Pee No Evil

"EPO is the problem," a frustrated Jim Courier told Newsweek back in 1999. “I have pretty strong suspicions that guys are using it on the tour. I see guys who are out there week in and week out without taking rests. EPO can help you when it's the fifth set and you've been playing for four-and-a-half hours.”

Anyone who's watching Wimbledon has to suspect that he was right: The players pound away at each other, trading 100-mph volleys for hours on end. In fact, it would be difficult to come up with a sport that would reward more different kinds of performance-enhancing drugs: steroids for power and recovery, stimulants for quickness and mental clarity, and EPO for base endurance, to keep you on top of the game in the fifth set. And the rewards for winning a major championship are huge--seven figures and up, counting endorsements. There are powerful incentives to cheat.

Yet as I explain in this Slate piece, the International Tennis Federation's drug testing program is a joke. Venus Williams and Rafael Nadal have both whined a lot this year--interestingly--about how much they're tested, but really, they're quite lucky. Major players can expect to be tested fewer than a half-dozen times each season--and almost never outside competition, which is when most doping takes place.

Even worse, there are almost no tests for EPO, despite a growing consensus that the blood-booster is ubiquitous across all sports, from cycling to NFL football, even to race-car driving. In fact, there may actually be less EPO use in cycling than in tennis, because of cycling's nonstop drug-testing program (which borders on invasive, but that's another conversation). I really hope that isn't the case, but the evidence and logic point that way. The door has been left open.

Yet when I put the question to tennis's anti-doping authorities, they suggested that Courier was somehow lying, ten years ago. And they insisted that EPO is not a problem -- because they've had no positive tests. It's hard to find something when you're not really looking for it.

Read the full article here.

Shane McConkey

This is one that I really would have preferred to write while the dude was alive: Shane McConkey, probably the greatest skier of his generation, who was killed in an accident in Italy in March, at age 39, leaving a wife and three-year-old daughter, and lots of very sad friends.

Shane was a guy to whom the usual "daredevil" clichés did not apply. He was just a funny, laid back family guy who liked to jump off cliffs. Yet by all accounts, he was meticulous, and extremely careful, relatively speaking. He'd always be the guy who backed out if conditions weren't right.

And while the stunt he was attempting—a combined ski-wingsuit-BASE jump—certainly sounds crazy, it was also the product of more than a decade of step-by-step progression. From where he stood, it made perfect sense to ski off a cliff, pop off your skis, open up a wingsuit and fly around for a little while, and then throw a parachute. Why not?

Think of it this way: If you're an idiot or just hasty, you die on your 10th BASE jump; he'd survived more than 700. Yet in his POV videos, everytime his chute opens, you hear him let out a relieved "Yeah!" He knew that everything he did was a gamble, and no matter how well he'd massaged the odds, it's hard not to wish that he had quit while he was ahead.

My full feature on Shane and the cult of extreme appears in the July/August Men's Journal—but it's not online yet. For now, "Juke Box Hero" is going to have to suffice:

Crazy for "Crazy For The Storm"

You're going to be seeing a lot of Norm Ollestad this summer--him and his new memoir, Crazy For The Storm, which Ecco Press timed perfectly to come out just before Father's Day. Not only will the author be making the TV rounds, not only does he have an excerpt in Men's Journal, but he's been anointed by Starbucks, which will be selling it in something like 1,500 locations.

The story in brief: In February 1979, 12-year-old Ollestad was in a small plane that crashed into a mountain outside LA, in a blizzard. His father and the pilot were instantly killed; his father's girlfriend would not live long. Young Ollestad, the only survivor, had to get down the steep, icy mountain alone.

The survival part is only half the story; the real hero is Ollestad's dad, a onetime child actor and later FBI whistleblower who "retired" to Topanga Beach in the 1960s, which was everything you might imagine it to have been. Papa Ollestad believed in the "sink or swim" method of child rearing, dragging little Norman on one insanely dangerous adventure after another: big-wave surfing, off-piste skiing in deep powder, a roadtrip down to Mexico that reads like something from "Easy Rider." (Although luckily, the policeman's bullet bounced off Adventure Dad's guitar.)

If he tried to pull this stuff now (as I write in my Washington Post review), he would certainly be "pilloried by the Alpha Mommy Brigade and lose hope of ever visiting his beloved only son." But his intense parenting style (shall we say) also helped young Norman outlive him on that mountain, barely an hour from Beverly Hills.

Coming soon: the movie. Gnash teeth, envious writers; everyone else, go read it.

