Mikaela Shiffrin slept great.

She always sleeps great. Then she ate two fried eggs, plus toast, no coffee, as she does every morning. Now it’s 9 a.m. on this bright June Thursday, the fourth day of the third week of her six-week early-summer training block. Her schedule prescribes a morning strength session, so off we drive from her parents’ house in Avon, Colorado, to the Westin Beaver Creek, where she works out when she’s in town.

First: a warm-up on a spin bike. Ten minutes, moving her legs in circles in her Lulu­lemon shorts, much like half the women here are moving their legs in circles in their Lululemon shorts—no big deal. Then we go into a small glass-doored room labeled MIKAELA’S CORNER. The Westin didn’t know what to do with this space, so the hotel gave it to Mikaela so she could do Olympic lifts. It’s an asset for the hotel to have this tanned, blond, 22-year-old ski goddess training here—though she does, let’s just say, ruffle some patrons’ senses of inner peace. Her body fills out her skin in a way that just looks fuller and better than anybody else. It’s like she’s a freshly blown-up balloon and the rest of us have been hanging around losing air for a few days or weeks. 

But in this private back room, there’s no one cowering in self-hatred at the sight of Mikaela’s epic, confidence-destroying legs except her father who, of course, feels not self-hatred but pride. Back in their youth, both Jeff Shiffrin and Mikaela’s mother, Eileen, raced alpine. When I ask Jeff, who is an anesthesiologist and has come to chat with me on his way to work, how they did it, how they managed to raise this specimen, perhaps the best skier in the world right now, on track to become maybe the best skier of all time, he says it’s all very simple. “If you have a kid who is going to a ski race, you go to the lodge beforehand so you can say, ‘Here’s the nearest bathroom, here’s where you put your backpack,’ so the kid can be better prepared and have less stress. At age six, you teach her how to juggle, for coordination and focus, and at seven you teach her how to unicycle, for balance.” There: now you know.

Mikaela wraps up her set. Papa Shiffrin, who handles the logistics of his daughter’s ski racing and refers to himself as “Sure Pa,” goes to the hospital to work. So far, so good. Then Mikaela moves out of her corner into the gym proper, and for a while all is still well in the Westin. The other gym­goers, both locals and hotel guests, continue pleasantly about their golden Vail days. Some recognize Mikaela, but whether they do or don’t doesn’t really matter—this isn’t a story about fame, or even winning, exactly. It’s a story about being the kind of person who not only knows how to win (that’s not really the hard part), but can execute on the never-ending tedium required. Still, to get it out there: 31 World Cup races, the 2017 World Cup overall title, four World Cup slalom titles, three World Championship slalom races, and an Olympic gold medal in slalom. And she’s on track to win more races and more championships than any skier ever. Lindsey Vonn may be only nine races away from catching up to Swedish legend Ingemar Stenmark’s record 86 World Cup victories, but Mikaela already has 24 more World Cup wins than Vonn did at her age and three more than Stenmark did when he was 22. 

Mikaela tries to keep her success low-key and her mind not on beating others but on being better tomorrow than she is today. After she won gold in Sochi in slalom, she did lose her focus for a few seconds and told a reporter that she in the upcoming 2018 Olympic Games in Pyeongchang, South Korea. (Who doesn’t?) But then she backpedaled and started talking again about putting in the work and staying strong. 

Mikaela’s quads look capable of leg-pressing entire alpine villages. Her glutes, halfway up her five-foot-seven frame, are abrupt, definitive forces of nature, the Rockies rising out of the Midwest. But it’s her concentration and discipline, and her ability to turn physical instruction into action, that are the real killers. Today, as almost every day, she isn’t working out with a partner or coach. There’s no minder, no entourage, no fuss. She does have an esoteric piece of gear called a , which costs $2,200, looks like a small bomb, and measures lifting metrics like bar angle and velocity. But other than that, she’s just an extraordinarily fit young woman with an iPhone, a silver watch, a few turquoise anklets, some very cute braids, and a list of reps and sets to get through.

Still, slowly, quietly, all around her, people start flipping out, needing—and failing—to adjust to the fact that here in this gym is this person with these legs and this ass who is flawlessly, unassumingly executing maneuvers that none of them could do with her precision and grace if they made it the focus of their lives. A man goes to pick up a kettlebell from a rack behind Mikaela, who is doing seismic squat jumps, and just melts down, worrying loudly about disrupting her to the point where she has to pause and comfort him. “No, you’re fine. You’re fine,” she says. When she loads a bar with 100 pounds, holds her squat for 45 seconds, and then explodes up into space, another guy bursts out, “That’s amazing! I can’t believe you can do that! Holy Moses!” 

Mikaela does her triple jumps, her agility drills. None of the exercises are that complex. We can all do this stuff, sort of—just like we can all keep ourselves from eating the entire bag of chips. 

Eventually, Eileen comes in, after her own workout, wearing Hokas and basketball shorts. Mikaela is on the U.S. Ski Team, but she’s also on Team Shiffrin, and her mother serves as her 24/7 unpaid coach. Eileen, it bears noting, does not think Mikaela does everything perfectly. It’s her job—not as mother but as coach—to find flaws. She scrutinizes Mikaela’s every movement (often repeatedly, forward and backward, in slow motion, on video), searching for imperfections and ways to crush those imperfections out.

Eileen is also here to make sure that I don’t intrude too much on Mikaela’s two-hour workout and thus keep Mikaela from getting home to her parents’ house in time for her nap. In the elevator to the parking garage, I ask Mikaela how she wants our day to go. 

I could take her out to lunch or dinner. “I need to go on my ride later,” she says. Then she adds, with just the slightest hint of an edge, “I don’t know what’s on your schedule.”

The tone is understandable. Given that Mikaela is the U.S.’s designated darling in the run-up to the 2018 Olympics, there have been a lot of nonathletic obligations: photo and video shoots (and attendant hair and makeup) for sponsors Barilla, Bose, Red Bull, and Visa, interviews for other media. But Eileen suggests that, even amid these obligations, there may be room for improvement. “I think you should be nicer,” she says. 

A word about naps: Mikaela loves to nap. She also loves Bode Miller, and she’s seen his movie, , at least 20 times. And she remains so crushed out that even now, when Bode congratulates her on races—for instance, he called her name and hooted at her when she was walking through the crowd on the way to collect her World Cup overall title last March—she says, “I still can’t believe he knows who I am.” 

But the naps: Mikaela not only loves them, she’s fiercely committed to them. Recovery is the most important part of training! And sleep is the most important part of recovery! And to be a champion, you need a steadfast loyalty to even the tiniest and most mundane points. Mikaela will nap on the side of the hill. She will nap at the start of the race. She will wake up in the morning, she tells me after the gym, at her house, while eating some pre-nap pasta, “and the first thought I’ll have is: I cannot wait for my nap today. I don’t care what else happens. I can’t wait to get back in bed.”

Mikaela also will not stay up late, and sometimes she won’t do things in the after­noon, and occasionally this leads to more people flipping out. Most of the time, she trains apart from the rest of the U.S. Ski Team and lives at home with her parents in Vail (during the nine weeks a year she’s not traveling). In the summers, she spends a few weeks in Park City, Utah, training with her teammates at the . The dynamic there is, uh, complicated. “Some sports,” Mikaela says, “you see some athletes just walking around the gym, not really doing anything, eating food. They’re first to the lunchroom, never lifting weights.”

Last summer, while Mikaela was in Park City, she overheard some of her teammates in the lunchroom talking about what they did for fun the weekend before and what they might do this upcoming one. “You want to go float the river?” Mikaela recalls one saying to another. “Let’s get a group of people together.” 

This mystifies Mikaela. “That takes freaking five hours to float the river,” she tells me. “And I’m like, honestly
 Do you forget how wonderful it feels to lie in bed and not be doing something in like the two seconds of spare time you have?”

Her dedication causes some tension, even passive aggression. If you’re focused at the expense of being social, and you win all the time, by huge margins, and are blatantly ambitious, you’re considered, well, standoffish. And you’re going to catch shade. 

According to Mikaela, the form this takes in Park City is: teammates will invite her to join them for a movie or a party or whatever and then add, with the faintest whiff of sarcasm, “if that fits in your schedule.” Mikaela gets it. That dynamic has dogged her since high school. The day she moved into her dorm room at , a boarding school in Vermont for elite skiers, her roommate, Brayton “Bug” Pech, remembers saying to her, “You seem like a really nice girl and all, but I just have to hate you when you get in the start gate.” Bug, now one of Mikaela’s best friends, told me about a morning when the school canceled classes because there was such amazing powder, and while Bug and all the normal (that is, truly excellent) skier-students were out on the hill, freeskiing in the magnificent blower pow, stoked out of their minds, there was Mikaela, on the training hill by herself, working on traverse drills and ankle flexion.

