Tyler Hamilton > Quotes

“What people don't understand about depression is how much it hurts. It's like your brain is convinced that it's dying and produces an acid that eats away at you from the inside, until all that's less is a scary hollowness. Your mind fills with dark thoughts; you become convinced that your friends secretly hate you, you're worthless, and then there's no hope. I never got so low as to consider ending it all, but I understand how that can happen to some people. Depression simply hurts too much.”
― Tyler Hamilton

“I discovered when I went all out, when I put 100 percent of my energy into some intense, impossible task - when my heart was jack-hammering, when lactic acid was sizzling through my muscles - that's when I felt good, normal, balanced.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“Slowly, inch by inch, I felt myself recovering. After a few weeks, the darkness began to recede; my appetite for life returned. Haven was wonderful; she understood and nursed me through these weeks until I felt strong enough to go out in public, to get on my bike again.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“Here’s what I was learning: secrets are poison. They suck the life out of you, they steal your ability to live in the present, they build walls between you and the people you love.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“I guess when you risk hell, there's not much left to scare you.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“One day I'm a normal person with a normal life,” he said. “The next I'm standing on a street corner in Madrid with a secret phone and a hole in my arm and I'm bleeding all over, hoping I don't get arrested. It was completely crazy. But it seemed like the only way at the time.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“truth is a living thing. It has a force inside it, an inner springiness. The truth can’t be denied or locked away, because when that happens, the pressure builds. When a door gets closed, the truth seeks a window, and blows the glass clean out.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Lance is Donald Trump. He might own all of Manhattan, but if there’s one tiny corner grocery store out there without his name on it, it drives him crazy.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“As it turned out, the story he told wasn’t about doping; it was about power. It was about an ordinary guy who worked his way up to the top of an extraordinary world, who learned to play a shadowy chess match of strategy and information at the outermost edge of human performance. It was about a corrupt but strangely chivalrous world, where you would take any chemical under the sun to go faster, but wait for your opponent if he happened to crash.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Then there’s the superstition about spilling salt. One night midway through the Tour of Italy, my CSC teammate Michael Sandstød decided to risk breaking the rule. He purposely knocked over the salt shaker, then poured out the salt in his hand and tossed it all around, laughing, saying, “It’s just salt!” We laughed too, but more nervously. The next day, Michael crashed on a steep downhill, breaking eight ribs, fracturing his shoulder, and puncturing a lung; he nearly died.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Lance worked the system—hell, Lance was the system.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“You can tell a rider's fitness by the shape of his ass and the veins in his legs.”
― Tyler Hamilton

“The peloton was Facebook on wheels-and during this period, information was flying.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“We got through it. Haven made excuses for me to friends, and made an appointment with a terrific doctor, who put me on Effexor, 150 milligrams a day, enough to get my brain straightened out.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“In 2002 Hamilton crashed early in the three-week Tour of Italy, fracturing his shoulder. He kept riding, enduring such pain that he ground eleven teeth down to the roots, requiring surgery after the Tour. He finished second. “In 48 years of practicing I have never seen a man who could handle as much pain as he can,” said Hamilton’s physical therapist, Ole Kare Foli.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“You can grade your performance in a race the same way you would grade a test in school. If you cross the finish line in the lead group, then you earned an A: you might not have won, but you never got left behind. If you are in the second group, you get a B—not great, but far from terrible; you only got left behind once. If you’re in the third group, you get a C, and so on. Each race is really a bunch of smaller races, contests that always have one of two results: you either keep up, or you don’t.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Dr. Ashenden, in the wake of the confessions of Hamilton, Landis, and others, had gradually come to understand doping from the bike racer’s point of view. “Before, I saw them as weak people, bad people,” he said. “Now I see that they’re put in an impossible situation. If I had been put in their situation, I would do what they did.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“You’ve spent your career inside this elite brotherhood, this family, playing the game alongside everybody else when suddenly—whoosh, you’re flushed into a world of shit, labeled “doper” in headlines, deprived of your income, and—here’s the worst part—everybody in the brotherhood pretends that you never existed. You realize you’ve been sacrificed to keep the circus going; you’re the reason they can pretend they’re clean.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“losing weight was the hardest but most efficient way to increase the crucial watts per kilogram number,”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Floyd’s account of Ferrari relating his worries that steroids had given Lance testicular cancer in the first place.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Bjarne recommended his special technique: come home from a training ride, chug a big bottle of fizzy water, and take two or three sleeping pills. By the time you woke up, it would be dinner, or, if you were lucky, breakfast.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Just a few days ago, I’d been in the greatest shape of my life, beating some of the best athletes in the world on Mont Ventoux. Now I could barely make it up this tiny hill. We joked about it, because that was all we could do. But it was unnerving. It shook me deeply: my strength wasn’t really in my muscles; it was inside my blood, in those bags.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“The deadly mistake that Tyler, Floyd, Roberto [Heras], and the rest of them made when they left Postal was to assume that they’d find other doctors who were as professional. But when they got out there, they found—whoops!—there weren’t any others.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“I remember being impressed that they were carrying hepatitis vaccine—pretty thoughtful, given how many shots those riders were getting.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“I tried not to lie too much. I know that sounds crazy—I mean, there I was, having doped consistently for eight years, professing my innocence—but I instinctively tried to keep things as close to the truth as I could.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“I don’t understand the whole fuss at all. If you test someone 215 times and he is always negative, then the problem is in the test itself. Well, I’m not responsible.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“Here is the secret: You can't block out the pain. you have to embrace it.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France: Doping, Cover-ups, and Winning at All Costs

“Ullrich was like a superman—or, to be more accurate, a superboy. He’d come up training in East Germany, where the coaches lived by the maxim Throw a dozen eggs against the wall, and keep the ones that don’t break. Ullrich was the unbreakable egg, a Cold War kid who, like Lance, had grown up without a father and, with the help of the East German state, had turned his energy into the single most impressive physique in cycling history.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“a faster cadence put less stress on the muscles, transferring the load from the physical (the muscle fibers) to a better place: the cardiovascular engine and the blood.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France

“the only way back is to spend years and hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers so that you can, if you’re lucky, grovel your way back to rejoining that same messed-up world that chucked you out in the first place.”
― Tyler Hamilton, The Secret Race: Inside the Hidden World of the Tour de France