Hamilton was raised in
Marblehead, Massachusetts, and attended
Holderness School in
Plymouth, New Hampshire, where he started cycling. After graduating in 1990, he attended the
University of Colorado at Boulder as a
ski racer but never finished the final semester of his
BA degree course in economics. In 2021 he married his long time girlfriend Kristina Hamilton and they had a baby boy together. In 2019, Hamilton joined Black Swift Group, LLC, an investment advisor and money manager based in Boulder, Colorado.
Olympic gold and doping confession 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 he failed a test for
blood doping (receiving blood transfusions to boost performance) at the Olympics. Two days after the announcement of his positive test at Athens, the IOC announced Hamilton would keep his medal because results could not be obtained from the second sample. The Athens lab had frozen the backup, which made it impossible to repeat the test. The
Russian Olympic Committee appealed to the International
Court of Arbitration for Sport to give Hamilton's medal to Russian silver medalist
Viatcheslav Ekimov. However, on June 27, 2006, the court rejected the request. In the
Vuelta a España, he won the stage 9 time trial on September 11, 2004, but left the race six days later, citing stomach problems. As winner of the stage, he was subjected to a doping test. He was told by the
Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) on September 13, 2004 that his two samples from two days earlier showed a "foreign blood population." After supporting Hamilton, Phonak team managers withdrew their support after a second member of the team,
Santiago Pérez, was found positive for the same offense at the 2004 Vuelta a España. The positive sample at the Olympics, and the positive test at the Vuelta were not the only indications that Hamilton was manipulating his
hematocrit level. In April 2004 his blood was found to have a high ratio of hemoglobin to reticulocytes (young red blood cells), indicative of EPO or blood doping. His score was 132.9; a clean athlete would score 90. The UCI suspends a rider if the score exceeds 133. This sample also showed someone else's blood was in his bloodstream. However, neither piece of evidence in isolation constituted a positive drug test (and the test for a mixed cell population had not yet been adopted), so no action was taken. On April 18, 2005 Hamilton was sanctioned by the
United States Anti-Doping Agency and received a two-year suspension, the maximum sentence for a first offense. On May 18, 2005, he appealed to the
Court of Arbitration for Sport but, after allowing Hamilton to gather evidence, the court dismissed his appeal. Hamilton claimed the UCI-sanctioned test was insufficiently validated (and may have returned a
false positive result) and that some of the agencies involved had concealed documents that would support his case. He also maintained that, even if foreign cells were present, they were natural and not the result of a transfusion. Hamilton was banned until September 22, 2006, two years from the date his "B" sample in the Vuelta a España was found positive. In 2010, Hamilton was subpoenaed by a federal grand jury to testify in their doping investigation of Lance Armstrong. Hamilton admitted in his testimony that he took banned performance-enhancing drugs during his cycling career. On May 20, 2011, he also made the confession in an email to friends and family after a taping of the TV news show
60 Minutes, during which he also implicated Lance Armstrong in the doping scandal. Hamilton then voluntarily surrendered the gold medal he won at the 2004 Summer Olympics to the
United States Anti-Doping Agency, which said it would continue its joint investigative work with the IOC. On August 10, 2012, the IOC officially stripped Hamilton of his 2004 Olympic gold medal and ordered that it be returned to them.
Operación Puerto On June 18, 2006, the Madrid daily
El País alleged that the Spanish civil guard investigation of doping in Spanish professional sport, "
Operación Puerto", had found that Hamilton paid more than US$50,000 to
Dr. Eufemiano Fuentes between 2002 and 2004 to plan and administer his use of performance-enhancing
erythropoietin (EPO),
growth hormone treatment, blood doping, and masking agents. El País charged that Hamilton's 2003 win of
Liège–Bastogne–Liège came days after a "double" blood transfusion planned by Fuentes. The evidence presented by
El País also implicated Hamilton's wife in facilitating Hamilton's doping. Fuentes was arrested with team director
Manolo Saiz in May 2006 as part of the Operación Puerto investigation. On June 26, 2006, Hamilton stated on his website: "I was very upset to read the accusations against me and to see my name associated with the Operación Puerto investigation in Spain. I have not been treated by Dr. Fuentes. I have not done what the article alleges. In addition, I have never been contacted by authorities in Spain regarding these allegations. Therefore, it is impossible to comment on a situation I have no knowledge of." The
Copenhagen daily,
Politiken, published further charges stemming from Operación Puerto on August 19, 2006. The article summarizes Hamilton's alleged doping program during 2003. It quotes Danish doping researcher Rasmus Damsgaard on the organization Hamilton's program would have required. It cites
Bjarne Riis, Hamilton's directeur sportif in 2003, denying knowledge of Hamilton's doping. And the article states that the reporters attempted to contact Hamilton on numerous occasions but were unable to reach him. The article's allegations are based on the rider's doping and racing calendar obtained by the paper. The calendar was seized in Operación Puerto. The doping calendar indicates use of EPO, growth hormone, testosterone, blood doping, and insulin on 114 days over seven months during the 2003 season. The racing program correlates with Hamilton's races in 2003, according to Politiken. The calendar includes two blood transfusions during the
