I started feeling kind of hot, feverish, and I went to the bathroom, and I went to I looked down, and my yeurn was was like black, like filled with the dead red blood blood cells. So, uh, that was kind of a scary moment for me. You know, I didn’t know, I didn’t know what was. I figured right away, like, “Oh, it was, they gave me a… my blood bag had gone bad.” It probably had gotten too warm or had it been affected, and, you know, the blood cells had died, and then it was reinfused into me.
Speaker 4: So it was, uh…
Speaker 3: I mean, I was lucky I didn’t die really, and I continue on the race, but it was it was definitely an eye-opening moment, like, you know, that the system we were in was certainly not perfect. You know, another time I was after I basically gave it by a bag of blood. I was rushing out of the Madrid airport where Ufiano Wentz lived, and I wa…
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