Here's a follow-up story about today's stage and Tyler's ride. Just came in off the news wire, distributed to our club newsletter.
Cheers,
Steve Cooper
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* CCB/Volkswagen. Racers wanted. *
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By Sally Jenkins
Wednesday, July 23, 2003; Page D01
If you're sick of bad-boy athlete stories, of greedy, entitled creeps and ruined angels and two-faced paragons, and you're in need of a restorative example, turn on the Tour de France and watch Tyler Hamilton ride through the mountains with a fractured collarbone, so determined to finish the race that he'll have to get his teeth recapped from clenching them against the pain. Or watch Jan Ullrich and Lance Armstrong exchange the most extraordinary courtesy in the midst of a vehement rivalry. Does the world seem gray and unpromising, and human nature mean? Console yourself with the Tour.
The guys in the Tour de France are just that, guys, with as many flaws as you or me. There's no guarantee one of them won't disappoint you tomorrow, but I don't think they will. The Tour is a peculiar event, and it's had its doping scandals in the recent past, but this week it represents something well worth examining, and that something is personified by Hamilton, the lesser known 32-year-old American from Marblehead, Mass., who has continued riding out of honor -- a gratuitous honor.
If Hamilton gets through the rest of the Tour he will have cycled more than 2,000 miles, over a hundred miles a day for three straight weeks, despite the collarbone fractured in two places and a badly twisted spine. He's a one-man antidote to the thieves' mentality so many pro athletes have -- which is to say, "If I can get away with it, I'd be a chump not to." Last week, a TV cameraman accidentally bumped his bad shoulder in a rush past him to interview someone else. A couple of days ago, a hotel elevator door malfunctioned, and closed on the same shoulder. When he gets home, "My dentist won't be too happy with me," he said, by telephone from France.
Why does he do it? "Just to be in the race is a feat in itself," he says. Hamilton has done this sort of thing his whole life; last year, he finished second in the Tour of Italy with a cracked shoulder blade. When it was over he had to have 11 teeth replaced, from grinding them in agony.
He only turned to cycling after he broke some vertebrae in a bad accident as a skier at the University of Colorado, and he has spent most of his career underpaid, working tirelessly and without recognition. He is just now having his finest season, at 32, because he spent most of his prime cycling uncomplainingly on behalf of Armstrong, helping him to three previous Tour victories as a member of the U.S. Postal team before he became leader of his own team.
It used to be that when Hamilton came home to the States from the Tour, nobody knew where he'd been.
"They'd say, 'How was your vacation in France?' " he laughs.
The conversation would go like this:
"I rode in the Tour."
"Oh. Did your wife do it with you?"
"No, uh, it's a big bike race through France."
"Really. Did you stop for some nice lunches?"
Hamilton's chances to get some due for his devotion were ended by a crash on the first day of this Tour, a bitter disappointment since he had a real chance of challenging Ullrich and Armstrong. He won the prestigious classic race Liege-Bastogne-Liege earlier this season, and would surely have finished among the top three in Paris on Sunday had he not been in a vicious pileup in Meaux. Sprinter Jimmy Caspar went down in front him, and his front wheel seized up, throwing him over the handlebars at 30 mph. "It was a domino effect, and I was in line," he says.
Initially, Hamilton kept riding just to help his team. But he has kept on, stubbornly, well past the point of reason, and is in seventh place. "Hamilton is an enormous surprise, a great surprise, a beautiful surprise," said race director Jean-Marie Leblanc. Other teams were at first skeptical about the severity of Hamilton's injury, given his ability to keep riding among the top 10, but X-rays show a V-shaped double crack in his collarbone. He has ridden with three layers of foam and tape on his bars, and reduced pressure in his tires to ease the shocks. But he's getting tired. "I've been fighting the pain for so long, it kind of saps you," he says.
Arguably no other sport requires the kind of sacrifice or maturity the Tour does, and for less recompense. The equation of work to adulation is simply different than that of an NBA player who runs up and down a court for 90 minutes, a couple of times a week. It's not a race for the self indulgent -- or selfish man's race, either. "When you worked that hard, you don't give up too easy," Hamilton says. "But you know, I'm not the only one who'd do something like this. A lot of other riders have the same characteristics."
This was amply demonstrated by the events of Monday. Hamilton was trailing Armstrong when Armstrong's bike flipped out from under him, the handlebars caught by a spectator's purse, and he hit the ground hard. As he struggled to his feet, bleeding, Ullrich slowed to wait for him, an almost incomprehensible act of sportsmanship. It was payback for a similar incident two years ago, when Ullrich skidded off the road down a dangerous incline, and Armstrong waited for him to catch up. When other riders started to surge forward past Ullrich, Hamilton raced forward and waved his arms, angrily urging them to slow down.
Ullrich could have attacked. His career was in the dregs a year ago after he tested positive for using the nightclub drug ecstasy, crashed his car, and injured his knee. He came back, got fit, and has been giving Armstrong the toughest fight of his career. But it's an unwritten rule among the riders that you don't attack a man down. The Tour is so grueling that it shouldn't be determined by bad luck, but by strength.
"What we did was out of respect," Hamilton said. "You want the strongest man to win. Had Jan kept going and won the stage it wouldn't have been fair. . . . We're competitors but we try to take care of each other a bit, and made sure the race is won by the strongest."
The Tour is a logistically and morally complex race. It's also said to be the only event in the world in which you have to get a haircut halfway through. What to make of this affair, in which riders would wait courteously if the leader crashes? Stephen Roche, the 1987 Tour winner, told the Associated Press, "The Tour de France is glamour, pain, deception, mountains, everything." William Fotheringham of the Guardian recently wrote, "The great metaphor inspired by the Tour de France is that of the race as a road to Calvary. It has been used over the 100 years since the great race was born to describe the process of a cyclist continuing in the face of great affliction."
It's been a week for weeping in American sports. A college basketball player was arrested for allegedly killing a teammate, and an NBA star was arrested for allegedly raping a 19-year-old. But the Tour, for all its moral ambiguities, has strangely been something fundamentally good, has offered some fundamental sense of sport, or civilization, or humanity.
CCB/Volkswagen, proud to be sponsored by..
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