Bug quickly learned that the path to personal happiness around Mikaela is to give yourself a break for being mortal and stand back in awe. “You have to put her in her own category,” she says. “She’s an anomaly. Most people with Mikaela’s talent just rely on their talent. That’s why, when the competition gets really serious, they fall apart.” Mikaela was different. “I knew she was going to be special, because she was going to make herself into something special.” 

Skiing is an incredibly complex sport. Unlike, say, swimming or gymnastics, athletes don’t just have to learn to control their bodies. The terrain is always changing, the surface is always changing. “The training is very deliberate, and then when the training peaks, the skiing becomes more about feeling,” says Kirk Dwyer, who was Mikaela’s main coach at Burke and a major influence in her life. “You can think about it like going up a chairlift.” What he means is that you’re moving along, training, making progress in one mode, and then, to perform, you have to make a 180-degree switch. Mikaela arrived at Burke well suited to the process. “Her mentality is similar to virtuoso musicians like Isaac Stern, always trying to play better,” Dwyer says. “She’s very intrinsically motivated. She sets the bar high. She focuses.”

Mikaela won the national slalom title at 16. Then she started winning in giant slalom. Now she’s adding speed events, winning her first alpine combined race—one super-G run, one slalom—earlier this year. She has won events by two or three seconds, in a sport where one-tenth of that is considered a decent margin. This is eminently—and maybe even unavoidably—hateable if you’re a female American alpine ski racer not named Julia Mancuso or Lindsey Vonn. Mikaela, like Vonn, has a custom training program in part because she brings money and glory to U.S. skiing and is considered the future of the sport. (None of the American men have a custom program.)

“It’s hard to find someone who is really genuinely happy for you if you are having success and they’re not,” Mikaela says. She knows that’s only human. “I just try to be as nice as possible and make fun of myself and laugh at the jokes.” But the slacking off, by which Mikaela means floating the river or having a few beers and playing spoons on a Friday night—she has little patience for that. Champions put in the work. Champions prioritize the effort to get better, every day. She makes each decision in her life only after she’s weighed whether or not it will help her achieve. She has a new boyfriend, a French ski racer. She’s going to meet him in Paris. But she won’t visit again if she can’t finish her training block strong. “Don’t worry about it and you’ll be great, said nobody ever,” she tells me just before her nap. 

Mikaela has a recurring dream. She shows up at the mountain for a race, puts on her boots and helmet, then realizes her clothes are disappearing. So she takes off her boots and helmet, dresses in her thermals and speed suit, then buckles on her boots and helmet again. But by the time she’s done this, her speed suit has flown off. This goes on: one piece of gear donned, another vanished. Eventually, she just starts running to the chairlift so she won’t miss her start. Every step she takes, the hill gets steeper and steeper until she’s falling off a cliff.

To say that Jeff and Eileen Shiffrin are dedicated and passionate skier parents does not even begin to cover it. The Shiffrins did not just click Mikaela’s tiny boots into bindings at age three and drift down the hill with her, snowplowing; they began methodically coaching her and her elder brother, Taylor. “Mom and Dad said, ‘Let’s do this: ski to that tree, in this position, as fast as you can,’ ” said Taylor, who just got an MBA at the University of Denver, where he ski-raced during undergrad, and now works on the business side of tech startups. “There were actually very specific drills about body position: head in front, knees to skis, pretend you’re holding a tray of hot chocolate and try not to spill it. Let’s do it again, and again, and again.”

Eileen started training her daughter on gates when she was six. The next year, Mikaela began racing. Soon after, she lost control near the end of a run, spun around in a complete circle, and still won the race by ten or twenty seconds. A parent of another skier turned to Eileen and said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Eileen is casual and friendly, offering me leftovers at a dining table that has family snapshots hanging above one end and ­Mikaela’s five huge World Cup globes lined up on a credenza nearby. She’s smart and game for anything (including studying German and chemistry alongside Mikaela while her daughter was finishing her high school diploma; now the two watch and together). She’s also a serious athlete. As a girl, Eileen spent three hours a day hitting a tennis ball against a wall. When not practicing her ground strokes, she watched as many matches as she could to study technique. She brings her intense commitment to practice—along with a belief that if you study, you can master anything—to all parts of her life. 

For instance, when Taylor was in sixth grade, he tried out for the soccer team but didn’t make the cut. Eileen bought four soccer nets for the family basement, ordered a complete set of World Cup soccer DVDs, and spent every evening that winter in the basement with Taylor, running him through drills. At tryouts the following fall, the coach thought Taylor played like Neymar’s little brother. “What on earth have you been doing?” he asked Eileen.

Eileen is not paid by U.S. Ski and Snowboard, but she’s recognized by the organization as one of Mikaela’s coaches, along with team coaches Mike Day and Jeff Lackie. She approaches her job with the sense of purpose and attention to detail of a forensic scientist at a murder scene. “You have to study the sport like you would study precalc or physics,” she explains. “You have to be willing to think about it that in-depth.” Eileen will, say, spend an hour or so in the evening with Mikaela watching tapes of Marlies Schild, the 2011 slalom world champion, asking questions: Is she keeping her shoulders facing out at this point in the turn? Or is she not really facing her shoulders out but driving her outside shoulder around? How much separation does she have between her upper and lower body? How is she using her ankles and knees?

Few athletes’ parents have the time, inclination, or athletic experience to do this, and that has given Mikaela “a pretty big advantage, almost an unfair advantage,” Eileen admits. She insists that her parental contribution ends there, that she has not also bequeathed to her daughter a significant competitive streak.

I ask Eileen what I think is a simple question: When did Mikaela become faster than her? 

“With skiing?” she says. “I don’t know. Mikaela says when she was 11 or 12—which is
 no. But I don’t race against her. I never really compared or had that situation. I still ski pretty fast, faster than a lot of people are comfortable with me skiing. They are always like, ‘Why aren’t you wearing a helmet?’ So, I’m not sure.” 

“But when did you cross the threshold to saying, ‘My kid is a better athlete than me’?” I rephrase.

“Better skier. Well, probably when she was
” Her voice trails off. 

To be clear, we are talking about 2017 World Cup overall champion Mikaela Shiffrin. “I don’t know. I’m not really sure,” Eileen says. “That’s such a hard question. I never really think about it.”

On the slopes, Mikaela steers her body like a Nascar driver classically trained at the Bolshoi Ballet—with such precision, grace, and control that it’s hard to comprehend the power required to hold your lower body at a 30-degree angle to the ground while keeping your torso upright, all while moving down iced ruts at 80 miles per hour.

U.S. Ski Team coach Jeff Lackie says, “Mikaela separates herself from the field by using every inch of the turn to extract speed, building momentum whenever possible. You never tire of watching athletic genius.” 

Right now, Mikaela’s focusing on turning before the gate. Pretty much nobody can turn before the gate. If you think about turning before the gate, you’ve missed turning before the gate and you’ve probably missed turning before the next gate, too. The window of time and the acreage of snow in which to perform the maneuver are just too small. Mikaela recognizes this. She knows the effort to turn before the gate is basically a Zen exercise. You keep working toward it. You keep not getting it. You stay committed to the practice. 

Mikaela is a really nice, smart person—I feel compelled to say that. She’s thoughtful and grounded, under her beautiful skin and all that muscle, and when I tell her I want to find a way to share the normal 22-year-old side of her life, she gamely takes me through her Instagram feed. We look at a story posted by an actress from Glee. Another posted by a cliff-jumping champion also sponsored by Red Bull. A third from a tawny-skinned fashion blogger. “She’s #tangoals,” Mikaela says. “I would get skin cancer if I was that tan all the time. But still.” Later we watch a video of Julia Mancuso training on a beach with her hunky husband. “This is not OK. I would love to be on the beach,” Mikaela says. “If I could just dip my toes in an ocean for a second, I would be over the moon.” I point out that she could fly to Maui, train on the sand, and dip her entire body in the sea. But as soon as the words are out of my mouth, I regret them. Telling Mikaela now, in the months leading up to the Olympics, that she could fly to Hawaii and train there is really not all that different than her teammates saying, if that fits in with your schedule. It’s disrespectful—subtly so, perhaps. But still. The remark fails to honor who Mikaela is. 

Mikaela is gracious and lets it slide.

Lindsey Vonn has always worked harder than anybody else on the hill. , Mikaela finds a post of Vonn doing one of the same core exercises she did this morning—plank position, feet suspended from a rubber band, body stiff in a linear plane. Only Vonn’s hands are not anchored to a box, as Mikaela’s were; they’re clutching rings. Mikaela laughs nervously. “Oh, that’s like what I did today, only twice as hard.” But she still wants to try it.

