"Even at the best of times, it was pretty dark."
Our exclusive interview with Tyler Hamilton will be on OTB AM tomorrow morning from 7:45am - to watch the whole interview with Tyler, subscribe to our YouTube, Facebook or Periscope channels or watch live tomorrow morning.
Tyler Hamilton was, in part, responsible for exposing the highest-profile doping scandal in sporting history. As a US Postal Service team-mate of Lance Armstrong, he took part in a blood doping regime that was as chilling as it was professional, and his relationship with Armstrong is now the stuff of sporting legend. In May 2011, Tyler admitted to taking part in an industrial-level doping programme that would ultimately disgrace Armstrong and - due to his central position in the sport - cycling itself.
It was with this in mind that OTB AM conducted an interview with Tyler to better understand his motivations for doing so, the mentality required to to lie on a worldwide scale, as well as how it felt when winning the medals and losing the war against journalists determined to expose them. Here, we give you a preview of what Tyler had to say.
"Standing on the podium at the Olympic Games - at the top step of the podium with a gold medal. It didn't feel like it should have. That's wrong. You should never feel that way.
"I felt a little bit empty. Obviously, it was still exciting but I had dreamed my whole life of winning a gold medal - in any sport, really. I remember watching the Olympic Games in 1980 - the Winter Olympics were in Lake Placid. I remember watching that US team win the hockey finals, and then Eric Heiden winning five gold medals in speed skating. I was like 'That's what I want to do.'
"Fast forward twenty-five years and I'm there in Athens and it didn't feel anything like it should have.
Once Hamilton immersed himself in the system, the riches and the cache associated with a successful sports team dulled the guilt and the emptiness - but it was in the witching hour where he began to feel the effects of his deception.
"You just keep going. Life was a hundred miles an hour at that time. Those feelings would pop up - usually when you're looking at the ceiling in the middle of the night, between 2 and 3 in the morning - I would call them 'committee meetings'. You would just bury those feelings and keep your nose to the grindstone and just keep going.
"But eventually, yeah - I had to deal with it all, I had to deal with the truth and what it did to me personally, on the inside. It was hard - I went through a dark period for a while.
"I got caught and I lied about it for a while, but I thought I was doing it for the right reasons - for myself, for my team-mates and for the whole peloton. Keeping that secret going. The code of the omertà. The code of silence."
The mafiosi analogy holds: it was a blood oath of a different kind, but Tyler's was no less strong in its psychological hold, or the gravity of the consequences of it bearing torn asunder. Lance had become a figurehead of sporting prowess, as well as transcending not only the sport of cycling, but sport itself. In 2004, the wrists of the great and the good and the great unwashed alike were adorned with the yellow of LiveStrong.
This meant that pressure on those that could let him down was made abundantly clear.
"I was prepared to go to the grave with my secrets. I didn't want to be the guy telling the truth. It took a grand jury subpoena. I backed up, backed up and backed up to the point where it was either jump off the cliff or tell the truth."
To watch the whole interview with Tyler, subscribe to our YouTube, Facebook or Periscope channels or watch OTB AM live tomorrow from 7:45.
