Stationary bike: Hamilton in limbo

There is still the bike, always the bike. Tyler Hamilton opens the door to his hillside home above the spectacular Sunshine Canyon, puts on his racing helmet and hits the road for six hours, as he has most days for the past decade. One thing, at least, has not changed. One thing is not in doubt.

For nearly three months, ever since it was announced that the Olympic cycling champion tested positive for banned blood transfusions at both the Games and the subsequent Tour of Spain, Hamilton has been living in an odd, unsettling limbo.

He has not yet been formally charged with blood doping, which carries a two-year suspension, but his Swiss-based team has dropped him. He still has the gold medal he won in Athens, but the Russians have asked the global sports court to take it away. His old sponsors are sticking with him, but new ones are holding back.

"It has just been awful," says the 33-year-old native of Marblehead, Mass., who expects to plead his case next month before the US Anti-Doping Agency. "My whole life is up in the air.My whole life is wide open."

Hamilton, who won the admiration of fans worldwide for his daring, his doggedness, and his heroic defiance of pain, now finds himself marked down as a twotime doper.

"Everyone who knows me as a person knows I didn't do this," says Hamilton. "I grew up in a family where being honest was so, so important. Being called a cheater, knowing I didn't cheat, it's the worst feeling in the world. It's like somebody stabbed me in the back."

His diehard fans, many of whom have posted supportive messages on the "believetyler.org"; website, insist he's innocent. But two positive tests a month apart at two different events in two different countries, skeptics say, are conclusive evidence against him.

The International Olympic Committee, which let Hamilton keep his time-trial medal after it said that the doping lab mistakenly destroyed his backup sample, has all but called his victory tainted.

So has Dick Pound, president of the World Anti-Doping Agency, and Bobby Julich, Hamilton's Olympic roommate and fellow medalist.

"I know I earned both victories," says Hamilton, who has his gold medal draped around a moose sculpture in his living room. "But I know a lot of people don't look at it the same way I look at it, and that hurts."

Bitter spill to swallow This was supposed to be the glorious breakout year for theman who had been cycling's Other American behind Lance Armstrong, who had survived a series of harrowing bone-breaking crashes to become one of the world's top few riders.

Phonak, which makes hearing aids, had signed him to a seven- figure contract as the centerpiece of its new team, hoping he could dethrone five-time champion Armstrong in the Tour de France, the sport's most hallowed event.

That dream came undone in a nasty crash during the sixth stage, when Hamilton was in a mass pileup less than a kilometer from the finish. He vaulted over his handlebars and butchered his back. It was, Hamilton says, like being dropped from the sky and landing on top of a telephone pole.

Previous smackdowns hadn't fazed him: Hamilton shrugged off a broken shoulder to finish the 2002 Giro D'Italia (grinding down 11 teeth to the pulp) and a broken collarbone to place fourth in last year's Tour. But this injury, which tore muscle, was different.

"It's like you're in a race car and you're stuck in second gear," says Hamilton, who hung in for seven more stages before abandoning the race for the first time in eight starts. "You try to go into third and nothing happens. That's the way it felt."

The injury, which provided him with a precious month of rest and recuperation before Athens, proved a backhanded blessing.

"Honestly, if that didn't happen, I wouldn't have won the Olympics," he says.

Hamilton won the time trial convincingly, finishing 18 seconds ahead of defending champion Vyacheslav Ekimov. He saw the flag raised for him, heard the anthem played. The next morning, Hamilton provided the required blood sample, hung around Athens for a few more days, then went back to his in-season home in Spain before the closing ceremonies.

What he didn't know, and wouldn't find out for more than a month, was that his sample had been flagged as "suspicious" for a blood transfusion that was detected by flow cytometry, a test that identifies mixed red cell populations.

Because the "B" sample was destroyed, the test was ruled inconclusive.

But the suspicions led to Hamilton being tested again after he won a time-trial stage in Spain Sept. 11. This time, both samples came up positive.

Alvaro Pino, Phonak's team director, broke the news five days later when Hamilton was getting a postrace massage. His sample had come up positive for a homologous transfusion -- blood from another person. Don't worry about it, Hamilton assured Pino. It must be a mixup.

But Hamilton, who soon learned that his Olympic sample also was deemed positive, was shaken.

"The next morning I woke up hoping it was a bad dream," says Hamilton, who pulled out of the Tour citing a stomach ailment. "I spent a few days by myself in Girona [his wife, Haven, was in Marblehead] and it was awful. My mind was racing. How could this have happened? I didn't even know what a homologous transfusion was. I had to look it up on the Internet."

Homologous transfusions had been banned for two decades, but sports bodies didn't have a reliable test for them. This year, the IOC and WADA adopted the flow cytometry method used to detect hemorrhaging between pregnant women and fetuses.

"It's a long-established procedure, but the application is new," says Dr. Gary Wadler, a New York University medical professor and an expert on sports doping. "My sense is that it's quite accurate.