Tour de France. “The first time before the three stages in the Alps and the second before the 12th stage – a 47 km individual time trial,” write the reporters. The article stated that such an ambitious program would have required assistance – “at least four or five people,” according to Damsgaard. The next day, August 20, 2006, the Belgian
Dutch language Het Laatste Nieuws newspaper published more details of Hamilton's doping diary. Among many allegations, the article claims he took EPO 30 times between December 2002 and February 2003 while riding for
Team CSC. In 2003, claimed Het Laatste Nieuws, Hamilton used doping on 114 of his 200 racing days. On September 14, 2006, USA Cycling announced information from the UCI "regarding Tyler Hamilton and his alleged involvement in 'Operación Puerto' along with a request to move forward with disciplinary action." USA Cycling referred the case to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. On April 30, 2007,
La Gazzetta dello Sport published allegations that Spanish authorities had completed a second dossier on Operation Puerto, 6000 pages long and naming 49 cyclists. Hamilton was again named, with the detail that he was #11 on Dr. Fuentes's coded list of clients. Hamilton did not admit any wrongdoing at the time, and his defense was based on personal integrity. As US cyclist
Bobby Julich who finished third in the Athens time trial that Hamilton won noted: :"It goes against everything I've ever seen or known from the guy. But the rest of us at the Olympics passed the test. Why didn't he? I'm sick of people who cheat, sick of cleaning up their mess and trying to explain it. There is heavy evidence against him. With that much evidence, I don't know how he's going to get out of it." The same year, Hamilton published a book,
The Secret Race, where he admits he was the client "4142" in Fuentes' documents.
Return to cycling Beginning in spring 2007, Hamilton began cycling again, having completed his two-year ban. He rode briefly for
Tinkoff Credit Systems. It supported Hamilton in the face of Operation Puerto rumors. However, on May 9, with rumors circulating about Hamilton's role in the April 30 dossier, the team dropped him for the
2007 Giro d'Italia. In September 2007, Tyler competed at the US national championship in
Greenville, SC, coming sixth in the time trial and 12th in the road race. In December,
Rock Racing said Hamilton would ride for them in 2008. Rock Racing was a professional team on the US circuit. Hamilton did not ride in the team's season-opening
Tour of California because of that race's rules against riders involved in doping investigations. Wearing his Rock Racing gear, Tyler Hamilton finished second of approximately 60 category one and two riders March 9, 2008 at a collegiate criterium in Denver's City Park. In July 2008 he won the
Tour of Qinghai Lake in China which is a top ranked race (UCI
2.HC). In August 2008 he won the US National Road Race Championship.
Second positive test On April 17, 2009 it was revealed that Tyler had failed an out-of-competition drug test; this time for a banned steroid (
DHEA), which he claimed to be taking for anti-depression purposes despite knowing that it is on the
World Anti-Doping Agency banned list. He announced his decision to retire. In June 2009, Hamilton was given an eight-year ban after testing positive for a banned anti-depressant.
Tyler Hamilton Training Since September 2009, Hamilton has been providing private training services to other cyclists.
Autobiography On September 5, 2012,
Random House (
Bantam Books) published Hamilton's memoir
The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs, coauthored with American writer Daniel Coyle. It won the 2012
William Hill Sports Book of the Year award. In the book, he details his career and his relationship with
Lance Armstrong, for whom he was a teammate and a confidant. It also details some of the doping practices he and Armstrong were using on the team, such as EPO injections and blood transfusions. They parted ways when Hamilton went riding for CSC. This decision was motivated by the fact that Armstrong had become cold and vindictive toward him. Hamilton then recounts the 2 years spent riding for
Bjarne Riis, his sympathy for the former rider and how Riis introduced him to Eufemiano Fuentes, a Spanish doctor who would be later investigated in the
Operacion Puerto doping affair. He then recounts his years on the Phonak Team when he tested positive during the
Vuelta a España to an alleged homologous blood transfusion. Despite admitting throughout the work that he very regularly used EPO, testosterone pills and patches, and
autologous blood transfusions (all banned practices), Hamilton staunchly opposed the sanction, since he had never used the blood of another person. It was speculated that Fuentes and his assistant had mixed the blood of another rider with his. His career in shambles, he raced for lesser teams after his suspension, tested positive for DHEA (in an OTC herbal anti-depressant) and retired. He later received a call from federal investigator
Jeff Novitzky, who wanted to talk to him. He refused and was served a
subpoena, whereupon he decided to tell everything. Some former teammates of Lance Armstrong and other witnesses appeared, until the federal government dropped the charges. The
USADA took over the investigation under civil law, and Armstrong was ultimately stripped of all his titles from August 1998 onward. Armstrong was also banned from bicycle racing and
triathlon competition. ==Major results==