Wanting to work the hardest is not just stealth-killer goody-two-shoes behavior. Skiing fast is the result of preparation and flow. This may be the key to success in all sports, maybe all of life. To win you need to work the hardest, because knowing you’ve worked the hardest is what will allow you to believe in yourself and stay out of your own way in a race. This idea is the core lesson of The Inner Game of Tennis, published in 1974 and written by W. Timothy Gallwey, one of the most influential sports training books ever written. “The player of the inner game comes to value the art of relaxed concentration above all other skills,” Gallwey writes. “He discovers a true basis for self-confidence; and he learns that the secret to winning any game lies in not trying too hard.”

Eileen loves this book. Kirk Dwyer made all the skiers he coached at Burke read it. Only if you’ve done enough training, only if you’ve tried hard beforehand, can you fully relax during a race. 

The trouble, for most of us, starts with the fact that we don’t always do all the work. We don’t do as much as Mikaela, or Lindsey Vonn, and this is not just a technical or physical problem. It undermines our self-confidence. Mikaela makes us see our weaknesses, our lack of full commitment. We want to win, but we don’t want to win at all costs. Maybe we’re scared to try that hard. Maybe we don’t know how. Almost none of us truly give 100 percent. We give 98 percent, or 95 percent, maybe less. Then, even though we may have dedicated our lives to a sport, even though we may be among the best in the world, we go out there and lose. Or we go out there and get hurt. “You don’t want to be second-guessing yourself on the way down,” Mikaela says. “And you don’t want to be skiing at 110 percent.” If you stretch yourself too thin, you snap. Mikaela likes to race well within her ability. “One of my theories is that if I just train more than everybody and I’m strong and I watch more video and understand the sport better, my 90 percent will be enough.”

Enough so that, come February, she can fly to South Korea, fall asleep on the mountain, and win.

Contributing editor Elizabeth Weil () wrote about women’s running brand Oiselle in June 2016. Carlos Serrao () is an șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű contributing photographer.

The post Mikaela Shiffrin Does Not Have Time for a Beer appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

To understand the indignation that made Sally Bergesen resort to Photoshopping to take on an empire, you have to believe that you can fight for justice through the medium of running shorts.

It was just a regular rainy Saturday in May 2014: Bergesen was home in Seattle, gearing up for a seven-mile run, watching the women’s 4×1,500 meters at the IAAF World Relays on her laptop. The 4×1,500 meters, sanctioned by the International Association of Athletics Federations, the sport’s gov­erning body, is extremely low-stakes in track and field—not an Olympic event, or even an NCAA one.

But Bergesen didn’t care. She had an athlete in the race. Seven years earlier, she’d mortgaged her house and started a women’s running-clothes company called . Her mission was modest: to make a decent pair of running shorts that didn’t make a fit woman look three months pregnant—was that too much to ask? She’d grown the company patiently, intelligently, considering all the brand “touch points” (hang tags, packing tape), choosing her fabrics with care. She’d also sponsored her first runner: , an 800-meter specialist and recent Yale University grad. Now here Grace was, on the sunny blue track at the Thomas Robinson Stadium in the ­Bahamas, representing the United States.

Four teams lined up for the start: Australia, Romania, the U.S., and Kenya. And truth be told, by the time Grace, who ran third, grabbed the baton, the Kenyans, who had arrived to break the world record, had ­blasted so far ahead of the pack that the camera feed showed only the front-running African, alone on 200 meters of track. Still, the Americans showed heart and grit, finishing second in a respectable 16:55.33. After they cooled down, they stood on the podium, smiling and waving their silver-medalist bouquets.

Bergesen felt proud, of course—but mostly she felt pissed. Grace wasn’t wearing Oiselle. Her teammates weren’t ­wearing ASICS, Brooks, or New Balance, the companies that sponsored them. No, the World Relays is an international event. As such, ­according to USA Track and Field (USATF), the sport’s Indianapolis-based national governing body, all American competitors represent the national team and must wear Nike. ­Period. Sure, Oiselle, not Nike, supported Grace. But Nike, which in 2014 ­renewed its contract with USATF in a ­23-year, report­edly $500 million deal, owned the glory. Bergesen snapped a picture of her laptop screen—Grace with her relay partners, flowers overhead, enjoying what should have been a great Oiselle ­moment but was not.

Already Bergesen had suffered some ­logo-related track-wardrobe trauma. In 2012, Grace qualified for the Olympic Trials, and Bergesen, new to the elite game, set out to design a singlet compliant with Olympic Trials specs. She knew that Oiselle’s existing singlet (multicolored, with OISELLE in large letters running down the body) wouldn’t work. So she created a navy design with a large yellow bird (oiselle is an archaic French word for “bird”) and OISELLE in small yellow letters. USATF instructed Bergesen to make the bird smaller—it looked too much like a company logo. So Bergesen tinkered. Her second pass included still-smaller letters and a flock of different birds. USATF told her that the U.S. Olympic Committee (USOC) might have concerns about the use of any birds. Bergesen submitted the singlet a third time. Sorry, USATF e-mailed, “The birds need to be 5% darker.” Finally, on Bergesen’s fourth attempt, she filed art for a singlet with navy birds on navy fabric, the two navies so nearly identical that the design resembled a solid shirt with a large grease stain. USATF said it was “good to go”—­success (sort of) at last.

If you looked closely, you could still read OISELLE in small yellow type.

It is tough to overestimate how influential Nike is in the sport of track and field. The company, which made $31 billion last year, has been the official sponsor of USATF’s ­national team since 1991 and will continue to be until 2040. With the exception of shoes, sunglasses, and watches, national-team runners must wear Nike, and Nike only, at all international events. Nike also sponsors major domestic competitions like the as well as elite training programs like the , coached by famed former marathoner Alberto Salazar. Of course, it sponsors individual athletes as well, among them Olympic gold-medal sprinter and distance-running superstar Shalane Flanagan. It is the sole running-shoe and athletic-apparel partner of the USOC, meaning that its logo, the Nike Swoosh, is the only athletic-apparel logo that can be seen on U.S. track and field competitors during the Olympic Games. For 38 of the past 38 and a half years, Sebastian Coe, Britain’s middle-distance Olympic star and the new president of the IAAF, received an ­annuity, reportedly as much as $140,000, for his ­position as a Nike ambassador. He severed that relationship last fall under ­intense pressure from the British press.

In the past year, Nike has found itself on the defensive on several fronts. In May 2015, a federal indictment against 14 FIFA offi­cials stated that an unnamed U.S. multinational sportswear company had made tens of million of dollars in questionable payments starting in 1996 in connection with the sponsorship of Brazil’s national soccer team. (Nike began spon­soring the team in 1997.) No charges have been brought against any company in that case. Now Nike is caught up in a controversy unfolding in ­Kenya over to the country’s national running team, which it sponsors. “There are no alle­gations that any Nike-sponsored athlete participated in any bribery or kickback scheme in Brazil or Kenya,” Nike’s ­director of North American communications, Jo Taylor, told me. She also noted that “commitment or signing bonuses are not unusual in the industry.

Whatever the case, scrutiny of Nike continues. Last summer, the BBC and the investigative-journalism nonprofit of Nike’s hero-coach Salazar, alleging that he pushed quasi-­legal substances and ­unneeded prescription drugs on his Oregon Project athletes. “At best they are misinformed,” wrote Salazar in a detailed public rebuttal. “At worst, they are lying. I believe in a clean sport and hard work and so do my athletes.”

Back home on that rainy 2014 Saturday, Bergesen imported her snapshot of Grace at the Bahamas podium and started tweaking. Let’s show who all these women really run for!—that was about as far ahead as she thought. She changed the runners’ Swooshes to their sponsors’ logos and on Oiselle’s Instagram feed. She went running, showered, bought groceries, drove one of her daughters to a soccer game.

Four hours later, she received a cease-and-desist letter via e-mail from USATF’s general counsel and chief of business affairs, Norm Wain. “The removal and replacement of the Nike Swoosh, especially in the context of a promotional piece, misleads consumers to believe that the USATF team is sponsored by these other brands, and not by Nike,” Wain wrote. “Oiselle’s display of these doctored photographs not only damages Nike, which is likely to suffer (or has already suffered) direct lost sales resulting from such confusion, but also diminishes the value of USATF’s sponsorship and ­licensing rela­tionships.” If Bergesen didn’t remove the image, he wrote, “USATF will have no choice but to take the necessary measures to protect its rights and interests.”

​Bergesen knew, when she set out to make cute shorts, that clothes are never just fabric. Brands are emotional, freighted with semiotics. You choose one brand over another because of how the label makes you feel, what it says about your values, identity, and desired tribe. Bergesen also knew, when she poked her spikes into the running-apparel business, that Nike was the 800-pound gorilla.

