Bill Gifford

Obama's Quiet "Sheriff"

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:50:00 +0000

While the rest of Washington has been preoccupied with health care and tea parties and wars and Sarah Palin (not to mention wars about Sarah Palin), Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been quietly—and slowly—undoing some of the worst abuses of the Bush administration. My piece on Ken Salazar's toughest dilemma is now up on the Men's Journal site.

But first, some background:

Cheney's "energy strategy" amounted to a a death sentence for millions of acres of habitat out West, as the government handed out drilling and mining rights to public land at a tiny fraction of its true value. Oil and (especially) natural gas companies fanned out across the landscape—led by Halliburton's "Red Army," of course—and pocked the earth with thousands of drilling pads and miles upon miles of new roads. From Montana down to New Mexico, the landscape and economy of the West was completely changed.

One of the last un-drilled islands of land was on a place called the Roan Plateau, a magical Colorado landscape known to hunters and fishermen but not too many others. Cheney's office put the public land on the Roan—all 55,000 acres of it—on the fast track for energy leasing, but environmentalists fought back, made it their Alamo. And as a Senator, Ken Salazar was on their side, against drilling on the Roan. And he lost: with less than six months left in office, the Bush adminstration leased it all out.

But now that he's Interior Secretary, things are a bit more....complicated. If he yanks the leases outright, the oil industry will flip out. Oh, wait, they already have. And he's finally begun to shoot back...but some greeny types still weren't all that happy with the choice of Salazar. He's de-listed wolves from the Endangered Species Act, for one thing; and of course, he hasn't protected the Roan. Environmentalists expected Salazar to revoke the Roan leases, as he'd pulled back other, sensitive tracts. Instead, he's been in court, defending a drilling plan he had opposed as a Senator.

Me, I think it's a sort of test case for the Salazar style, where he sits back and waits for things to play out his way -- having done all he could, in his low-key way, to make sure the marbles all run his direction. Eventually. (For more, check out my pal Max Potter's epic profile of "Cowboy Ken" in 5280 magazine.)

This story was great fun to report: I spent a day tramping around on the Roan with Steve Torbit and Bill Dvorak from National Wildlife Federation and Ken Neubecker of Colorado Trout Unlimited, telling hilarious bait-and-bullet stories, then the next day we did a fly-over with Bruce Gordon of EcoFlight, who's like a Paul Newman character come to life. Then the next day we barreled down to the San Luis Valley, where Salazar grew up on a hardscrabble farm. The amazing thing, though, is the extent to which your stereotypical good ol' boys—hunters, fishers, ranchers, cowboys—have been turned into environmentalists, thanks to the Bush administration, which let the oil industry basically wreck their lands. And that's another story for another day...

Do You Really Need to Shoot Deer on Sunday, Too?

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 21:43:00 +0000

Because I live about, oh, 400 yards from state game lands, the first day of deer season here in Pennsylvania is always a shattering experience. It begins at first light, with a "KABOOM!" echoing across the valley. A few minutes later, more gunshots ring out in answer. And so it goes for most of the day. It's like living in Bosnia, circa 1994.

My neighbors and I all spend the week(s) of hunting season looking forward to Sunday, when the gunfire stops and we can go out and walk in the woods without having to put fluorescent orange kevlar vests on the dogs. So I was amazed to learn that Pennsylvania is one of the last states in the Union that bans Sunday hunting.

This seems like an eminently good idea — as I wrote in this Pittsburgh Post-Gazette op-ed yesterday. But then, I'm not a hunter. I was intrigued to learn, via the Pennsylvania Game Commission, that it helps hunters, too. Adding Sunday hunting would require the game authorities to shorten hunting seasons, restrict bag limits, and could result in private landowners withdrawing their lands from public hunting access programs. Finally, the Game Commission's own surveys have never indicated majority support for the idea—even among hunters.

In fact, banning Sunday hunting such a good idea that the National Rifle Association opposes it. The NRA's relentless, nationwide campaign has succeeded in overturning Sunday hunting bans in New York, among other states. They claim it treats hunters as "second-class citizens," but I fail to see where the Second Amendment guarantees the right of the people to bear arms in the woods on Sundays. It hasn't worked so far in Pennsylvania, in part thanks to opposition from the powerful farmers' lobby, but this state of affairs might not last forever, particularly given the vast power of the NRA — and their tendency to overreach on these things. (They also tend to oppose anti-poaching laws, as they have in PA.)

