Tyler Hamilton: 2004 Tour de France

Outside Magazine, July 2004

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2004 Tour de France: The Ultimate Guide
The Agony Is the Ecstasy (cont.)


	Room with a view: Hamilton with his dog, Tugboat, on the balcony of his Girona apartment, one floor up from former teammate Lance Armstrong (Jeff Riedel)

LIKE MOST TYLER HAMILTON stories, the tale of his 2003 Tour de France follows a three-act dramatic formula: first a fateful crash, then a devastating injury, followed by an improbable comeback.

Act I: A sunny July afternoon in the riverside village of Meaux, finish of Stage 1. In his second season after leaving Armstrong's USPS team, Hamilton has elevated his game to a new level, becoming the first American to win the brutal 160-mile Liège–Bastogne–Liège race, in April, then winning the Tour of Romandie a week later. With the skilled CSC team behind him, he carries high hopes for the Tour, all of which quite literally crumple on a narrow curve near the first day's finish, when the usual thing happens—one rider twitches, another puts a foot down—sparking a hideous pile-up that knocks Hamilton over at 40 miles per hour.

"That hurt a lot," Hamilton says.

Act II: Two doctors x-ray and examine him. The right collarbone is fractured, a clean crack in the shape of a V.

As last year's Tour vividly illustrates, Hamilton possesses something the others don't: a whiff of mystery, the sense of something unknowable shifting beneath the placid surface.

The Tour's official newspaper is notified, headlines are written: Hamilton Out. Then a third doctor examines him and notes that, while the bone is broken, it is not displaced. In a Hamiltonian stroke of luck, the fracture occurred near the spot where he broke his collarbone in 2002, and a mass of fresh bone growth has prevented the new fracture from spreading. "C'est possible," the doctor says.

Act III: Hamilton, pale and bandaged, wobbles out for Stage 2. His suitcase is packed and brought to the first feed zone in anticipation of his dropping out. His 34-year-old wife, Haven, who met Hamilton at the 1996 Tour du Pont, where she was volunteering, ponders how she'll console him. But he finishes the 127-mile stage in the lead group, and the Tour is never the same.

"On a pain scale of one to ten," Hamilton says, "that was ten."

"It is the finest example of courage that I've come across," decrees veteran Tour doctor Gerard Porte in the press, adding that your average person would have taken four weeks off work. Historians root eagerly through the Tour's ample cupboard of noble wounded—Pascal Simon's broken shoulder blade in 1983; Honoré Barthélémy's broken shoulder and wrist, and injured eye, in 1920; Eddy Merckx's 1975 finish with a broken jaw—and watch as Hamilton steadily matches them all. The squad of filmmakers who are featuring Hamilton as the centerpiece of a 2005 Imax movie on how the brain works (called Brain Power) keep their cameras rolling, scarcely believing that God could script so perfectly. Inevitably, a rival team director accuses Hamilton and CSC of fakery, precipitating the rarely seen spectacle of a team parading X rays to prove one of their riders really is injured.

Barred by anti-doping regulations from taking any useful painkillers, Hamilton turns to scads of Tylenol and other, less conventional methods—like a good-luck vial of salt in his jersey pocket. Each night, CSC's lanky Danish healer, Ole Kare Foli, applies acupressure and "channels energy" while Hamilton sleeps.

It seems to work. A few days later, on the steeps of L'Alpe d'Huez, in Stage 8, Hamilton not only rides in the lead group but attacks four times. Then things suddenly get worse. Favoring the injury, Hamilton compresses a nerve in his lower back. The night after Stage 10, Foli tries to massage Hamilton to loosen him up for the needed spinal adjustment, but the pain is too great.

"That really, really hurt a lot," Hamilton says. "At least what I remember of it."

Haven has more vivid recollections. "Ty was lying there in the dark, and he couldn't move," she says. "Then he says, ‘Just do it, do the adjustment now.' Ole went to straighten him out, and Tyler's screaming and Ole is crying and I'm crying, wondering what could be worth all this."

Eight days later, Hamilton provides a succinct answer with an incredible Act IV in Stage 16, a day in which he is nearly dropped early on, is ridden back to the pack by his team, then breaks away and rides alone through the mists up Bagarguy, one of the Tour's steepest climbs, his eyes grimaced to slits, his cheeks, according to one account, streaked with tears.

He outrides the superior power of the chasing pack for 70 miles and wins his first Tour stage, giving television commentators plenty of time to let their voices dissolve with emotion as they declare it one of the longest and most courageous solo breakaways in Tour history. Hamilton's unexpected victory briefly eclipses all other story lines, including that of his former teammate Armstrong. As Hamilton sums things up, "That day felt really good."

It is a measure of the Tour's insularity that the full impact of Hamilton's feat doesn't hit home until a couple weeks later. It happens in an unlikely place, the trading floor of the American Stock Exchange, where he's been asked to ring the opening bell. Hamilton is a touch nervous about going there—a skinny cyclist in the trading pits of Wall Street? He finished fourth, remember?

Hamilton is game, though, and he follows the script, ringing the bell and making the rounds amid the craze of shouting NFL-size guys in their luridly colored jackets. Then it happens. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices one of the big shaved-head guys pointing at him and whispering to another big shaved-head guy. And pretty soon that second guy is whispering to a third guy, and before long a whole burly tribe of traders gather around Ty and they're going bananas! They know who he is, the whole collarbone story, and, what's more, they love him! Because in Hamilton the pit jocks recognize one of their own, a regular Joe with a secret streak of balls-out insanity, and they can't help but mark the occasion by giving him a new name: Tyler Fucking Hamilton. And all of a sudden Tyler Fucking Hamilton is shooting the breeze about the Yanks and the Sox, inhabiting this strange high ground of celebrity. Almost as if he's been preparing for moments like this his whole life.

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