Tyler Hamilton: 2004 Tour de France

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Outside Magazine, July 2004

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2004 Tour de France: The Ultimate Guide
The Agony Is the Ecstasy
Hideous crashes? Shattered bones? Tyler Hamilton smiles through it all—which is just what he needs to beat you-know-who.

By Daniel Coyle


	"I prefer to let my legs do the talking": Tyler Hamilton in Girona, Spain, April 2004 (Jeff Riedel)

TYLER HAMILTON, WHO IS by some accounts both the toughest and nicest cyclist on the planet, has a certain look he gives whenever he tells one of his stories. It is subtle, but since Hamilton, 33, has built a career on subtle moves, it is worth attending.

Here's how it goes: First Hamilton makes eye contact; then he widens his boyish green eyes a fraction of an inch in faint surprise; then he tilts his head in an understanding nod.

"I crashed and broke my shoulder early"—eyes lock on—"but the doctors didn't really know it was broken"—eyebrows up—"so I just kept riding"—nod, smile. Pretty soon you're nodding and smiling, too, and the air fills with warm, brotherly affection, along with the unmistakable implication that if you'd somehow been in the same situation (which happened to be at the 2002 Giro d'Italia, a three-week race in which Hamilton finished second), you would have done exactly the same thing.

The irony of this gesture—that a man best known for enduring pain might put his energies into the pleasure of others—is not something Hamilton would appreciate, or even notice. It is simply what he does. It has fueled his ascent from washed-up college skier to a position as Lance Armstrong's lieutenant from 1999 to 2001, then to a spot as lead rider on the talented Danish CSC team in 2002, and to a

Tour de France 2004

CLICK HERE for Outside’s Guide to the 2004 Tour de France, and follow the race July 3-25 with our SPECIAL ONLINE COVERAGE.

fourth-place finish for that team in the 2003 Tour—despite racing three weeks with a fractured collarbone. At the 2004 Tour, Hamilton will captain a newly fortified Swiss team, Phonak, and take on the singular aim—insert your own Greek myth here—of supplanting his friend and former leader at the pinnacle of the cycling world.

Of course, that's not the kind of thing Hamilton would actually say—the most he'll tell you is that he hopes to finish in the top three. It's hard to believe he will find environs more hopeful than the ones he's in now, seated comfortably amid the springtime bustle of an outdoor café in Girona, Spain, where he trains during the European racing season each January to fall. But according to his rules, Hamilton isn't talking about self-centered things like hope or ambition—no, he's doing something more basic. He's counting his refurbished teeth.

"Eleven, or twelve, I think," says the Marblehead, Massachusetts, native, referring to the number of molars he had recapped after grinding them down to their nerves during the Giro. "It was a lot of trips to the dentist, that's for sure. And that drive into Boston—that's where my dentist is—that's no fun. Traffic can get pretty bad, you know?"

We know. We also know that Tyler Hamilton's niceness, like Britney Spears's appeal, is a phenomenon that is often observed but rarely comprehended. His five-foot-eight, 135-pound form radiates an almost paternal alertness to small needs, his hands reaching out to open doors, tickle babies, pay for coffees, scratch exactly the right spot behind a dog's ears. It would be easy to miss what dwells quietly beneath, namely a massive deposit of granitic reserve, a quality perfected by English Protestants and exported to Hamilton's New England hometown, a quality built on one rule: The bolder you are, the more deferential you must be.

"I prefer to let my legs do the talking," Hamilton likes to say. The rest of his body is not exactly uncommunicative: There's the long, white scar along the middle finger of his left hand, the result of a bloody crash in last year's Tour of Holland, in which he also cracked his femur. There's the tentacle of a scar above his right eyebrow, courtesy of a car door he encountered while warming up for a 2002 race, and the usual hieroglyph of road-rash scars on his legs and elbows—all of which Hamilton regards with cheerful indifference, or at least seems to.

"Somewhere deep inside, he's got that edge, that urge to kill," says former U.S. Postal Service teammate Jonathan Vaughters, 31. "The sport's too hard not to have it. But he buries it very well. I'm not saying he does it intentionally as a tactic. But as a tactic, it works."

Exactly what Hamilton is burying is the more interesting question, and might be why some oddsmakers slot him a notch above the second tier of Tour contenders, though still behind Armstrong and German Jan Ullrich (the 1997 Tour winner and five-time runner-up). There is evidence for their optimism: This is Hamilton's first year as sole team leader, and he will enjoy the unquestioning support of Phonak's eight other Tour riders, many of whom he handpicked. But there are other, less tangible reasons. As last year's Tour vividly illustrated, Hamilton, a strong climber and time-trialist, possesses something the others don't: a whiff of mystery, the sense of something unknowable shifting beneath the placid surface.

"Once, when I was 14 and he was 11, we were fighting," his brother, Geoff Hamilton, 36, says. "I nailed him, right on the button, and he went down hard. I was a lot bigger than him, and so I figured it's over. And then... . Ty bounces off the floor and comes at me, boom, like a tiger. I remember thinking, Whoa, what is this?"

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Contributing editor DANIEL COYLE, author of the novel Waking Samuel (Bloomsbury USA), is at work on a book about the 2004 professional cycling season.

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