Yet her first reaction upon receiving the letter was defiance: “Fuck no. I’m not going to take it down.” Then she realized Oiselle could be buried in a lawsuit so complex and expensive that the company could ­never dig out. So she removed the photo from Oiselle’s Instagram feed and posted Wain’s letter on her personal Tumblr page.

At 47, Bergesen looks a bit like Mary ­Tyler Moore. Warm smile, smooth brown hair, nice eyes—your new friend. But over the past year, she’s started to emerge as a different pop-culture icon entirely: the unassuming rebel, a fledgling Erin Brockovich. “I’ve had moments of genuine fear,” she says. “But I do think you have to make people uncomfortable.” So along with designing well-cut shorts and strappy athletic bras, she has taken it upon herself to start trying to expose the dynamics of power in track and field, the ways the rules are stacked against small businesses and the athletes sponsored by them.

“‘If you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re probably on the menu.’ That’s one of my favorite quotes,” Bergesen told me over her donburi lunch bowl last October in ­Seattle. (A few people have said this; one is senator Elizabeth Warren, who makes total sense as a Bergesen hero—she looks like a PTA president and reasons like Fidel Castro.)

We’d just walked across the huge University Village shopping center from Bergesen’s new (and first) Oiselle store, where two-time U.S. 5,000-meter champion , a former Nike athlete and now a ­partner in Oiselle, sat at a blond wood table with a rainbow assortment of Sharpies, signing copies of her popular . Bergesen describes Oiselle’s identity as “low-key, committed to an ­active life, with a New York aesthetic and a feminist bent.” (This is an apt description of Bergesen, too, who was dressed impeccably in great tortoiseshell glasses, black boots, and skinny jeans.) The brand is upscale, thoughtful, just shy of trendy—the Madewell of athleisure. Bergesen comes by her radical roots ­honestly. She grew up in Berkeley, California, in the seventies and eighties, when, she says, the dominant parenting philosophy was “You can be anything you want to be, and I’m not going to help you figure it out.”

By her own assessment, Bergesen was a “nerdly outsider kid” who obsessed over Vogue, wore scarves and ripped jeans, and only started running cross-country her ­senior year at Berkeley High after she failed to make the volleyball team. Even so, she didn’t take running seriously until her senior year at the University of Oregon. ­Shortly after graduation, she moved to Seattle for a boyfriend—Alec Duxbury, now her husband, a 47-year-old high school English teacher and bike racer—whom she’d met when they were studying abroad in France. While in Europe, Bergesen had also taken up smoking. One day she found herself on the corner of Third Avenue and University Street in downtown Seattle sucking wind and weighing her life choices. “Smoking? Running? Smoking? Running?” she recalls. “I wonder which one I should give up?”

​Bergesen took a similarly meandering route to her career. After a false start as a paralegal, she took an entry-level job at a design firm. By the time she delivered her second daughter, in 2003—her first was born in 1999—she’d been helping companies brand themselves for ten years and running seriously for twelve. That’s when she took a fateful shopping trip for athletic clothes and had a running-shorts epiphany: “I love running and I love design, and oh my God everything here is so awful. It doesn’t have to be.”

She spent the next year crafting what would become Oiselle’s first product, the Roga shorts. (“Roga” stands for running plus yoga.) They have a flat waistband, like yoga pants, but without the baggage of a brand like Lululemon, whose founder publicly blamed women whose thighs rub together when Lululemon recalled a batch of fraying yoga pants. At the 2006 Seattle Marathon expo, just before she launched Oiselle, she printed up some branded T-shirts—nothing fancy, just bird silhouettes on an American Apparel blank. The tee sold out immedi­ately. This set off a trend that remains true for Oiselle to this day: Women love their stylish cuts, yes, and their just-right design details, like zip pockets for IDs. But what they really crave is the chance to signal membership in a community—in this case a community of well-dressed, serious-but-not-too-­serious, running-obsessed women.

​Oiselle did $10 million in revenue in 2015. It’s targeting $15 million for 2016, still tiny compared with Lululemon ($2 billion) and Athleta (part of Gap’s $16 billion empire). Oiselle is not yet profitable, either. But even so, Bergesen has managed to shape it into a small company with huge, like-minded pros.

Oiselle's first big get was Lauren Fleshman. That the charismatic, Twitter-savvy, two-time U.S. 5K champ who’d run for Nike since 2003 would even consider signing with Oiselle was just a dream. Among the brand’s demographic, Fleshman is a goddess: fierce, fast, smart, spirited, effortlessly beautiful, married to Jesse Thomas—a handsome pro triathlete with an MBA—and mother to an adorable son. Everybody wants to be her.

Like many serious women runners, Bergesen first fell in love with Fleshman in 2010, when Fleshman came from behind to win the USATF Outdoor Championships 5K by two seconds. She was then asked by a TV ­reporter how she did it. Fleshman, still sweaty, her hair up in her race ponytail, said, “That was just balls. All that was was balls.”

Fleshman had her own small-business radicalization moment in 2011, when she ran the New York City Marathon. She arrived at the Staten Island start with temporary tattoos for Picky Bars, the energy-bar company she’d founded with her husband and another pro runner. During the marathon, Fleshman realized, her body would be seen by millions of spectators. What a great opportunity for their young brand! The race organizers disagreed. The race is an IAAF event, with strict sponsorship rules. At the Verrazano Bridge, a race doctor helped (“helped”) Fleshman ­remove her tattoos. This led her to start thinking about who controls what is essentially billboard space on athletes’ bodies.

In the coming years, Fleshman’s radical, antiauthoritarian (but, let’s not forget, capitalist) thinking matured. Many big running-apparel companies include so-called reduction clauses in their sponsorship contracts, allowing them to cut athlete pay for the ­remainder of the contract if a runner doesn’t hit certain benchmarks, fails to compete in a specified number of IAAF-sanctioned races, or falls below a certain rank.

Take, for example, an athlete with a four-year, $40,000-per-year contract that includes a 25 percent reduction clause. (This would be a good contract.) If that athlete fails to meet their contractual benchmarks in the first year, pay is reduced to $30,000. If that athlete then gets injured and can’t compete during the second year, pay drops to $20,000. It will remain at that level ­unless the athlete triggers the reduction clause yet again. Contracts often do include performance bonuses. But as Phoebe Wright, a Nike-sponsored 800-meter runner, told me,

“Most athletes have had reductions even after a good year. Reductions tend to make athletes bounce between feeling taken ­advantage of and feeling worthless.”

By late 2012, Fleshman had a stubborn IT-band injury that was causing her to miss races. Her pay had not been reduced, but she also knew that she wanted to have a baby. Thus, after what Bergesen describes as much “flirting over Twitter,” Bergesen flew Fleshman and her husband to Seattle to meet the Oiselle team. Bergesen made her an offer: as much cash as she could muster (she declined to give details), plus an equity stake in Oiselle. On January 1, 2013, Bergesen and Fleshman dropped what they called “the F-bomb,” announcing that

Fleshman had joined the company. The move put Oiselle on the running map. 

Next, Bergesen landed an even bigger name: Kara Goucher, one of America’s most beloved distance runners. Goucher, too, had been under contract with Nike—and had grown more and more unhappy there. According to her, Nike stopped paying her when she became pregnant with her son, Colt, in 2010 and put racing on hold. (Nike upheld its full contractual commitment that year, says Jo Taylor, pointing out that marathoners Paula Radcliffe and Joan Benoit Samuelson had multiple children as Nike athletes.) Goucher says her contract also ­included a large reduction for every year that she was not ranked among the top three female marathoners in the United States. Meanwhile her family relied on her income, and in order to avoid a reduction clause, she felt she needed to compete on a broken foot. By 2011, she told me, her feelings about Nike were interfering with her training. “This is a lie,” she remembers thinking. “I’m putting on a uniform and representing something that doesn’t support me. I felt like there was an ax above my head.”​

Oiselle couldn’t compete with the seven-figure deal that another company offered Goucher as her contract expired. But Bergesen had her decidedly pro-woman culture. She had seen marketing value in Fleshman when she was pregnant, when she was struggling with injury. (Vulnerability is very relatable.) It made no financial sense, but Goucher and her husband met with a planner and decided to change their lifestyle. On March 18, 2014, the day she was released from Nike, Goucher signed with Oiselle. “I couldn’t stop crying,” she told me. “I felt like I was free.”

Trust inside the sport of track and field is at an all-time low. In November 2015, ex-IAAF president on allegations of corruption re­lated to doping scandals. Now incoming president Coe—who served as Diack’s vice president and whose top aide also stepped down amid the doping scandals—was supposed to clean up international track. It didn’t help that, in December, four months into Coe’s tenure, French prosecutors began investigating the IAAF’s decision, under Diack, to award the 2021 World Championships to Eugene, where Nike was founded. Coe told the British press that in the past, other cities were also awarded the right to host championships without an open bidding process.

