Despite failing a test for blood doping, U.S. cyclist Tyler Hamilton will keep the gold medal he won at the Athens Olympic Games because of a laboratory mistake, Olympic and anti-doping authorities said Thursday.
But in a turn that raises further questions, Hamilton's cycling team confirmed Thursday that both the initial and back-up tests on a blood sample provided by the cyclist at a race in Spain shortly after the Games were positive for doping, allegedly showing evidence of someone else's blood in his system.
Hamilton, 33, of Marblehead, Mass., said in a statement released Thursday on his team's website, "I will prove my innocence."
Hamilton's victory in Athens on Aug. 18 made him the first American to win the individual time trial, a 29.8-mile race, in a non-boycotted Olympics. After years of toiling in the shadow of U.S. cycling icon Lance Armstrong, most notably in the Tour de France, the Games gave Hamilton worldwide acclaim.
Now Hamilton is in limbo, and Olympic and anti-doping authorities, who have embarked upon an aggressive campaign to blunt doping in sport, must confront a setback rooted in a simple error.
In Athens, instead of properly refrigerating a sample of Hamilton's blood at 39 degrees after performing an initial test on it, a laboratory inexplicably froze it.
The International Olympic Committee notified Hamilton in a letter dated Sept. 16 that the initial test had revealed "two different red blood cell populations" -- his, and someone else's.
But freezing that sample -- down to about 5 degrees below zero -- destroyed it, the IOC's anti-doping chief, Arne Ljungqvist of Sweden, said in a conference call with reporters.
"Human error occurs," he said.
Blood doping has been a long-standing Olympic concern, particularly among athletes in sports requiring endurance, such as cycling in the Summer Games and cross-country skiing in the Winter Olympics. The idea is to get more oxygen to the muscles, which enables them to work harder.
One way to do that: a transfusion, which introduces someone else's blood into an athlete's system, increasing the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells.
An athlete's sample, blood or urine, is typically split into two parts, one for immediate analysis, the second to confirm -- or raise doubt -- about the first if it shows evidence of doping. The first part is called the A sample, the second the B.
It remains unclear how Hamilton's B sample was mistakenly frozen.
