Eric Holder, Back Then

Back in the '90s, when I lived in DC and the city was just beginning to pull itself out of Marion Barry's mess, I profiled one of the key players in its revival: Eric Holder. Then, he was the first black U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC (yeah, I know). Now it looks like he'll be the first black attorney general of the United States, but more than that, he's the kind of guy—pragmatic, humane, nonideological—who can help the Justice Department live up to its name, for a change. 

Originally in TNR, but I can't find it on their site; now brought to you by some library in Kiev. 

Mark Udall's Toughest Climb

There was a time, way back at the beginning of my career, when I wanted nothing more than to be an Important Political Journalist. I interned at the Village Voice (when it still mattered), then moved back to my more-or-less hometown of Washington, DC, to report on that town's biggest business: politics, law, and lobbying. 

That was interesting for a while. Then I got sick of fake news, partisan posturing, and being constantly lied to. (You know, the same stuff pretty much 53 percent of America is also sick of, by now.) So I shifted gears, began writing about more everyday people, their passions and pursuits, which occasionally included killing each other; I also started writing about athletes who I felt were interesting and unique as human beings. (Bode Miller being one example.) 

Which brings us the long way around to Colorado's Mark Udall, who's running for Senate in a hotly-contested and crucial race for both sides. Whether or not you agree with Udall's left-of-center politics, you have to admit he's not your typical politician. Not many congressmen have summited even one of Colorado's 14,000-foot-peaks, let alone all 54 of them; probably none have stood atop an 8,000-meter mountain, or been trapped at 25,000 feet on Everest. Udall's climbing experiences give him, I think, an interesting and useful skill-set for politics, particularly if you hail from a region where your point of view is (or was) maybe not all that popular. He's used to the tough, often unpleasant slog. 

Udall, of course, is  son of the late great Rep. Mo Udall, one of the last truly fiery liberals in Congress, who gave Jimmy Carter a run for his money in 1976 Democratic primary race. He was also a guy who could pal around with (shudder) Republicans, including his young protege John McCain; later, when Mo lay in the hospital, incapacitated by his Parkinson's, McCain was one of his only regular visitors. 

For this long profile of Mark Udall in the November Men's Journal, I spent a day with Udall last January, going to FEMA forest-fire meetings and then backcountry skiing near the Continental Divide; you can guess which activity he enjoyed more. I came back in August, when the campaign with Republican ex-congressman Bob Schaffer was at its most heated. Udall was a bit more tense then, but still very much the Western statesman. Voters must have noticed: He was roughly tied in the polls back then, but now sits on a double-digit lead. Did someone say "Future Interior Secretary"? 

UPDATE: Yes, He Won. 

Getting a Grip on McPalin

So I went to the McCain-Palin rally down in Lancaster, PA last week, and it was....interesting. I was among the X,000 folks who either arrived too late or didn't have Official Republican Tickets (in my case, both), and so didn't get into the rally before the fire marshals stopped letting people in. (Not a problem McCain encountered much before he proposed to Palin.) But there was a silver lining: The rest of us got to greet McCain as he left the auditorium, and, well, I got awfully close to the man. In person, he's small and feisty-seeming; I liked his handshake, and afterwards, even I felt a little bit of a "Palin Bounce."

BMX: Going Big

Finally, the Summer Olympics get rad: This year marks the debut of BMX, the first shredder-friendly sport in the Games. And it's come a long way since you jumped your Sting-Ray off a dirt pile, crashed and green-stick-fractured your wrist, and ran home to Mom, who yelled at you. The Beijing BMX track features a three-story-tall start ramp, which launches riders off the first jump at close to 40 mph--Tour de France top-end sprint speeds (only the Tour guys don't get air). That's followed by a 40-second full-on sprint, with elbows (and bikes) flying. There's a reason these guys wear full-body crash pads.