The truth is that hunting is on the decline. Sunday hunting is not going to bring it back; and for one group of people (whose numbers are shrinking) to demand that the woods be reserved for their use, seven days a week, is the height of selfishness.

The piece is sure to spark debate; it already has, based on my appearance today on KDKA Radio. To anyone who disagrees with me, I'd just say this: Be careful what you wish for.

The Fire Last Time

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 02:40:00 +0000

I've long admired Tim Egan's reporting for the NYT, because it seemed to come from a genuine connection with and love for his native Pacific Northwest; plus, it reminded New Yorkers that there was, in fact, a whole entire country out there beyond the brown clouds over New Jersey.

In his latest book, The Big Burn, he spools out a history of the catastrophic forest fires that swept across Idaho and Montana in 1912. Teddy Roosevelt's newly-created National Forest system was still a sizzling-hot controversy, with the usual extractive-industry ho's making all kinds of noise against the whole crazy radical idea of not cutting down every single tree west of the Mississippi.

Eight decades later, not much has changed. Oil and gas companies screech bloody murder at any suggestion that they can't drill everywhere they want to, right now. The only reason the West hasn't been totally raped is because, way back at the turn of the last century, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot (and John Muir) showed rare courage and vision.

From my Washington Post review of The Big Burn:

What's most striking is how little has really changed since then. Huge corporations still angle for Western resources, misusing laws intended to encourage homesteading to help themselves to the oil, gas and minerals that lie underneath the Rockies. Recent immigrants are still despised in many political quarters, and our African American president has been portrayed as a monkey by his foes. And politicians, particularly Republicans, insist on invoking Teddy Roosevelt's name when in truth his progressive, anti-corporate and pro-conservation agenda would get him branded a radical tree-hugger today.

Fear of Flying

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 22:19:00 +0000

I’ve done plenty of stupid stuff that could have killed me, everything from backcountry skiing after a snowstorm without avalanche gear (or knowledge), to riding a moped on the island of Mykonos, without lights and plastered on some sort of blue drink. Bad ideas, all. But the worst it ever got, the closest I’ve ever come to starring in one of those two-inch stories buried in the back of the New York Times, happened in the Poconos. In the basket of a hot air balloon.

If you’ve ever been ballooning, then you know that there’s basically nothing less extreme—and nothing more peaceful. You ascend silently, borne up by the power of warmed gases, and then you drift along with the wind, in perfect relative stillness, high above the world and its busy little tangle of people and problems. Cars slow to watch, the people inside pointing and going, “Look! A hot-air balloon!” Many people seem to get engaged on balloon rides; perhaps you did, too. This is the story of a balloon ride gone terrifyingly wrong...

[To read the rest, go to The Accidental Extremist, a great site maintained by my pal Christian DeBenedetti.]

Attack of the Lance Trolls!

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 18:58:00 +0000

I had it coming, I guess. About a month ago, I published a little article in Slate that charted the rockier bits of Lance Armstrong's comeback: The testy encounters with the press, the headgames with his own teammates, the crashes and miscues, and just the general sense that things were not necessarily going according to plan. And yes, I did find some similarities between his own ultra-touchy, somewhat narcissistic behavior and that of a certain former Alaska governor.

It went up July 7, during the first week of the Tour. And then everyone flipped out. More than 125 comments, and the majority were, how to put it, highly negative. I was called pathetic, a loser, a "whiner"—a classic Armstrong-fan epithet. I was called other names, too, like "Bob." (Next time, LesterFreeman, try reading before you post.)

Some of the points were well taken. A number of people pointed out that journalist Paul Kimmage, who Armstrong reamed out in a Tour of California press conference, had "compared Armstrong to cancer."

Yep, it's called a metaphor. (Read Kimmage's actual column here.) And it's somewhat understandable that Armstrong would be angry. It's less understandable why he would then turn around and make this Nike ad, which not-so-subtly compares his own critics to....cancer. (Metaphorically, of course.)

Anyway: What's clear is that Lance Armstrong commands a devotion from his fans that is unmatched by any other sports star in memory. He's more than a hero to these people; he's a savior. And to cancer people, of course, he really is a kind of savior, if only by example. I get that. (And in fact, I still give It's Not About The Bike to my friends who get diagnosed.) But his appeal goes way beyond the disease. He's the only cyclist ever to tap into mainstream American sports culture.

