Bill Gifford

Eric Holder, Back Then

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 20:45:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 15:38:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 15:28:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 15:26:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:31:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 17:49:00 +0000

UPDATE: My profile of Greg LeMond, from the July Men's Journal, is finally online at the mag's website....oh, wait it's gone. But the folks at CompetitiveCyclist thoughtfully cut and pasted it into their site, so you can read it here.

Note that the first graf is what we in magazining call, illiterately, the "dek." The article proper begins with: "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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 05:52:00 +0000

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]

LEDYARD Ships

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 05:27:00 +0000

He's real, He's here, Ledyard lives! Amazon and Barnes & Noble are now shipping my book, Ledyard: In Search of the First American Explorer.

Nutshell: It's a biography of John Ledyard, who lived an extraordinary life in the late 18th century. After dropping out of Dartmouth by canoe (for which he remains legendary on that isolated campus), he sailed with Captain Cook on his third and fatal voyage, during which Ledyard became one of the first whites to set foot on the West Coast of North America. Later, in Paris, he befriended Thomas Jefferson, who was fascinated by his tales. Together they hatched a plan to cross the North American continent. Ledyard attempted the trek himself, but somehow got it in his head to travel east, across Siberia where he'd find a boat to take him over to Alaska, he hoped. No such luck: Catherine the Great had him arrested as a spy, which he probably was. He ended up dying in Cairo at the age of 37, vomiting to death in a convent.

Ledyard was more than just a headstrong adventurer; he was a spirited free-thinker, a man ahead of his time. "Little attentive to differences of rank," an English friend marveled, "he seemed to consider all men his equals." He mocked his Connecticut relatives' obsession with the virtue of celibacy, and as he traveled the world, he left no native woman unloved — if he could help it. His journal of Cook's voyage is notable because he fails to presume the superiority of Christian, western men to the "natives" they encountered. And a few months before he died, he left this pearl, which perhaps ought to be inscribed above the front door to the White House: "Methinks every Man who is called to preside officially over the Liberty of a free People should once—it will be enough—actually be deprived unjustly of his Liberty that he might be avaricious of it more than of any earthly possessions."

Why They Climb

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 03:43:00 +0000

I like to hike up mountains as much as -- more than -- the next guy, but something about actual mountaineering scares and awes me. Mainly the consequences. I don't like looking down between my feet and seeing, say, a village, a couple thousand feet down. Or a glacier where nobody will ever find my corpse. I'm not a huge fan of heights. Yet the people who climb mountains fascinate me; there was one guy, about my age, who worked with my father a long time ago. He was a cool dude, and a climber, always disappearing to scale peaks in the Andes or Wyoming, which is how he died, at age 37, leaving a beautiful opera-singer wife and a two-year-old son. Anyway, I thought of him as I read The Boys of Everest, Clint Willis' intriguing new book about British climbing pioneer and certifiable badass Chris Bonington and the climbers who followed him, often to their deaths. Read my Washington Post review here.

The Billionaires' Bike Club

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 04:10:00 +0000

Cycling has a strange appeal to wealthy, high-achieving sorts. Maybe it's because the sport rewards effort -- you get out of it what you put in, both in training hours and in Benjamins spent on fancy bike gear. It really helps to have a $5,000 carbon-fiber steed! I know! So here's this group called the "Champions Club," a couple dozen wealthy cycling enthusiasts who donate six-figure sums to development programs for US cyclists. That's a good thing. In return, they get to hang with the pro riders of the Discovery Channel (formerly U.S. Postal Service) team. Oh, and Lance. And of course you need to stay in shape to do that, which is not easy if you're running a billion-with-a-B hedge fund or, say, Wal-Mart, whose chairman is a member (why they don't sell better bikes, or offer bike parking, or build bike paths to their stores, is not clear). Anyway, I did this piece on the Champions, and on U.S. Cycling godfather Thom Weisel, the man who first sponsored Lance, for Outside last July.

Ferrari profile online!

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 19:23:00 +0000

Update: My profile of Dr. Michele Ferrari, Lance Armstrong's "controversial" longtime trainer, is now online. (Or go to bicycling.com and search "Ferrari.")

The Bode Show

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 05:31:00 +0000

The woman from Maxim wore a bikini to their interview, but she really didn't need to: Bode Miller is a great interview, no matter what you're wearing. He's one of the rare athletes who treats an interview like a conversation, as opposed to an opportunity to dictate the usual sports cliches, so he almost always says interesting stuff. It was disappointing to see "60 Minutes" hyping his comments about skiing hungover as if it were "news," when anybody who's followed Bode knows that it was just him spouting off, a throwaway line. And besides, drinking and skiing are hardly strangers, for better or for worse. (Think St. Bernard.) If he stays sober for the slalom, he'll win three medals in the Olympics, and his teammates, like Daron Rahlves, will win three more.

A couple years back, I spent some time with Miller in his native New Hampshire, and then two weeks in New Zealand with Bode and his teammates, for this 2004 piece in Outside magazine; you can read my take on his current imbroglio here, in Slate. (Short version: Is anybody surprised? And is it really such a big deal? Except of course to his sponsors, who might like him to finish a slalom once in a while...)

Lance's Mystery Doctor

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 02 Jan 2006 19:24:00 +0000

When a British newspaper revealed that Lance Armstrong was working with Italian sports doctor Michele Ferrari, on the eve of the 2001 Tour de France, it sent shock waves through the sports world that are still being felt. For the European press, who knew Ferrari's notorious reputation, it was as if Armstrong had tested positive for EPO, the illegal performance-enhancing drug. Though Armstrong and his then-U.S. Postal team tried to minimize the relationship, they've been under a cloud of suspicion ever since. And as usual, in such high-profile media controversies, truth was the first casualty.

In March 2005, I traveled to Italy to meet the elusive Dr. Ferrari—and some of his fiercest critics and supporters—for a profile of "The Legend" that appears in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of Bicycling magazine. Ferrari rarely gives interviews, with reason, but I found him to be intelligent, funny, iconoclastic, and more than a little jittery, thanks to his October 2004 conviction on (relatively minor) sports-doping charges. Behind his dark reputation, I learned, lurks the mind of a brilliant sports scientist, a man who revolutionized training for endurance athletes. He was also far more deeply involved in Armstrong's training—and that of his Tour teammates—than has ever been acknowledged. (There's a great section on Ferrari in Dan Coyle's book,Lance Armstrong's War.)

Is he "guilty"? Not for me to decide, though there is disquieting evidence that points in both directions. Read and decide for yourself.

Note: The piece is not available online, so you'll have to buy the magazine, on newsstands until January 31. There's no cover line, but you'll find it on page 51.

Welcome!

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 01:20:00 +0000

Congratulations--you have managed to reach the online home of journalist and writer Bill Gifford, not to be confused with the ultra-stodgy 18th-century English literary critic of the same name. (Well, OK, he was "William Gifford," but so am I. The IIIrd, in fact.) Nor am I related to Frank, despite our shared last name and, most likely, mutual aversion to Kathie Lee. I won't be "blogging," per se, since I have enough other work to do, but I will provide occasional updates and, perhaps, the occasional killed story. Hopefully not too many of those. Mainly, this site will serve as a collection of links to my current pieces, and a platform for my own diffident sort of self-promotion. Plus, the occasional pic of my dogs.