Cycling Heroes Tell the Truth About Doping

“Well, there’s a lot of other cheats and liars out there, too, who’ve gotten away with it. It’s not just Lance, you know? I mean, with a little luck, I’d still be out there today being a cheat and liar.”  - Tyler Hamilton

Like millions of others, I watched the Tyler Hamilton interview on Sixty Minutes in which he tells his own story of using performance-enhancing drugs in professional cycling and implicates world-wide hero and cancer-survivor Lance Armstrong in doping. 

I’ve been a cycling fan my entire life.  I grew up in a French-American household, and had the great fortune as a child to see the riders of the Tour de France pedal through my father’s village and up the mountain passes.  This fandom has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember really.  And always something foreign to most of the people I knew, outside the French community in which I was raised in San Francisco, until the Americans, first Greg LeMond and then, most famously, Lance Armstrong, arrived on the scene.  Now it’s wonderful: there is daily coverage of the Giro d’Italia, for example, hours of coverage at normal times, so unlike the old days before the Internet or this big boom in interest here.

It surprised me, honestly, just how sad I felt as I listened and watched Tyler Hamilton describe his doping experience, his pain at telling this truth, with all its repercussions, so clear in his face and voice. 

Yes, lying is wrong.  Doping is cheating.  I don’t disagree with any of that.  Liars and cheaters should be punished, not rewarded.

But just the same, I am so sorry, so sad, for how this tarnishes what has always been a truly magnificent sport, and for how hard the stars, the athletes and heroes to so many, go down. I’m so sad for Tyler and others who are coming forward now and spilling the beans, and for how mortifying it must be for them to have to make these admissions after years of silence about what really happened.  I think about all of the good that Lance has done outside of cycling, all of his work as a cancer survivor, advocate and fundraiser, how the Amgen Tour of California features a cancer-fighting agenda.  None of that would have happened without him and his many victories.  None of that excuses lying, either.  But still, damn, he is about to lose it all. 

It’s all just such a shame.

Of course this is not the only sport in which athletes dope or use any advantage available to them to succeed, especially when everyone around them is doing it and the culture encourages and requires it.  I’m not saying it’s right.  But back then, in the early part of the 21st century in professional cycling, how else were you supposed to compete at that level except by participating in the doping?

Two days ago, Tyler Hamilton voluntarily surrendered his Olympic gold medal, won in 2004, to the US Anti-Doping Agency.   He didn’t test positive at the Olympics, but he did get busted several weeks later at another race.  For years, he has probably known that he hadn’t earned that medal or many of his other successes purely on his own merits.  Surrendering the medal was the right move, the class move.

And so, really, was telling the truth.

The sport is still full of heroes, full of amazing feats of human endurance, perhaps more so now than in many years, as the testing culture replaces that of EPO.   And now new kinds of heroes too, like Tyler Hamilton, who tell the truth and take their lumps no matter the forces arrayed against them, no matter how many friends it costs them or how big the public humiliation.  That's truly heroic, and such a great lesson to us all no matter how painful it is to watch.