The diehard Lance fan is typically a middle-aged male who discovered (or re-discovered) cycling during his hero's 1999-2005 Tour de France reign. It's a wholly different group of people from the geeky-misfit kids who were drawn to the sport in the pre-Lance era, like the kid in Breaking Away who digs bike racing because it is European, exotic and obscure. The Lance fans are closer to the Dale Jr. crowd, with their contempt for "The French" and perfervid America, Fuck-Yeah!-ism.

Subtlety and nuance are lost on this crowd. They see nothing wrong—or even boring—with their man's relentless, grinding domination of the world's hardest bike race, or the fact that in seven years he seemed to have suffered (by my count) exactly four bad days. They're the breed of sports fans who always root for the favorites: for the Yankees when they were good, or the Dallas Cowboys in the '80s. In Breaking Away, they cheer for the college boys, not the Cutters.

With other sports stars, imperfect private lives and off-field boorishness are acknowledged and forgiven. (Or at worst, ignored.) But Lance is not permitted to have flaws. Which is why a sizable army of fans seems to spend lots of time trolling the Webernets for any mention of their lord. If there's the slightest negative connotation towards Armstrong, then Boom! The comments section lights up.

Calm down, folks. It's not the end of the world if your hero has a few crashes, gives a pissy interview, or gets in a dust-up with his younger, stronger, faster teammate. It's part of the sport. Not everyone has to love him, either. How he deals with it—and how you deal with it—is what's important.

Which brings me back to my piece, which wasn't nearly as harsh as the commenters perceived it to be. The Palin comparison and the cheeky "Jerkstrong" headline (sorry, I couldn't resist) were provocative but meant to convey a serious point: If Armstrong wants to have a future in public life, as he seems to, then he's going to have to toughen up and learn to deal with (or at least accept) criticism. You can't be that thin-skinned. You can't have that much drama, all the time. And if the cycling press is too tough for you, then you're going to have problems in the real world. Is all I'm sayin'.

Singletrack in the City

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 15:29:00 +0000

Just out in Mountain Bike magazine: My feature on Manhattan's first legal mountain bike trails, way up yonder where the wild things roam...

The backstory: Back when I was a 21-year-old Park Slope "Manny" (long story), I used to sneak into the "backcountry" of Prospect Park for a quick mountain-bike ride, every once in a while. It wasn't much: scrappy, eroded trails, and you never knew who was going to jump out from behind a tree. But there some sweet rocky sections, a few rideable staircases that didn't seem to have been maintained since Olmsted's day. Then some young teacher got knifed for his bike back there, and that was the end of my urban mountain biking.

Mountain bikes were banned from NYC parks almost as soon as the mountain bike was invented—understandably, in the case of, say, Central Park. But Central is not the only park in town, and even as it was restored and renovated, other city parks continued to go feral, particularly in Upper Manhattan.

Four years ago, a group of mountain bikers persuaded NYC Parks to let them "adopt" a section of Highbridge Park, a narrow strip of hillside woodlands near the approaches to the GW Bridge. It looked like something out of the movie Warriors: junkies, homeless encampments (cum drug dens), abandoned cars, wild dogs. The bikers' group, NYC MTB, pulled out literally tons of trash and spent thousands of man-hours forging trails out of the urban wilderness. Almost as an afterthought, they built a dirt-jump park for the kids -- and it's turned into a mecca for helmetless punks from Manhattan, Bronx, even Jersey. I like to sit there sometimes and watch the kids pull spins, even flips—stuff I'd never dare attempt now.

It's a cool place to visit. Take the #1 train to Dyckman Street (be sure to eat at the pork-rice-and-beans joints right by the subway). Better yet, take your bike up there. Or check out Max Breslow's photos of the place--which has already hosted a handful of races, including a Thursday-night informal series. And then there's Yonathan Arava's superb documentary, "The Highbridge Project," worth it for the groovetastic soundtrack alone.

Shane McConkey and the End of Extreme

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:05:00 +0000

"You step off the edge, and everything goes away," Shane McConkey told one of the last interviewers he ever met. "And you’re just 100 percent in the zone – you’re flying now. You’re a bird."