The IAAF’s struggles exacerbated existing credibility problems here in the United States. Athletes were irate in December 2014 when USATF’s board of directors ­appointed the organization’s president, Stephanie High­tower, 57, a former star hurdler and manager of the 2004 Olympic women’s track team, to represent the United States at the IAAF, despite the fact that the longtime incumbent representative had won more than 80 percent of the athlete vote. (USATF stated that it had overturned the vote because the IAAF was in the midst of change.) Athletes were also concerned about the length of the new Nike contract and how that mountain of revenue would be shared with them, though as ­USATF chief public-affairs officer Jill Geer reminded me, three representatives from the organization’s Athletes Advisory Committee sit on the board.“Athletes are the backbone of our sport,” Geer e-mailed.

Nonetheless, professional track athletes on the whole are surprisingly broke. ­According to an analysis by the USATF Foundation, an affiliated nonprofit that promotes athlete development, more than 50 percent of American track and field competitors who rank in the top ten in the U.S. in their events earn less than $15,000 a year from their sport. A report from Smith College sports economist Andrew Zimbalist, commissioned in April 2015 by the Track and Field Athletes Association, found that they receive a much lower share of revenue than their peers. “In other professional sports, athletes roughly earn between 25 and 35 percent of revenues in individual sports and between 45 and 55 percent of revenues in team sports,” Zimbalist wrote. By contrast, he estimated, “In the USATF, the elite athletes are receiving $3.46 million,” which works out to just under 10 percent of USATF’s 35.2 million revenue in 2015. USATF disputes these figures, saying that it budgeted more than $15 million in 2015 for athlete support, a category in which it lists broadcasting costs and fees for championship officials. Of that,
$5.1 million (about 14 percent) was paid to athletes in prize money, health-insurance deductibles, and other direct benefits.

Last summer, U.S. 800-meter champion Nick Symmonds, who , took a very public stand. In the lead-up to the IAAF World Championships in Beijing, he refused to sign USATF’s statement of conditions, which promised that he’d wear Nike clothes at all “official” team activities, a stipulation Symmonds found vague. His contract with Brooks required him to wear Brooks clothing the rest of the time, but USATF had also advised athletes to pack only Nike or unbranded apparel for the entire two-week trip. Symmonds felt caught between competing obligations. “I think we can all agree that the way the statement of conditions is written right now is just a real dog turd,” he told press at the time. As he reasoned: He was being paid by Brooks to represent the Brooks brand. His value would be diminished if he could not perform his job for a portion of the year. And he was ­being blocked from doing that job by the deal ­USATF had signed with Nike. USATF ­issued a statement that “the only restriction ­USATF places on athletes’ apparel or ­appearance at any time is when they represent the United States in national team competitions, award ceremonies, official team press conferences, and other official team functions.” Symmonds did not go to Beijing.

Not all Olympic sports rely so heavily on a single apparel sponsor. USA Swimming, for instance, currently partners with ­Arena, Speedo, and Tyr. All three companies’ ­logos can be seen on athletes at various World Championship events, which creates a healthy ecosystem of competitive brands. USATF does have ­additional sponsors—BMW, the Hershey Company, Visa, and others—but none with nearly as much sway in the sport as Nike.

Nike’s outsize commitment to track does have serious benefits. “Nike began as a running company, and our commitment to serve runners and athletes of all kinds, at every level, continues to drive everything we do,” says Jo Taylor. “Nike’s goal is to help grow the sport”—which, she notes, is good for everybody, even smaller brands like Oiselle. Besides, says Ken Goe, a longtime sports reporter at Portland’s Oregonian, “Really pop­ular sports don’t have this issue, because lots of big companies want to step up and be a part of them. In track, not so much. It doesn’t attract a mainstream ­audience apart from the Olympics.” No doubt, no company besides Nike would likely be prepared to support USATF at the $500 million level. Nike only does so, Goe says, because cofounder Phil Knight “feels a love for the sport that transcends Nike’s business interests.”

Still, the power differential causes problems. Attorney Sathya Gosselin, who served on the plaintiff’s legal team for O’Bannon v. NCAA—an ongoing lawsuit arguing that college football and basketball athletes should be compensated when the NCAA uses their images for commercial purposes—told me that he regularly receives phone calls from aggrieved track athletes concerned about Nike’s influence on the sport. He believes antitrust cases can be hard to prove. Hypo­thetically, he says, “If there are ways in which the athletic federation is colluding with Nike to squeeze out sponsors and athletes, above and beyond their contractual agreement, that would be concerning. It is very difficult for a professional track athlete to earn a living without taking on second and third jobs, and that impinges on their ability to compete at the highest levels.”

Last year, Bergesen consulted with Gosselin about bringing an antitrust case on behalf of Oiselle. He declined the case, leaving Bergesen with the impression that an athlete, not a small business, would make a more sympathetic plaintiff. But in January, Symmonds’s caffeinated-gum company, Run Gum, represented by Gosselin’s firm, Hausfeld, filed a lawsuit against ­USATF and the USOC alleging anticompetitive conduct regarding the 2016 Olympic Trials. Under current rules, athletes can only wear the ­logos of approved athletic-apparel and gear companies during the trials, icing out small brands. (USATF emphasizes that these are USOC regulations, not USATF’s, and that it is merely following protocol.) Bergesen is ­wholly supportive of Symmonds. Yet she says, “In my mind, the case doesn’t solve the bigger issue at hand—unpaid athlete representation at the Olympic and world levels.” She may still pursue legal action.

Everybody was still playing nice in early ­December 2015, when Bergesen and Fleshman flew to Texas to attend USATF’s annual meeting. Fleshman had a plan to present to the Athletes Advisory Committee for how athletes might seize control of marketing space on their bodies. Bergesen was there for moral support. But she couldn’t resist a good opportunity for consciousness-raising.

After registering at the Hyatt Regency and declining their red Nike swag backpacks, thank you very much, Fleshman and Bergesen fortified themselves with bagels and coffee in the hotel lobby. Then, while Fleshman attended an athletes-only session, Bergesen headed up two escalators to the ethics-committee meeting, which took place in a windowless room filled with brown-clothed tables. The meeting was just about as boring as a person could imagine. That is, until Bergesen, sitting in the back row and looking as unassumingly Mary ­Tyler Moore–esque as ever, raised her hand and politely asked, “So I’m curious how ­USATF plans to handle the issues of harassment and intimidation by Nike against small companies and the athletes sponsored by them.”

The room fell silent.

Frank Sullivan, the committee’s earnest Midwestern chairman at the time, stepped in. “Can you give us some examples?”

Bergesen straightened up her posture. “Well,” she said, “one particular incident of concern was at the Olympic Trials in 2012,” when, Bergesen claimed, the 10,000-meter winner, a Brooks runner, was required to wear Nike sweats at the medal ceremony. “Here is what should have been this happy, triumphant podium moment, and this athlete was ­harassed to get out of her sponsor uniform and into Nike apparel.”

“Yeah, where do we stand on that?” asked Tyree Washington, an exceedingly well-muscled ex-sprinter. “We’ve all heard ­examples of that happening. That should not be happening.”

Bergesen then brought up a second incident, widely reported in the running press. According to a University of Oregon police report, multiple witnesses at the USATF Outdoor Championships in Eugene last summer saw John Capriotti, Nike’s vice president of global sports marketing for athletics, verbally and physically harass Brooks head coach Danny Mackey, a former Nike ­employee, in a heated encounter over an undisclosed matter. (Mackey declined to press charges; neither he nor Capriotti would comment.)

A few minutes later, USATF counsel Norm Wain walked in. Bergesen introduced herself, and Sullivan politely recapped her issue.

Wain, one of the few people at the convention in a suit, fiddled for a moment with his phone.

“Let’s peel back for a second,” he said. “Number one, USATF does not ­interfere with the business of athletes and sponsors. USATF has a deal with a sponsor with ­regard to the national-team uniform. Number two, with regard to reporting, it’s really hard to answer that question. The athletes have a panel, the coaches have a panel. This committee developed a vendor code of conduct in terms of how to drive best prac­tices. I’d have to go back and look to see what that document says. I’m late for a meeting, so
”

​Bergesen smiled tightly and rephrased. “The question is: How far is USATF willing to go to remedy a situation that involves their major sponsor?”

Wain bobbed and weaved some more. “We’d need to do an investigation to get more facts. Then we’d look at our bylaws. There are a lot of different things that come into play.”

By this point it was 12 o’clock, and another committee needed the room.