This is America's true homegrown cycling discipline; before mountain biking had even been invented, kids in Southern Cal and Pennsylvania had sculpted jumps and berms out of vacant lots and old piles of fill dirt. And you can bet your life that the U.S. Olympic Committee wants to take home gold in this event, especially since we have precious few other medal contenders in cycling. (How badly does the American team want to win this? Well, we spent $500,000 building an exact replica of the Beijing track in Chula Vista, CA. And I can tell you, it's scary even to stand up there on the start ramp.)

For Bicycling, I spent this spring on the trail of America's best BMXers: Kyle Bennett, Donny Robinson, Mike Day, and Jill Kintner and Arielle Martin. I went to a big regional race down in West Palm Beach, spent time with the Olympic hopefuls in training at Chula, and visited 2007 world champ Kyle Bennett in his east Texas stomping grounds: 

The BMX story always starts the same, it seems: THE KID gets taken to the track by his dad or an older brother, at seven or nine or (latest) 12, and gets hooked. Even video games can't compete with jumping a bike off a pile of dirt. Except in Bennett's case there wasn't a dad around, really, or an older brother; he had only Pepa, his grandfather, the man who raised him from almost the day he was born.

When Bennett pulls into the driveway of Pepa's house, about 10 minutes from his own place, the old man is sitting in a folding chair under the shade of tall pine trees, wearing a belted seersucker ensemble and smoking a cigarette. He's brown and wrinkled almost beyond believability, watching his older son replace the battery in Bennett's ex-wife Ashley's car. Bennett bounces out and grabs their four-month-old daughter, Kylie, lifts her to the sky. The baby girl looks like she might cry, and Ashley frets. Pepa smiles. A legendary character in Texas BMX circles, his real name is Donald Collins: 84 years old, a retired water-plant contractor and veteran of multiple World War II bombing missions over Germany. After the last raid, his B-17 almost didn't make it back across the English Channel.

Fast-forward 40 years, and he's taking care of his youngest daughter's boy, trying to keep him entertained by starting nails in a plank of wood and letting the boy finish pounding them in, one after- another. The boy performed so well at this task, he hammered so enthusiastically, that the family has called him "Banger" ever since. Pepa babysat for another boy in the afternoons, and one day the boy invited Banger down to Armadillo Downs to check out the racing. "When we got home, he said, 'Pepa, I want to try that,'" he says.

A week later Banger was back at Armadillo with his Wal-Mart bike--having removed the kickstand and the fenders--and a long-sleeved shirt and a borrowed helmet. It was a Tuesday night just like this one, and nobody remembers whether he won or not, but he loved the racing, the way the bike felt as it rolled over the rounded jumps and around the three banked turns. "He said, 'I'm gonna keep doing that, Pepa,'" his grandfather remembers, and within a month Banger had a real BMX racing bike, a JMC Blazer bought used, plus a beat-up old helmet, all for 100 bucks. "I knew BMX was what I wanted to do," Bennett tells me later. "I knew I wanted to be a professional bike racer pretty much from day one."

Phast Phinney

He's one of the world's fastest cyclists, he's got a great family, and his model/swimmer girlfriend is gorgeous enough to, as Mick Jagger put it, make a grown man cry. Right now is a pretty good time to be Taylor Phinney, but next month could be even better, if he somehow pulls out a medal-winning performance in Beijing.

It's not inconceivable. The son of two of America's greatest athletes, speed skater/cyclist Connie Carpenter and Tour de France stage winner Davis Phinney—both Olympic medalists themselves—Taylor hit the genetic Powerball. But he's also a pretty unique kid, cycling talent aside, poised and confident and just generally comfortable in his own skin. He can be funny on camera, too, a blessed relief from the typical one-dimensional, cliche-spouting Olympian you'll be seeing too much of next month. And he just keeps getting faster.

I watched Taylor smoke a world-class field at the UCI Track World Cup in January, and in February I spent a day with him, his sister Kelsey (a good junior XC skier) as well as Connie and Davis, who's dealing with young-onset Parkinson's disease. When I sat down to profile Taylor for 5280 Magazine, I realized that his family was the real story.