Human flight is one of the oldest human dreams, and also one of the deadliest. Skiing off cliffs with a parachute, and later a wingsuit, Shane McConkey came as close as you can to achieving that dream. But not close enough. My piece about his extraordinary life and death, in the July/August Men's Journal, is one of the saddest I've ever had to write. The devastated wife, their three-year-old daughter, the stunned friends who now have a Shane-size hole in their lives, all because he just couldn't quit while he was ahead. For whatever reason.

I tried to capture his personality and his vision in the piece, but this shot-perfect James Bond homage (from the Matchstick Productions film Seven Sunny Days) is how I choose to remember him:

Doping and Le Tour: It's What They Do

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 23:21:00 +0000

Terrific essay from SI's Alexander Wolff that explains the "culture clash" over doping in cycling, including this interesting passage (among many):

Armstrong has long broadcast on two frequencies -- one to the European peloton, another to cycling-innocent followers in the States. A perfect example took place several months ago, after an out-of-competition tester from France's state-run anti-doping lab doorstepped him on the Riviera, and Armstrong, just back from a training ride, disappeared for 20 minutes to take a shower. Europeans know that the one thing a cyclist may not do under any circumstances is leave a tester's sight before providing a sample. They can recount the sport's colorful history of doping-control subterfuge, from hastily swallowed diuretics and blood-thinners, to stand-in urine delivered through concealed rubber tubing. When this departure from protocol briefly looked like it might lead to his suspension, Armstrong tweeted indignantly, Was winning the Tour seven times that offensive?!? That in turn cued up reactions Stateside of the "Of course they wouldn't let him take a shower -- they don't believe in showers!" variety. Not that Armstrong necessarily had something to hide; given his relationship with the French, he may have simply been up for a game of chicken, to dare them to expel from their great race its biggest name. The point is, he took them on and won, again.

Jerkstrong: The Reviews

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:26:00 +0000

One of the, um, unique things about online journalism is that you get instant reader feedback. Instant, and in the case of my Lance Armstrong/Sarah Palin piece, voluminous. So now there are 118 comments in "The Fray" and counting, and probably 100 of them didn't really like the article, and accused me of various things, including having a "casual" knowledge of cycling. (FWIW, I've covered bike racing since 1998, and I've also raced road, mountain, and cyclocross.)

I also got called a "groupie" by someone who is, quite obviously, a groupie. But one of my favorites was also one of the first:

You want to write about bike riding? Follow the peleton up L'Alpe d'Huez. When you know how hard it is, then maybe you'll understand why Armstrong was nauseated at the thought of some sportwriter passing judgment on those guys who got caught doping.

Somehow, I don't think that was why he was "nauseated."

The reply was also great:

hahahahaha! classic dentist roadie response.

What's a "dentist roadie?" Who knows. I haven't ridden Alpe d'Huez, though; maybe I should. (Oh, wait -- it's not on this year's Tour.)

Anyway, Deadspin picked up the theme and added their own thoughts on "The Critic-Proofing of Lance Armstrong":

Armstrong's petulance is understandable, at least to a point: He's been held up as the face of doping in a sport that owes its very existence to doping. Its earliest practitioners were, as author John Hoberman has written, "continuing the work of of experimental physiologists interested in learning how much abuse animals or humans could take" and who, to weather the stress, spiked their coffee with cocaine and strychnine and took nitroglycerin to aid their breathing. If he has been persecuted, it has been for the sins of his own sport.
The result, however, is that he has curdled into the joyless, scowling Nixon-on-a-bike we see today, one who snarks at his critics from his Twitter account and who needsuseful idiots like Rick Reilly to lighten up his image. (Seriously, read Reilly's latest. He talks to Armstrong's bare ass.) This may render him largely insufferable to a segment of the public, but it makes him a perfect pitchman for a shoe company that sells a certain spirit of sporty resentment, and sells it hard. The Nike commercial is the latest step in Armstrong's personal evolution. He has critic-proofed himself. In his mind, he is beyond any questions of guilt and innocence now. He is the Messiah of the infirm.

Oh, and that Nike ad ("Driven") that started it all off? It's not running on Versus anymore. They must have agreed with this cycling insider (who emailed me privately):

As the man that has made some Lance ads for Nike in my time, that piece of shit that they're selling now is horrible. I couldn't believe it wasn't a BMSquib spot. Sad for everyone- especially the poor cancer people.