The Flying Man

Just closed a big piece on this guy: Shane McConkey, the singular skier who died ski-BASE-jumping in Italy this spring. Basically, he was doing what you see him doing here, but with one extra element thrown in: Before he pulled his parachute, he planned to fly around in a wingsuit, like a human flying squirrel. 

It was a stunt too far, and when his skis failed to release as planned, the whole thing went awry. And of course, a certain number of people on the internet decided that they needed to tell everyone else how stupid Shane was, what an idiot, irresponsible, how could he have left his wife and daughter, etc. But I wonder: Did they think that when they watched his videos and went, "oooh"? 

I particularly like this clip, from Mark Obenhaus's superb 2007 documentary, "Steep" — I've watched it over and over, noting every detail. I love the way he just seems to will himself off the ground, moving effortlessly from skiing to airborne front flip. But my favorite moment is when he jettisons his ski poles just before he goes off the edge. It's a gesture of total commitment, abandoning himself to flight, the pursuit of his own kind of beauty.

Was he "crazy," as the couch critics would have it?

Maybe. Crazy like an artist, I'd say.

Steve Larsen, 1970-2009

Last week one of my favorite sports figures died. Steve Larsen, an Ironman triathlete and former pro road and mountain-bike racer—a national champion with almost as much raw talent, some said, as that Lance guy—collapsed during a track workout in Bend. An autopsy ruled out a heart attack; more likely, some sort of breathing problem was to blame. But it's always unnerving when young athletes simply drop dead. 

A few years ago, Outside magazine sent me to do a profile of Larsen, who at the time was moving from mountain-biking to triathlon; he had been kept off the 2000 Olympic team because of USA Cycling politics, and he was done with cycling. Right away, he began shattering bike-course records and shaking up the way the Ironman distance is normally raced: take it relatively easy on the swim and the bike, then throw down in the run. Larsen threw down on the bike, and while he never won the Ironman championship at Kona, he definitely upset the dynamics of the race—"tossing the cat amongst the chickens," as Phil Liggett would say. 

But beyond being a phenomenal athlete, Larsen was a solid human being: a businessman, family guy, and great dad who left behind five kids. When he finally accepted that his elite-athlete career was over (his best finish a ninth in Kona), he kept competing, kept training hard, simply for the love of his sport. He didn't need to make an overhyped "comeback," didn't need attention. He wasn't ever going to win the Tour de France, or the Ironman, and eventually he accepted that. All of those things meant that, in the end, he wasn't all that interesting to my editors, who ended up killing the piece. Which I understand. (It wasn't all that well written, either, I must admit.)

Here is a section on the young Larsen, a supremely talented rider who found himself overshadowed by the great, dominant cyclist of his generation:

 

He was the best, always the best. From the moment Steve Larsen mounted his first road bike, a sleek blue Motobecane, at age 13, it seemed like he couldn’t lose a race. "He killed everyone," recalls his former teammate Frankie Andreu. "And according to the girls, he was the best-looking."

Recognition came quickly. At seventeen, in 1987, he was photographed for GQ, his golden locks falling down to his stars-and-stripes national champion’s jersey. Everyone said he was the next Greg LeMond—including LeMond himself, who had befriended the teenaged Larsen when they both lived in Davis in the mid-1980s. "That was always who I measured myself against, which was a pretty good measuring stick," Larsen says, diving into a grilled-eggplant panini in a Davis sidewalk cafe. "So if Greg turned pro at 19, I expected I would turn pro at 19. If Greg won the World Championships at 21, I expected I would win the Worlds by 21."

But he didn’t win the Worlds at 21. Another young Motorola rider did: Lance Armstrong. This was the same Lance Armstrong who’d beaten him in the U.S. national championships in 1991 (where Larsen finished second). Armstrong’s 1993 world championship cemented his role as Motorola team leader, and pushed Larsen—who felt he deserved a shot—further to the side. Before Lance came along, when they were both 18, it was Larsen who was supposed to be American cycling’s next great hope, the apple-cheeked California boy who would win the Tour de France. (Ironically enough, Lance was busy racing triathlons as a teenager.)

They came from similar backgrounds, each the son of a struggling single mother, but where Lance describes himself as a rubber-burning hellion, Larsen was the teachers’ favorite, the wholesome kid who would eventually marry his high-school sweetheart, Carrie Feldman. After his parents divorced when he was eight, largely because of his dad’s drinking, he shouldered much of the family responsibility. "He was always the little helper," says his mother, Connie Larsen. One of his three paper routes helped to pay for household expenses. The other two supported his racing. It didn’t matter that his schoolmates thought he was weird, or that his older brother called him "gay," or that he basically dropped out of high school in his junior year, although he’d always gotten good grades (he later took a few semesters’ worth of college classes). Larsen’s future was clear: He was going to be the next great American bike racer.

