tyler hamilton night

[dixiesdad]

Attended a wonderful evening set up by Wheatridge Cyclery with the featured speaker Tyler Hamilton. What a super guy and he stayed over 1 1/2 hours after the presentation to sign autographs. His stories of the Tour were great and we saw a preview of a new Imax movie due out this year. The pics were breathtaking. I have never seen so many middlle aged men screaming in my life. It reminded me of the girls in the audience on the Ed Sullivan show in the 60's. Also saw Andy Hampsten (still one of my favorites) and Ron Keifel. I asked Ron ifhe had seen the video of the Motorola Team where Eddy Merckx refers tohim as a strong rider and he had not. I traded him initialing my New CSi 7-11 frame for a look at the video. Rode my CSi this weekend with the new 2003 Record group and Neutron wheels .. the ride is no doubt my favorite. I personally hope Tyler wins the tour this year but he has to quit changing teams as it is too expensive to keep buying the jerseys on the teams he is on! best of luck Tyler!:D

[Greg Wright]

Our bike club helped host Tyler last Tuesday night in Fort Collins. Wow--what a guy. He was very engaging and patient signing autographs. We're all just amazed at his pain tolerance as well as his incredible "bad luck". I can't begin to imagine how much damage I might endure by crashing at the speeds those guys achieve (and average!).

We're a small group in a mid-sized town and we drew 250 people as a fund-raiser. We raised around $20k for Tyler's two foundations--MS and Young riders.

[Johny]

To me, Tyler represents a hard-working class. Maybe not the most talented (I am actually not qualified to say so in cycling), but always gives more than 100%. Almost named my son after him... but did not want to put too much pressure on him :)

Go! Tyler! Go!

:banana: :banana: :banana:

[Kevin]

Greg Wright,

How did you go about arranging for Tyler to attend? Was their an appearance fee? Was their a min. for his charity?

Kevin

[Greg Wright]

:beer: Kevin--I (we) have a couple of advantages with Tyler here in Colorado. First, Tyler and his wife Haven recently purchased a home just outside of Boulder (Tyler went to CU on a ski-race scholarship back in the early '90's). Second, one of our race team directors, who has been diagnosed with MS within the past year, met Tyler while he was filming his promotion for MS Society. So even though I'm the prez of the bike club, our race director made all the connections with Tyler. We made a commitment to raising money via hosting a private dinner, selling out 250 tickets for his talk and autograph/photo ops, and having a silent auction on a variety of things like restaurant certificates, massages, movies etc. I don't think we had a minimum other than the $10k we raised from the 250 autographs. He did not charge us a fee.

Since this is his "off-season", spending time at ONE of his homes, it just fell into place for us.

BTW--off-season? The day of our event he rode for 7 hours. The day before he did 7+ hours on his mountain bike on the roads because there was a lot of snow and ice. Most days he rides longer. He very seldom takes a day off from the bike. The day he filmed his MS promo he spent 12 hours with them, mostly riding in front of the camera in various settings in the hills.

[Kevin]

Greg,

Thanks for the info.

Kevin