Yes, I Called Lance Armstrong a "Jerk"

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 00:00:00 +0000

I used to love Lance Armstrong; his stunning win in the 1999 Tour de France brought tears to my eyes. Seriously, if you missed it, go buy (or rent) the World Cycling Productions DVD of that race. He had this innocence about him, this deer-in-the-headlights look, like he never really expected it to happen. Instead of bodyguards, he had a six-foot-plus, rugby-playing American investment banker dude who was pressed into service to keep the photogs away.

What a long time ago that was. As I learned more and watched more and heard more, over the years—much of it off the record—he grew less appealing. There was (and is) still a lot to admire about the guy, but it comes with a harsh dose of bitterness, vengefulness, resentment, and plain anger that can be tough to take. Nice guys don't win, I get that. But there seems to be an awful lot of energy spent settling petty scores (like poaching young phenom Taylor Phinney from Jonathan Vaughters' Garmin team), and creating melodramatic fights with his perceived "enemies," when he could be using his popularity and his time to advance the public good.

Then I saw this Nike ad:

Which prompted me to write this piece in Slate. A nibble:

It's jarring, dramatic, and memorable—and not in a good way. While it's curious that a multinational company chooses to sell athletic wear in this fashion, the ad is even more interesting for what it tells us about Armstrong's psyche. On its surface, it reinforces the idea that Lance is standing behind the victims of a disease that nearly claimed his life. That is indisputable. It also, however, pushes the idea that Armstrong is some kind of savior. HisShepard Fairey-designed bikes are emblazoned with two numbers. The first, 1,274, is the number of days between his last race and his comeback. The second, 27.2, represents the number of people, in millions, who died from the disease during that time. Is Armstrong suggesting that there's some kind of causal link between him not riding his bike and people dying from cancer?

The ad also implies, disturbingly, that the cyclist's "critics"—and that includes everyone whothinks he's arrogant—are equivalent to cancer. It is apparently not enough for him to ride his bike and lead a positive campaign. He can't help but go after his detractors at the same time. And you thought Sarah Palin was divisive.

Pee No Evil

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 15:03:00 +0000

"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.

UPDATE: For more info, and some pretty interesting muscle pics of players, check out http://tennishasasteroidproblem.blogspot.com/

Shane McConkey

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 16:08:00 +0000

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"

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 22:34:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 05:44:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Fri, 29 May 2009 15:31:00 +0000

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

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 14:08:00 +0000

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?

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:29:00 +0000

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.

Updike: Ironman of Freelancers

bill.gifford@gmail.com (Bill Gifford) — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 16:09:00 +0000

About a decade ago, when I was an editor for Philadelphia magazine, one of my first projects was to compile writerly reminiscences of the city for an anniversary issue. I decided to go big, and mailed an obsequious plea to Updike’s Massachusetts address, offering to pay the extravagant rate of, as I put it, “a couple bucks a word.”

The reply came back within a week, manually typed on a tiny white postcard. He was willing to reminisce about Philly, despite its being some 60 miles down the Schuylkill River from his native Shillington. But he honed in on my sloppy, un-Updikean wording: “When you say ‘a couple bucks a word,’” he wrote, “do you mean the literal two, or something closer to three?”

I was only supposed to offer one dollar a word for these pieces, not three, so to my boss I was now simultaneously a hero and a budget-busting fool. Not that I cared: The piece came in right on time, and of course it was perfect, 500-odd words that hummed with warmth, like the old Philco radio that used to play Phillies games in the Updike home. "I bet he wrote it on the can," a colleague sniped. "I hope so," I shot back.

I'd learned two valuable lessons about surviving as a writer: First, always ask for more money. Can't hurt, and they'll probably say yes. Second, and more important, always be writing.

As critics and readers debate whether or not Updike was the Great American Novelist, or whether he deserved a Nobel in addition to his pair of Pulitzers, one of Updike’s key singularities is likely to be lost: He was that rare American writer who actually made his living by writing. And I mean from Day One. He didn’t take teaching jobs or pimp for grants and fellowships, or accept any of the other petty blandishments that the American literary establishment has to offer. He was the Ironman of freelancers. He wrote stories and sold them, so they had to be good. He would write on almost anything, true, from women’s fashions to 19th-century painting to, well, his somewhat slender memories of a city where he had never really lived. And if his vast output had its weak spots as well as its Rabbit, Runs and Witches of Eastwicks, does anyone really remember those, or care? He wrote to live, but only because he lived to write.

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]