Tyler Hamilton

“Once in a while, when I was younger, I'd lie, then tell the truth, and I'd feel better.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“Boulder was my U.S. base for the better part of 20 years, and it will always have a special place in my heart.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“If you like the outdoors, Colorado is a big adventure playground for adults: it's great for skiing, cycling, climbing, and hiking.”

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

“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'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.”

“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.”

“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.”