"So put these pieces together and say to yourself, 'I have a blood test that is looking at whether there are cells from a different person in a person's body' -- well, the assumption is he had a transfusion and that's how they got there.
"The truth of the matter is they can get there certainly from a fraternal twin who has a different genetic identity and bone marrow stem cells can persist for life. So that's the deal."
USADA and its experts assail that theory as nonsense. They say, for instance, that blood banks would be dotted with donations containing "mixed populations" were it true, but they are not. "Maybe he should hire an exorcist," Dick Pound, the head of WADA, said with a laugh in a telephone interview, dismissing the notion of a "vanishing twin."
Jacobs, told of Pound's remarks, said: "Last I looked, he isn't a genetics expert from MIT, he's a tax lawyer from Montreal."
If not a "vanishing twin," then how is it that someone else's blood appears to have been in Tyler Hamilton's system? "That's the million-dollar question," Haven Hamilton said. "If we could explain it, we would. We would tattoo it on our arms."
She testified that among the reasons she is certain her husband would never have undergone a transfusion was the death last summer of their beloved golden retriever, Tugboat, who "immediately stroked" after the second of two transfusions.
Tyler Hamilton had tucked the dog's red tag into his helmet at the Olympics, and still wears it around his neck on a silver chain. The Hamiltons now have two new golden retriever puppies, Anchor and Tanker; each wears a red tag that says: "Believe."
The pups are there to greet Hamilton when he comes home from his long rides.
"If you're a guilty person and it's just a matter of time," Haven Hamilton said, "you can't go out in the snow and train in that kind of weather. You can't -- unless you know in your heart you should be out on the bike and you know in your heart you should be back on the racing circuit."