There are no false positives. There are false negatives."

Aware of the risks Most doped cyclists had abandoned transfusions in favor of the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin (EPO), but once scientists came up with a reliable test for EPO, word reached the labs that the cheaters were going back to transfusions.

The International Cycling Union spread the word last winter that there'd be new tests this season.

"The riders knew about it in January," Hamilton says. "They talked about it."

Their consensus was that an athlete would have to be crazy to risk a transfusion that could be detected in a blood sample for four months in a sport with year-round random testing.

"If I did want to cheat, why would I do something like that?" asks Hamilton, who says that his dog, Tugboat, who died last summer, was partially paralyzed after receiving a transfusion from another dog. "Four months -- that in itself says enough right there."

Hamilton says he requested a DNA test ("to make sure it's my blood") and offered to provide another sample. "They said, 'Oh, that isn't protocol,' " he says. "It's a brand-new test. You'd think they could bend the rules, make an exception.

I wasn't asking for a favor.

I was just asking for the truth."

Hamilton drove to Switzerland to be present when the B sample from Spain was tested. "What was in that vial was my life," he says.

When the B sample came up positive, Hamilton's life in limbo began. The IOC said he could keep his Athens medal because the B sample was ruined, but made a point of declaring that the A sample was undeniably positive.

Phonak, after saying it would back Hamilton -- "independent of the results" -- suspended him a day later.

Last month, in a last-ditch (and futile) attempt to keep its license on the pro tour, the team fired Hamilton, whose contract still had more than a year to run.

Both the suspension and the dismissal were his idea, Hamilton insists. "I thought it was best," he says. "My situation was affecting the whole team -- the riders, the staff, their families. It really didn't change anything. I'm not going to compete until my name is cleared."

Until it happened to him, Hamilton concedes, he thought doping cases were open and shut.

"If a test was positive I thought, well, the guy's positive," he says.

"Most of the time, the athlete denies it."

Almost all of the time, though, the lab results are considered conclusive by doping agencies and international sports federations.

The flow cytometry test, leading hematologists say, is highly accurate.

"The evidence provided in the [clinical] paper is pretty solid and convincing," says Dr. Carlo Brugnara, director of the hematology laboratory at Children's Hospital in Boston. "The Australian group that did the work is extremely careful. Technically, the method is robust and reliable."

Dr. George Garratty, scientific director of the American Red Cross Blood Services in Los Angeles, concurs. "The principle itself is completely validated," says Garratty, who has been using flow cytometry since the early 1980s. "If the labs are good labs and the controls are working properly, the test should be valid."

Unless Hamilton and his defense team of scientists and lawyers can convince USADA or the Court of Arbitration for Sport that the Spanish test was botched, odds are that he'll be suspended for two years, essentially a lifetime ban in a sport where most top champions are finished at 35.

"I'm not guilty" Until the verdict comes down -- and that may take months -- Hamilton is doing what he normally would do in the offseason -- hanging out with Haven, his two new dogs, and his old friends in Boulder, where he went to college.

Taking the bike for high-altitude training runs around his house.

And making his scheduled appearances for his sponsors and his foundation, which benefits muscular dystrophy patients.

"I didn't back off anything," says Hamilton. "I didn't cancel any of my commitments. Why should I hide? I'm not guilty."

The people who know him best still believe that, he says. So do a heartening number of fans from around the world who can't imagine that Tyler Hamilton, who has been clean for his whole career, suddenly became a double-doper.

But some friends and colleagues who Hamilton thought would be behind him have been noticeably aloof. "You might expect a phone call or an e-mail, but that's all right," he says. "I'm not one to hold grudges."

As for Julich, who told The New York Times that there is "heavy evidence" against Hamilton and questioned whether he could beat the rap, Hamilton shrugs. "He's got the right to his own opinion, but he hasn't heard all the facts," he says. "If the shoe was on the other foot, I wouldn't have said those things."

People tend to believe the lab results, and Hamilton accepts that. He understands why the financial opportunities that usually come with an Olympic gold medal and a feel-good story are on hold.

"I'm not bitter about it," he says.

"It's unfortunate, but I'm not bitter.

That's not why I tried to win the gold medal. If nothing ever comes monetarily from it, that's fine."

All he wants, Hamilton says, is to have his name cleared and to get back to racing. "If I could have the hearing tomorrow, I'd do it," he says. "The hard part for me is having to wait."

If things work the way Hamilton hopes they will, he and his defense team will convince the USADA that the doping test is flawed. Phonak will take him back, and his team will get a wildcard entry into next year's Tour de France. And maybe this time, his skeletal structure intact, Hamilton will pedal in triumph down the Champs Elysees.

If the verdict goes against him, what began as a midsummer night's bad dream becomes a twoyear nightmare and everything Hamilton ever worked and suffered for is tarnished.

"I can't imagine us losing this, so I'm not even thinking about it," says the man from Marblehead.

"It can't happen. They can't fail a clean athlete."