The next day, Fleshman made her own ­attempt at change. She had some allies in the ballroom that housed the Athletes ­Advisory Committee, foremost among them Symmonds, though he’d grown skeptical about change through offi­cial channels. (“I can accomplish more in one tweet than in an entire weekend here at USATF,” he told me.) But this was a tough crowd: 100 elite athletes, including dozens of sprinters who looked like they could each squat a Ford F-150 with Symmonds and Fleshman in the cab.

“I’m on the older side,” Fleshman started out when she took the mic. “I’m 34. I’m in my last one to two years of competing.” Then she presented her plan. In high literary-­feminist style—Fleshman graduated from Stanford in 2003—she called it “A Space of Our Own: A Proposal to Make a Living.”

She asked everyone to imagine standing on a track, in a huge stadium, about to start an international race. “The sponsor on the bib number—somebody else sells it. The sponsor on the uniform—­somebody else sells it. The logos behind you when you’re on the starting line—somebody else sells them. The television commercials—somebody else sells them. The only person that can’t sell any space on the biggest stages of the world is you, is us.”

​Fleshman flashed a slide. (Bergesen had designed it.) It showed a standard race bib and, alongside it, a revised one with a small piece of real estate outlined in red that an athlete could sell to a sponsor of his or her choice—say, General Mills or Oiselle. “This proposal says athletes should have a space of our own, that we get to monetize as we see fit, considering we are the ­asset.”

The energy in the room felt weirdly flat.

“Perfect, thank you, Lauren,” said committee vice chair Jeff Porter, a hurdler who is sponsored by Nike.

​Fleshman sat down.

It was hard to see how her plan could hurt anybody present. But a lot of athletes are sponsored by Nike, or want to be. Perhaps more to the point, as North Carolina sports agent Evan Morgenstein notes, athletes don’t make good revolutionaries. “The current system is only possible because athletes are indentured servants and afraid to come together because they’re worried that they’ll get kicked off teams,” he says. “And once you make that national team, what happens? You become a ward of the state. Someone from the governing body immediately makes you sign a code of conduct that says you won’t smoke, you won’t philander, all that legitimate code-of-conduct stuff. Then, at the end, it says you’re signing over all your marketing rights to the governing body. Once you sign, you’ve given it all away.”

​USATF has made some recent strides toward ­equity. Most notably, in November, the federation announced that each athlete who makes an Olympic or World Outdoor Championships team would ­receive a stipend of roughly $10,000. The reaction was positive. Who doesn’t like $10,000? Still, some see this as shut-up money, a bone tossed to ­reduce their negotiating power.

“You hear this a lot from the leadership here now: Just be grateful,” Symmonds told me. He was not buying it. “No, no, no. We earned this,” he said. “This is ours. We’re not going to be grateful that you stole this from us and are now giving 10 percent back.”

It can be hard to remember sometimes that what Bergesen is doing, primarily, is selling cute running clothes.

“I’ve been to the future. You’re all going to have a lot more color in your underwear drawers soon,” one of her designers said at an all-staff meeting last fall. The Oiselle office, on the second floor of a commercial strip in Seattle’s Green Lake neighborhood, is exactly how you would picture it: lots of young women in excellent shape, a dozen bins overflowing with samples, a table of homemade baked goods.

The big questions of the day were: How do you design a running bra with a pocket for a phone? (In the cleavage? Will it hurt?) How big should their largest size be? (They opted for 12.) And, a company perennial, any thoughts on a monster bottom, meaning a pair of pants every woman is just ­dying to have? “I’d like to see us push harder on a lifestyle short,” Bergesen told her team. “Let’s do a Roga lifestyle short with pockets. Kind of like a jeans style. Jean shorts are so uncomfortable. They’re so crotchy.” Everybody agreed.

Bergesen’s mantra, lifted from Karl Lager­feld, is “Fashion is a sport now—you have to run.” In other words, you have to keep moving fast, keep evolving. (Lagerfeld also said, “Sweatpants are a sign of defeat. You lost control of your life, so you bought some sweatpants.” But let’s leave that to the side for now.) In 2013 and 2014, Bergesen produced Oiselle runway shows during New York Fashion Week. Fleshman, Grace, and other athletes served as models, making a statement about power and beauty. The shows generated tons of buzz. But she did not repeat in 2015—as Lagerfeld says, you have to run.

Surprising even Bergesen, there’s a lot you can communicate with a foot or two of fabric draped around your ass and legs. “When I started out,” she said, “I sensed what was lacking in the shorts”—good design and quality construction, proxies for respect toward the consumer—“and I knew that symbolized what was missing in the sport and in the industry as a whole. It ended up being much bigger than the product.”

Yes. It ended up being about the logo.

The post The Woman Who Took On Nike with Running Shorts appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

A ski jumper needs to have just the right amount of crazy. Too much, you become a bobsledder. Too little, you never even try. Of the two U.S. women with real hopes to medal in the Sochi Games—the first Olympics to include women’s ski jumping—one, 19-year-old reigning world champion Sarah Hendrickson, seems to excel because she’s ethereal and light. The other, former champ Lindsey Van, 29, appears to defy gravity to escape a character that, even she admits, can be heavy and dark.

Fly girls

Meet the women expected to dominate the 2014 Sochi Games.

Last fall, Van was lounging around with teammates Jessica Jerome, Alissa Johnson, and Abby Hughes before the U.S. National Championships at the 90-meter “normal” hill in Lake Placid, New York—a slope Van had barreled down 5,000 times. All four women grew up together in Park City, Utah. All were dressed in kneesocks, tank tops, and underwear, waiting to pull on their aerodynamic foam jumpsuits until just before they walked outside. “I don’t understand people who like running. I think there’s something wrong with them,” Van said, in her usual biting, funny, and authentic manner. “Ski jumping is annoying, too. But I haven’t found anything I love more.”

Van is a big reason women will be jumping in Sochi at all. The U.S. men have virtually no chance of medaling. But with three of the world’s ten best jumpers on the women’s team, the possibility of a ski-bootstrap, zero-to-hero narrative has turned them into media darlings. Adding to the drama is a fair bit of internal tension: Van dominated U.S. women’s jumping for 15 years. Arguably she started it, at least at an elite level, by tagging along with the guys and jumping as well as they did. Van won the first women’s world championships in 2009. For a year she held the record—105.5 meters, male or female—on the normal hill in Vancouver.

But she wrung herself out pushing the stodgy old men of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to allow women’s ski jumping to join men’s, an Olympic event since the first modern Winter Games, in 1924. Before the 2010 Vancouver Games, Van and Jerome, the third-best American, were the , arguing that they jumped nearly as far as the men (which they do); the IOC countered that the women’s field wasn’t deep enough (at the time, just 83 competitors from 14 countries; there are now 300 competitors from 18 countries). The women lost that round, a serious blow to Van. She sat out the 2010 season, then in 2011, after a roommate was diagnosed with leukemia, signed up for the National Marrow Donor Program and gave twice.

Later that year, the IOC finally relented. Women’s ski jumping would have one Olympic event—the individual competition on the normal hill—compared with three for the men: the normal hill, the large hill, and the team event.

Meanwhile, Hendrickson glided into the sport on the tracks Van cut. Even before she turned ten, she was on posters that said THE FUTURE OF WOMEN’S SKI JUMPING. Hendrickson, not Van, won the first Women’s World Cup, in 2012, and the world championships in 2013. Hendrickson, not Van, scored the lucrative sponsorships from Kellogg’s, Nike, and Red Bull.

But then, while training in August, Hendrickson overjumped the hill and blew out the ligaments in her right knee. She knew the sport had risks. “A lot of jumpers claim that they’re not scared,” she told me before the accident. “But that’s not really true.”

Ski jumping is a weird hybrid, an unlikely mix of Nordic under-statement and epic flight. Athletes are scored on both distance and style. The ideal is a still body during flight and a bent-kneed telemark landing.

Contrary to how it looks from the ground, jumpers don’t just zip down the ten-story Skee-Ball shoot, pop off the end of the ramp, and float through the sky. The sport is a master class in functional physics, an object lesson in converting potential to kinetic energy, a primer on optimal angle of attack.

For proof, just watch the kids on the novice hill, some as young as six. They muster all their bravery, point their skis downhill, then fall like chicks pushed out of a nest. The pros, by contrast—the best of whom tend to come from Northern Europe and Japan—are explosive and precise. In the span of ten seconds, the athlete shoots down what’s called the in-run in squat position, thighs parallel to the ground, chest on knees to reduce wind resistance as she accumulates speed. Then she takes off, catapulting her body forward and up, never opening her chest so high that it creates unnecessary drag. Next is the flight—the athlete soaring headfirst, feet splayed, body tilting in a tight angle over the skis. For the landing, she extends her arms and bends her legs, aiming to gently meet the ground.

