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Tyler Hamilton has been accused of testing positive for blood doping, but he denies it.

COMMENTARY

By Jim Litke

AP columnist

updated 9:44 a.m. ET Sept. 22, 2004

Another sweet sports story turned sour with the news that Olympic cycling champion Tyler Hamilton tested positive for blood doping.

Because it almost doesn’t matter what happens from here on out.

Cycling insiders will tell you the 33-year-old American was the nicest guy in racing, one of the most deserving, and the last one they thought would get busted. Cynics, meanwhile, simply wink at the notion that anybody that good in such a dirty racket could be clean.

In the past, Hamilton stood up for the rest of his sport. Those words used to carry a lot of weight. This time he was speaking for himself. The sad part is that nobody gets the benefit of the doubt anymore.

“I am 100 percent innocent,” he said Tuesday while awaiting the results of backup tests. “I worked hard for that gold medal, and it isn’t going anywhere.”

The results of new and improved doping tests in the Athens Olympics last month and at the Spanish Vuelta less than two weeks ago say something else. Both found evidence of blood from another person, a signal that Hamilton received a transfusion, an old-school cycling ruse to boost performance by increasing the amount of oxygen-transporting red blood cells in his system.

Hamilton called that “completely impossible.

“No. 1, that’s risking my life,” he said, citing the fear of contracting AIDS. “No. 2, that’s risking my wife’s life. And for someone to accuse me of doing that ... I’m very angry about that.”

And he’s not the only one.

Summing up the mood in the riding community in the States, editor Steve Madden of Bicycling magazine said, “It’s a bad day for American cycling if it’s true. It’s a bad day, in fact, even if it isn’t true.”

The reason why is that stories abound about Hamilton’s courage, his long-suffering display of loyalty and his sense of fairness as a competitor. The thinking goes that if guys like Hamilton are dirty, then maybe the cynics have it right; maybe everybody else is, too.

In the 2003 Tour de France, just two years after giving up his job as Lance Armstrong’s chief lieutenant on the U.S. Postal squad to lead his own team, Hamilton broke his collarbone in the first stage and rode through the pain to a fourth-place finish.

In stage 15, after Armstrong bumped a spectator’s bag early in the climb and crashed, Hamilton raced to the front of the pack, waving his arms and yelling, forcing the other riders to slow and observe the code of honor that says nobody takes advantage of a fallen leader.

Armstrong caught up to the main pack, then raced away with breathtaking swiftness, winning that day’s race and setting the stage for the fifth of his straight Tour titles. When Hamilton won the next day’s race with a show of grit that defied everyone’s expectations, Armstrong called it “the biggest day of the Tour.”

Now those heroics, as well as the Olympic win that Hamilton called the “the highlight of my career, by far,” are tainted. Where once we marveled at human achievement, we now immediately suspect better living through chemistry.

So it should come as no surprise that rumors about Hamilton were already making the rounds. According to one, an analysis of his time-trial win in Athens revealed Hamilton’s “wattage” numbers — basically, a measurement of how much energy a rider produces and translates to the pedals — were significantly higher than normal.

His sponsor, a Swiss company named Phonak, insisted the new testing methods were untrustworthy. And despite firing former world champion Oscar Camenzind for testing positive for EPO just before the Olympics, Phonak chairman Andy Rihs insisted that even another round of positives in Hamilton’s backup tests would not necessarily convince him the rider was guilty of doping.

“I don’t fire innocent people,” Rihs said. “For me, Tyler is innocent as long as no one proves the contrary.”

A few others will withhold judgment, but not many. Three gold medalists in Athens have already been stripped and Hamilton would become the first American caught by drug testers. The concept of innocent until proven guilty still holds sway in a court of law here, but not in the court of public opinion.

And no matter how this story ends, all the good work Hamilton has done there is about to be undone.

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