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 (cont.)


	Front runner: "If I fall on my face," says Hamilton, "there's no one to blame but me." (Jeff Riedel)

CRAZYKIDS, THEY CALLED IT. Not the parents—they didn't call it anything, because most didn't know it existed, and those who did know wished they didn't. This was strictly kids-only, six or eight of them, united around a simple proposition: to go out in the woods every day and do something big. Climb a mountain. Cross a frozen river—or, better, a partly frozen one. Tyler was 13, and it was how he spent his winter weekends with a few other kids at New Hampshire's Wildcat Mountain ski school, in the White Mountains. The group included Mark Synnott, who would grow up to be a big-wall climber, and Rob Frost, now a noted adventure filmmaker. But back then they were a bunch of restless pups who wanted to see how close they could sneak toward the edge and not get hurt.

If they did get hurt, they were usually too numb to notice. Wildcat Mountain, near Mount Washington, is a squat, north-facing slab of ice to which the term "resort" is usually applied ironically. Godawful weather is the norm, and from a tender age Hamilton was faithfully submitted to its charms, his family making the three-hour trip from their Marblehead home each winter weekend. Though Tyler had already displayed a somewhat alarming tendency to find pain (broken ankle, several stitched-up chins), Wildcat was the place where he spent time in its company.

After all, his parents, Bill and Lorna Hamilton, had met skiing Tuckerman's Ravine, a famously gnarly hike-in descent in the White Mountains, and had essentially stayed outdoors ever since. If you were a Hamilton in the 1980s, it was a given: Summers were spent sailing, winters skiing, and in between were rafting trips to Alaska and climbs on Mount Washington. Craziness was permitted on these adventures, even tacitly encouraged. Within the walls of the Hamilton house, however, another set of rules prevailed, mostly enforced by Bill, a computer consultant. Telephones were answered properly, meals attended punctually. And one of the most explicit rules regarded boasting.

"It just was not done," Jennifer Linehan, Tyler's 37-year-old sister, remembers. "If you talked big about something you'd accomplished, they would listen politely and then move on."

Not that there weren't things to boast about. All three Hamilton kids were good athletes, and by his early teens Tyler was one of the top downhill racers in New England. But that didn't mean he could act like it. After winning races, Hamilton was required by his father to congratulate the dejected losers. Hamilton would make the rounds, nodding and smiling—I just got lucky this time; next time it'll be you—and pretty soon the other kids would be nodding and smiling right along with him.

In 1987, Hamilton went to Holderness School, a sports-minded boarding academy near Plymouth, New Hampshire, where Crazykid energy was funneled into a grid of old-fashioned Episcopalian discipline, and where Hamilton roomed with the son of former East German cyclist Peter Kaiter, who introduced Hamilton to European-style bike racing. Hamilton attended mandatory church services and was instructed by people like Phil Peck, a former Olympic nordic coach who could recite the Book of Common Prayer and anaerobic-threshold statistics with equal authority.

In 1990, Hamilton entered the University of Colorado, in Boulder, as a freshman and joined the school's ski team as a walk-on. The following year, he broke two vertebrae in a mountain-bike crash, ending his downhill career and sending him to pedal off his frustrations in the Rocky Mountains. A promising part-time cyclist, Hamilton quickly excelled when it became his focus; he joined the university's cycling team in 1992—winning the collegiate nationals in 1993—rode for the U.S. national team in '94, turned pro in '95, helped Armstrong win the Tour with USPS from 1999 to 2001, and went to the CSC team in 2002. Each year he moved to a new level. "Baby steps," Hamilton calls them.

"Tyler started later than most," says Jim Ochowicz, who coached Hamilton at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and serves as president of USA Cycling, the sport's governing body in the U.S. "He might be 33, but his body isn't as beat up as a lot of the other guys who started cycling at 15. He's still got room to explore."

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