Until Lance came along. Armstrong was like a Ferrari, capable of head-snapping acceleration; Larsen more resembled a big, old diesel truck. He could ride steadily for a long time, but he couldn’t pull-off the race-winning breakaways the way Lance could, and did. “He has an incredible engine in terms of aerobic power, but he didn’t have that second speed, that top speed,” says Dr. Massimo Testa, who was the Motorola team physician and became Larsen’s close friend. Once Armstrong had established himself as leader, Larsen had two options: Work for Lance, or say goodbye. “The team was organized around Lance, and the best races for Lance,” says Testa. “Steve is a strong personality, and I didn’t see him working as a domestique for anyone."

Land of the Rising Roads

We'd talked about doing a bike trip someday, but deep down I suspected it would never happen; E's more of what you might call a weekend cyclist, not a day-after-day rider. The moon and the stars have to be perfectly aligned...the weather ideal and sunny...but not too hot...or cold....or windy...or hilly. Then my pal Bill Strickland from Bicycling called, and whispered the magic words: travel assignment. 

We quickly moved past the usual suspects, the Burgundy and Tuscany-type trips. Argentina? Wrong dates. New Zealand? Not up for 20 hours of flying. The Berkshires? Boring. Then we spotted a unique offering from Butterfield & Robinson: "Hidden Japan," an eight-day trip along the west coast of Honshu, staying at small country inns with steaming-hot geothermal onsen baths. Sold!

As it turns out, Japan is a cyclist's dream. Outside the phenomenally-congested big cities, and away from the main travel arteries, the small country roads are almost empty of traffic—yet beautifully, immaculately paved, thanks to Japan's now-decade-long stimulus-spending binge. (No, it hasn't ended their recession.) There's nothing better, to me, than a winding one-lane country road, unless it's a winding one-lane country road heading down a mountainside, in which case I'll see you at the bottom. (As our friend Owie put it in his own hilarious blog, "I fully expected to see Bill pasted to a tree.") 

Seriously, you could actually ride naked there. Not that anyone did that. 

But the bike riding was merely the side dish to a heaping buffet of cultural experiences, many of which involved food. We ate amazing, surprising things, a few of which we could actually identify (anyone for a fried fern?) and many of which we couldn't. (These are noodles made from kudzu, the vine that's suffocating the South.) 

But it wasn't just Japanese food; we had an amazing Italian-influenced dinner, with halibut carpaccio and possibly the best marinara sauce I've ever tasted. Later, in Tokyo, we got sushi across the street from the Tsukiji fish market, followed by a last lunch of pizza di Napoli. 

The full story is in the May issue of Bicycling, not yet online so you have to buy it, but it's worth the cover price just for Marco Garcia's superb photos. 

Bode's Last Chance?

OK, so Bode Miller's last Olympic foray was a total "yard-sale," as skiers say. (For nonskiers: a crash so nasty that ALL the victim's gear--skis, poles, hat, gloves, goggles, and perhaps a tibia or two--ends up strewn across the hill.) At least from a PR standpoint it was. But it got him what he really wanted, in a way: For two years, the American press has totally ignored him, even as he racked up one of his best seasons ever last year, winning the World Cup overall and winning six races to bring his lifetime total to 31 World Cup wins. That's a lot of gold medals. Too bad none of them have come at the Olympics. 

But the thing about Bode is that he really doesn't care; that's not why he's out there. He claims to be seeking a different kind of perfection, and if he doesn't always lay down his best runs when the medals are at stake, then so be it. He's not your typical empty-headed, gonna-go-out-there-and-do-my-best kind of athlete; there's a lot more going on under that brooding, sullen forehead of his. 

This season, he's been way off his game, DNF-ing in eight of the first 16 races so far. At Beaver Creek, he caught a ski on a gate and stuffed it into the safety nets so hard his ankle hasn't been right since. Which brings up something he told me, when I traveled to his New Hampshire home to interview him for the February Men's Journal: "[I]f I get injured this next season, I’ll probably stop. Why not? I’ve got a lot else to do."

This week, he gets one more chance to redeem his season, at the FIS Ski World Championships in Val d'Isere, France (now through next Sunday, Feb. 15th). One good thing is that he seems to do better when expectations are low. We'll see -- take a break from work and watch Bode race.