The mechanics of the sport favor both the skinny and the powerful. Hendrickson stands just over five foot three and weighs 94 pounds, with a body mass index of 16.5. Van, by contrast, is all muscle: she’s five foot two and a half, weighs 130 pounds, and can leg-press 630. Most ski jumpers find that it’s easier to soar by being light and lofty, like a paper airplane, than by building quads that can fire you into the air with the force of a cannonball.

As a result, eating disorders are a serious problem for both women and men. To discourage this, jumpers with BMIs below 21 are required to ride shorter skis, but the penalty isn’t enough to make a healthy weight worthwhile competitively. Hendrickson’s bony shoulders look worrisome. She admits she has to force herself to eat sometimes.

Ten minutes before the first round of jumps in Lake Placid, Van slipped on her suit and climbed the wooden stairs, steep as a Maya pyramid, to join the queue at the top of the ramp. Only 80 girls and women ages six and up ski-jump in the United States; 20 of them were here. (Admittedly, the IOC might have had a point about depth. Four jumpers—chosen at trials on December 29 and at coaches’ discretion—will make up the U.S. Olympic squad. That’s one in 20 participants.)

The mood on the hill was familial and restrained. Ski jumpers aren’t interested in mirroring the gauche ruckus of the X Games. Many see even alpine skiers as debauched, hinting that they might do well to turn the aprĂšs indulgences down a notch. In fairness, the view from the top does require a certain stoicism.

Sitting on the bar that serves as a starting block, the vista is a 300-foot drop to a landing zone of artificial turf. Yes, weirdly, in ski jumping snow is optional. Winter events like Sochi take place on snow, but otherwise the landing hill is a tilted football field of green plastic blades, each one two feet long and as thick as bucatini—excellent material for an all-weather hula skirt.

Every competitor jumped twice, sliding onto the bar, placing skis in the porcelain tracks, and waiting for Paolo Bernardi, then the U.S. coach, to lower his arm and shout, “Jump!” Accelerating down the incline, each woman sounded like a small plane on a rural runway. Then the world turned quiet as she launched herself, body prostrated for ten seconds in the sky.

If you grew up watching ABC’s Wide World of Sports, you’ll have etched into your permanent memory under the Agony of Defeat a 1970 and thus be under the misimpression that ski jumpers crash all the time. This isn’t true: crashes are rare. They are also less devastating than you might expect. The slope of the landing hill mirrors the jumper’s flight, meaning a skier’s body is rarely more than 10 or 12 feet off the ground.

Still, every competitor has an injury story. In 2006, Jerome blew out her knee; in 2004, she lacerated her spleen. Hughes, 24, tore a disk in her back in 2007. Van has had five knee operations; she broke six vertebrae in a skiing accident in 2009—and won the world championships two weeks later.

In 2005, Gian Franco Kasper, president of the FIS, ” implying that women’s knees might not be strong enough for the landing. The ladies are plenty strong, thank you very much. But, as in many sports, knees can blow out at inopportune moments. When Hendrickson crashed, she cried for five days straight. Upon waking from surgery, she had 22 weeks to prepare for the Sochi Games. But while she may be a featherweight (she dropped down to 89 pounds during her rehabilitation), she’s no pushover. She rehabbed eight hours a day to hold on to her Olympic dream. By Thanksgiving, she was on track to jump in January.

Hendrickson stayed home when the nation’s best lugers, skeleton sliders, bobsledders, and ski jumpers assembled in Lake Placid. The spartan Olympic Training Center there housed our national treasure in glutes. One afternoon, Nina Lussi, a 19-year-old from Lake Placid and one of two U.S. team jumpers not from Park City, was in the weight room when the bobsledders appeared. “They all came in wearing their booty shorts,” said Lussi. “Spandex booty shorts. Scariest moment of my life.”

The jumpers felt more comfortable in the huge basketball gym, bounding from a dead stop to the top of a shoulder-high stack of crash pads. As Jerome sat on Van’s back to stretch it out, Lolo Jones entered with her 30 new pounds of bobsled muscle. Jerome declared that she’d had a girl-crush on Jones before anyone else in America had a girl-crush on Jones and plotted her approach.

“It’s happening. Handshake! Handshake!” Van narrated.

Jerome returned triumphant. Soon Jones walked over to try the most fundamental ski-jump training move, the imitation.

“So break it down for me,” Jones said, standing on a block face-to-face with the men’s ski-jumping coach, who looked seriously undermatched. Jerome obliged: squat deep, lower your chest to your knees, explode up and out until your body is horizontal over the coach’s head.

Jones’s first jump was a flop: too vertical. Then she got a feel for the motion and the sport’s allure. “You guys are like, ‘Fuck long jump!’ ” she said. “Ski jumping’s like long jumping, but you have to have balls.”

Earlier in the summer, I’d attended Hendrickson’s 19th-birthday lunch. The team toasted her as she ate half a Reuben sandwich. On good days they all interact like sisters, squishing into hotel rooms, squabbling over who’s a slob and who’s a neat freak, who might clip her cuticles incessantly and who might travel with a blankie. But even before her injury, success had started to splinter Hendrickson away. While Jerome and Johnson waitressed and Hughes worked as a nanny,

Hendrickson worried a bit about becoming like alpine star Lindsey Vonn, who was drawn away from her team by the media. Given the amount of attention—and money—she’d already received, she expected that the other girls might be envi-ous. “If they are, I completely understand,” she told me. “I feel guilty. In that picture of us,” she said, the one from the 2013 women’s world championships, “I’m on their shoulders, alone at the top.” Of course, that whole story line had veered off-script. To make it to Sochi, Hendrickson’s recovery had to go exactly right every day. And even then she had to worry about current World Cup champion Sara Takanashi, the four-foot-eleven Japanese teen she’d beaten by only 1.5 meters in the world championships.

Almost nobody ski-jumps, but everyone has stuck a hand out of a car window, felt the lift, and wanted to fly. In the finals at Lake Placid, Van soared 96.5 meters, body perfectly still in her bright orange jumpsuit in the warm fall air. She beat second-place Jerome with ease, winning her 16th national championship.

This February, Van will jump in the competition that has eluded her all her life. But even after such a long and bumpy road, the podium is not what’s motivating her. “Honestly, I thought I would have quit by now,” she said. “But jumping’s more addictive, and more difficult, than anything else.”

Correspondent Elizabeth Weil is the author of the marriage memoir .

The post The American Stars of Ski Jumping appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Last January, three months after Lucky Chance woke up from a coma in France and a week after he arrived back home in the suburbs west of Sydney, he put on his oversize monkey costume and hobbled across the street to a playground. There, his mother held a camera and helped Lucky, now 28, make a video.

Lucky had been creating short films since he became Lucky Chance, a name he legally adopted after he dropped out of high school at 15, lived as a rock-climbing bum, and joined Australia’s circus. The videos are beautiful and terrifying, halfway magical, two-thirds nuts, exploring what it looks like when a young man in his prime pushes his body hard up against the edge of risk. In them, Lucky does handstands on the lips of cliffs. He hurls himself off rock walls holding only a rope. He BASE-jumps from unfamiliar exit points on days when clouds obscure the landing zone. He sets up a diving board on a sheer rock face, inches backward toward the end, and leans back.

“It’s physical image creation—art through physicality,” explains Lucky, who was born Toby Benham. We’re sitting in front of his mom’s computer at her house in Emu Plains, where he’s come to convalesce and figure out what to do next. Carol Hahnfeld, a preschool teacher, is one of only a few people who still call him Toby. Her office is small and stuffy, cluttered with filing cabinets, an ironing board, and old family photos, homey enough to make anyone with a strong taste for adventure want to cannonball from a ledge.

Much of the world met Lucky in July 2011, when a video surfaced of him doing just that. Or, to be more precise, when the world saw Lucky, wearing a pirate costume, do a triple backflip with a double layout from the end of a 100-foot-long climbing rope bolted to a cliff in the Blue Mountains, about two hours from Sydney. Lucky called the apparatus the , and in July 2010, a camera crew working on a climbing movie called was there to film him as he flew off and landed with a parachute. But as he rotated, his legs splayed. The chute tangled around one leg, and Lucky fell 560 feet before it finally deployed, 30 feet from the ground. He hit the earth standing and walked away. Lucky’s sister, Melanie, a 30-year-old account manager for a financial-analysis firm in Melbourne, told me that the event made her brother feel “a little bit invincible.” A video clip of the fall went viral—more than 400,000 hits.

The man sitting next to me in his mother’s house looks quite different from the man in that video. His handsome face is lined with scars. The light in his eyes flickers like a wonky fluorescent bulb. His legs get stiff. On August 16, a little over a year after his miracle on the Death Swing, Lucky’s name and the cloak of protection it implied betrayed him. In what he estimates was his 500th BASE jump, he hiked down from the village of Les Carroz to a thousand-foot cliff in Magland, near Chamonix in the French Alps. The place is known as a good, accessible spot—the first cliff many BASE jumpers approach upon arriving in France. Lucky chose to jump from DĂ©rivator, a side exit point less steep than the main one, which requires a running start. He planned to leap off and practice his trademark somersaults and flips in flight.

