Tyler Hamilton Quotes

Whenever I was on the podium, it felt weird. I was obviously happy to have done well, but it wasn't truly happy from the bottom of my heart.

I discovered Boulder not through cycling but skiing. I was recruited by the university for the ski team, and in my opinion, it's the best place for skiing - you have this super-light, fluffy champagne snow.

For me, having the opportunity to go to college was very important. To miss out on an education is a loss.

I knew that people disliked me, and there always will be, but that's the price you pay for being in the limelight, so to speak.

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.

You can call me a cheater and doper until the cows come home. But the fact remains that in a race where everybody had equal opportunity, I played the game, and I played it well.

If you do have a team where every rider has a huge list of results, that means everybody wants to do the race for themselves. The strongest team in the Tour is not the strongest team on paper.

The peloton was Facebook on wheels-and during this period, information was flying.

Lies suck; they tear you apart from the inside out.

I lied for years and years. And the thing about lies and secrets is that they eat you alive from the inside. I would not wish that pain on anyone.

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.

I'd never really experienced the West before moving to Colorado. The East Coast, where I grew up, has a lot of big cities, like Boston and New York, and is more densely populated, and I instantly fell in love with the big open spaces of the West, where you can see not just for a few miles but for a few hundred miles.

Once you start lying, you get kind of comfortable. You start believing it. Especially if you truly believe you didn't really cheat because you were doing what everybody else was doing.

I'm never satisfied. I always want to achieve more.

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.

Once in a great while I miss the racing, the feeling of winning. That rush. That adrenaline.

If you weren't a risk-taker, you were always going to be a step behind. You could be the best cyclist in the world, but if you weren't a risk-taker, you weren't going to win the Tour de France.

I guess when you risk hell, there's not much left to scare you.

The truth always finds it's way out, even years and years and years later. The truth always prevails.

They've pushed me down a big ravine, but I'll get back up to the top.

If you look at my career, I kind of got progressively better and better and better. I came closer to the top.