We'll be seeing more of this kid--if not on the Olympic podium (he's racing the 4000-meter individual pursuit on the track), then racing internationally for the Garmin-Chipotle professional team. Tune in to the Tour de France in, say, 2010 and you'll see him in action...

Accelerating out of a standing start, Taylor brings his bike up to speed with a few powerful pedal strokes, then settles into an aerodynamic tuck, flying around the banked oval track like a runaway roulette ball.

The fans are screaming for him, pounding the trackside boards as he blurs past, his carbon-fiber rear wheel practically snarling as it flies over the smooth wooden planks. It's sort of a hometown crowd: Taylor has been coming to Los Angeles to train for the World Cup for the past six months, taking four-day weekends here and there with the tacit approval of his Boulder High teachers—most of them, at least.

Despite its name, the individual pursuit is not a strictly solo race: Two riders start on opposite sides of the track, and basically try to catch each other. That's why it's called a "pursuit," but it's really more like a duel. Since Taylor had the second-fastest qualifying time, which got him into the final round, the worst he could do was win the silver medal. His opponent, Dutch national champion Jenning Huizenga, would be tough to beat. While resting in a borrowed motor home before the final, Taylor mused on his prospects.

"He said, 'Wow, second place is really good,'" Lim remembers. "Then he said: 'What the hell am I thinking? I'm here to win a bike race.'"

Which he is not on the way to doing, halfway into this race. After eight laps out of 16, he has fallen a solid half-second down on Huizenga. But then the time gap starts dropping, lap by lap. "I kicked it up a gear," Taylor told me. "It hurt, but it was now or never, so you might as well give it everything. It was painful, but I don't remember it as painful."

What he remembers is the crowd, the announcer screaming, his USA Cycling coach yelling time splits at him until finally he was in the lead. He always finishes faster than he started, while most of his competitors slow down toward the end of the race. He crosses the line a half-second ahead of Huizenga to win his first World Cup race—and to become, in four and a half minutes, an Olympic medal contender.

"Yeah!" shouts Davis as he bounds back down to the track infield. "There's a new sheriff in town!"

Greg LeMond vs. the World

UPDATE: My profile of Greg LeMond, from the July Men's Journal, is finally online at the mag's sort-of-a-website. Lede: "Greg Lemond's attack dog is staring me down..." (But of course, to see the dog you've got to buy the magazine.)

The Rough Ride of Greg LeMond

Long time no update. A lot's been going on, but here's the biggie: My profile of 3-time Tour de France winner Greg LeMond appears in the July issue of Men's Journal (where I'm now "Editor at Large," possibly the best job title in all of magazinedom). Anywayyys: I spent a day and a half with Greg and his family last July, during which time we watched Michael Rasmussen's best and last Tour stage win ever (he got yanked from the race that very day), and talked about many deep subjects, from the sorry state of LeMond's beloved sport, to his ongoing feud with Lance Armstrong, to his horrifying history of childhood sexual abuse.

When LeMond's abuse was revealed last year, during the Floyd Landis doping arbitration, I sort of went, "Ah-hahhh...." -- it was like the other shoe dropping. Now we know a little more about what makes him tick. Now we know why he could make himself suffer so much that he could win the Tour, against all odds and even against his own teammates, three times. It all made sense to me: His hunger as a young rider, and his anger as a retired athlete, watching Lance Armstrong achieve the record that LeMond still believes could have been his.

Whether you love LeMond or hate him--not many people fall in between the two extremes--you have to admit that what he suffered as a young boy was just wrong. And the damage continued well into his 40s. He told me that he felt his greatest accomplishment, greater than any of his Tour wins, was simply to have pulled his life back together over the past five years.

Bottom line: It's great to be a champion. But it's not always so easy to be a former champion.

[UPDATE: there's a discussion of the article at RoadBikeReview forums]