Tyler Hamilton

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This article is about the cyclist. For the Canadian Idol contestant, see Tyler Hamilton (musician).

Image:Tyler Hamilton head.jpg Tyler Hamilton (born March 1, 1971 in Marblehead, Massachusetts) is an American professional road bicycle racer. He attended prep school at the Holderness School in New Hampshire. After graduating in 1990, he went to the University of Colorado at Boulder as a ski racer. A back injury ended his skiing career and he switched to cycling. He became a pro in 1995, riding for the U.S. Postal Service cycling team in the 1998, 1999 and 2000 editions of the Tour de France. Hamilton was responsible for protecting Lance Armstrong in the mountain stages of the Tour, as it was hard for other teammates to keep up. Hamilton also acted as a scout in the individual time trial stages, riding as hard as possible without regard to his finishing performance, and thus providing time split comparisons.

In 2001 Hamilton left U.S. Postal and signed with Team CSC. He was made a team leader under the tutelage of Bjarne Riis. Hamilton fractured a shoulder in a crash in the 2002 Giro D'Italia, yet still managed to finish second.

In 2003 Hamilton won both the Liège-Bastogne-Liège and the Tour de Romandie. In the 2003 Tour de France he cracked a collarbone in the first stage, but stayed in the race. He went on to win stage 16 with a 142 km solo breakaway, and placed fourth overall. For his stage win, Hamilton was awarded the Coeur de Lion (French for Heart of the Lion) prize, awarded to the most aggressive and daring racer of the stage.

In the 2004 Tour de France Hamilton raced for Phonak Hearing Systems. He dropped out on stage 13, after having continued back pain, mostly due to bruising incurred in a crash on stage 6.

He had developed a reputation for having bad luck, crashing during important stage races, but also for being a courteous, affable cyclist and spokesperson for the sport, especially in the United States. His wife Haven Hamilton and golden retriever Tugboat became recognizable fixtures at the races, appearing in photos and interviews. Late in 2003, Hamilton founded The Tyler Hamilton Foundation to raise funds for the Multiple Sclerosis Society, and to help amateur cyclists rise through the ranks.

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Doping and suspension

At the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Hamilton won the gold medal in the men's individual time trial. That medal was placed in doubt on September 20, 2004, after it was revealed that he had failed a test for blood doping (receiving blood transfusions to boost performance) at the Olympics. Two days after the announcement of his positive test result at Athens, however, the IOC announced that Hamilton would keep his gold medal because the results of a second, backup sample were inconclusive. The Athens lab had frozen the backup sample, which made it impossible to repeat the blood doping testTemplate:Ref. The Russian Olympic Committee has since filed an appeal with the International Court of Arbitration for Sport seeking to strip Hamilton of his gold medal and grant it to Russian silver medalist Viacheslav Ekimov.

At the time Hamilton had just withdrawn from the Vuelta a España. He won the stage 8 individual time trial on September 11, 2004, but resigned from the race six days later, citing stomach issues. Being the winner of the stage, he was subjected to anti-doping tests, and was informed by the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) on September 13, 2004 that his two test samples from 2 days earlier had showed the presence of a "foreign blood population."Template:Ref After initially supporting Hamilton, his Phonak team managers withdrew their support after a second member of the team, Santiago Perez, was found positive for the same offense at the 2004 Vuelta a España Template:Ref.

On April 18, 2005 Hamilton was sentenced by the United States Anti-Doping Agency to a two-year suspension from professional cyclingTemplate:Ref, the maximum sentence for a first-time offense. On May 18, 2005, he appealed the ruling to the Court of Arbitration for Sport but, after an adjournment to allow Hamilton to gather additional evidence, the Court dismissed his appeal on February 10, 2006 Template:Ref. Hamilton’s defense claimed that the UCI-sanctioned test was insufficiently validated (and may therefore have returned a false positive result) and that some of the agencies involved had concealed documents that would have supported his case. He also maintained that, even if a foreign population of cells was present in his blood, the cells were naturally present and not the result of a transfusion. He raised the possibility that they were from a demised twin present during his mother's pregnancy or that he was for some other reason a chimeral individual.

Hamilton is now banned from competition until September 22 2006, two years from the date his "B" sample taken in the Vuelta a España was found to be positive. Although current UCI ProTour rules would have effectively doubled the period of his suspension (until September 22, 2008), his positive test occurred before those rules were put into effect in 2005.

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