Lucky remembers, or says he remembers, no details of that day. All he knows or will acknowledge is that he was jumping with his best friend, fellow Australian Alex Duncan (who did not respond to interview requests), and that he did the two things he always did before a BASE jump: he checked the wind direction and speed and pushed negative thoughts from his mind. “It is commonly the case that you overestimate the difficulty of a particular jump. This may have been my undoing, but I would never have had it any other way,” Lucky told me in his grand archaic style. Much of the short, fantastic life of Lucky Chance feels like a fable: dramatic, timeless, containing a moral—and a little vague. On principle he refused to surrender to risk.

That day in Magland, Lucky’s persona or worldview or whatever you want to call it caught up with him. With his wide harlequin’s smile and BASE-jumping backpack, he launched himself off the cliff, threw a complicated set of aerials, and hit a rock ledge almost 450 feet below the exit point. According to reports from other jumpers, the day was very windy, and Lucky freestyled (did airborne gymnastics) where he needed to track (put his body in the best position to gain distance from the wall). When he bounced off the granite his chute partially opened, and he wound up suspended, unconscious, from his canopy, which was caught in a tree 300 feet above the grassy landing zone. He suffered a fractured jaw, a broken pelvis, open fractures in his left femur and heel—and a traumatic brain injury. Three French jumpers later retrieved his canopy, which was full of cuts and holes. As one of them, Jean-Michel Peuzin, said, “A canopy in a cliff is no good for karma.”

In the first video Lucky made after returning to Australia, he is not Lucky at all. Instead he is a character he calls . Before showing me the video, Lucky stood up and walked with his stiff, wide gait across the hall to his childhood bedroom. There, stacked in the corner, next to the twin bed with the floral coverlet, sat a pile of three football-mascot-type costumes: a monkey, a dog, and a bunny. “You have to meet Stunt Monkey,” he said. “He’s my alter ego. Monkeys like to do all the same things I like to do: climb and swing.” Before the accident, Lucky had given Stunt Monkey cameos in several videos. Stunt Monkey—who has a head filled with foam, a brown body, black eyes, and a tan face and belly—front-flipped off the Death Swing cliff wearing a rope and harness. He walked down the sidewalk in Sydney, glanced up at a building, and scaled it unroped. Near the top, Stunt Monkey sat to rest on a windowsill. Then he climbed back down.

That first post-accident video is unbearably sad. Stunt Monkey, his balance off and his confidence tattered, wobbles on crutches around a tiny playground. The sky is gray, the music melancholy. The adventures du jour do not involve handstands on cliffs, skateboarding prostrate downhill at 45 miles per hour, or double back layouts through the sky. Instead, Stunt Monkey flails his arms through the bars of a jungle gym built for a toddler. He crawls on hands and feet up a flight of three stairs. He pauses timidly at the top of a tiny slide. Then he inches down.

Following the accident, Lucky was evacuated by helicopter to the village of Sallanches, but his injuries were so severe that doctors there sent him on to the University Hospital of Grenoble. The Grenoble doctors searched for Lucky, who was still unconscious, on YouTube to learn more about who he was. He started waking up six weeks later. When he was finally coherent, eight weeks after the accident, and the doctors told him what had happened, Lucky said, “That sounds exactly like something I would do.”

According to Carol, Lucky has been seeking high-altitude trouble all his life. When he was a child, if she wanted to find him, she needed to look up. Lucky—then still Toby—spent a lot of time on the roof of the house and of his school and on top of the bus-stop sign. His younger cousin Ben Ko, 23, describes him as that awesome, terrifying older cousin you always wanted to be around even though he’d feed you 30 packets of sugar just to see you freak out. Toby, a smart but disinterested student, didn’t have much of a superego. “There was very little difference for him between thinking and actualizing,” Ben said. “Toby would say, ‘You know what I’d really like to do? I’d like to climb naked.’ ” Then he would.

Toby’s parents divorced when he was 12. Shortly after, he signed up for a rappelling class in Glenbrook, in the Blue Mountains. Carol encouraged this—she’d just made her son move to a small house in a new suburb, and she wanted to give him something positive. Toby’s love for the mountains was fierce and magnetic. He already possessed that sparkling ambition and love of heights that characterizes the puer aeternus. French pilot and writer Antoine de Saint-ExupĂ©ry is the classic of the type: charming, impractical, talented, short-lived. Toby started climbing. Then he started jumping off a nearby highway bridge, 60 feet down into the Nepean River. School felt deadly: too boring and too many rules. The day his mother flew to Germany for a honeymoon with her new husband, a postman named Knuth Hahnefeld, Toby dropped out of high school and moved about an hour away to a climbing campground. He was 15.

The hand-to-mouth dirtbag life suited Toby, as did free soloing—climbing without a rope. Toby was never a sponsored climber, never well-known outside Australia, but he was a talented athlete with a magic about him. (This magic seems to have been less charming up close; by Lucky’s own admission, those who loved him found him colossally self-centered.) He also had a bottomless appetite for daring, free-soloing routes close to the edge of his ability—climbing walls he’d never climbed before, without safety gear.

Over breakfast one morning near the city of Parramatta, Lucky told me about his formative on-sight solo route, Ferrets and Berts, rated 5.11c. The line is overhung at the crux, near the top, so, already exhausted, he threw a hand—a “dyno”—toward the final hold. “That was a massive, massive experience for me,” Lucky said while wolfing down a plate of French toast and bacon with his fingers. “My friends were not keen to do it themselves. But the rope was unnecessary! It was unreasonable! If I knew I wasn’t going to fall, what was the point?”

On an extended trip to Mount Arapiles, in southern Australia, Toby picked fruit for farmers in exchange for food and did his first backflip off a rope swing into a reservoir. He loved the feeling of tumbling midair, and he started flipping compulsively off ever higher objects: fences, stairs, buildings. Six months later, when he returned to the Blue Mountains, climbing in any traditional way no longer interested him. As he puts it now, “I wanted to keep making mental gains along with physical ones, and that was only achieved through danger.”

In 2002, Toby, then 19, traveled around the world, hitting the climber-vagabond highlights and sharpening his skills. He ate candy and watched TV while sitting in lawn chairs at the Kmart in Bishop, California. He got tendinitis in his forearms and, while he was grounded, learned to cartwheel on a slackline. He shoplifted food in Salt Lake City and spent four days in jail. In Europe, Toby fell in love with a French girl. In Germany, he found ticks, he says, embedded in “both my Johnson and my butt.”

Then he encountered England’s famous gritstone scene—a dangerous, technical head game, as the rock is nearly featureless and the local ethos prevents climbers from placing bolts. With his tendinitis in check, he hurled himself at the walls, meeting a British climber named James Pearson at a crag in northern England’s Peak District and crashing on Pearson’s parents’ floor.

Pearson, 26, is now sponsored by North Face, La Sportiva, Adidas Eyewear, and others. As he recalls, Toby returned to England the following year, 2003, and the two embarked on a “gritstone rampage.”

“We were psyched out of our tiny little minds,” Pearson told me. “We climbed pretty much every day, in all weather.” According to Pearson, at that time only one or two other guys in the world could match their skill on the hard grit. “We would try routes in really bad conditions so that when we went for the lead on a cold, crisp day, it would feel relatively easy. We were playing a dangerous game, and we both came close to losing.”

In late 2003, Toby soloed Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door, graded E9 6c (the rough equivalent of 5.14), with no mats and no ropes, after a night of dancing on ecstasy. On Christmas Day, which he spent with Pearson’s family, he climbed Harder, Faster—rated E9 7a. The route was the pinnacle of his climbing career. His tendinitis was returning so regularly and ferociously that he could no longer climb enough days in a row to progress. Soon, Toby got what Pearson calls “itchy feet” and flew to Spain to learn to BASE jump.

“If I’m honest, nothing Toby did surprised me,” Pearson said recently. “And if I am really honest, I expected one day to hear that he had gone too far. From our time climbing together, I would say that while Toby had a huge desire to enjoy life to its absolute maximum, he actually had a fairly low appreciation of the gift he had. Last year, when I saw news of his accident, I remember thinking, Well, shit, here it is—he finally pushed things too much.”

Lucky says his reaction to BASE jumping was like a junkie’s to heroin. “From my first jump I wanted more. It was like a drug—just a taster was never enough.”

BASE jumping is far more dangerous than anything else we consider a sport. It has what statisticians call a crude death rate of 43 per 100,000 people. (By comparison, skydiving’s rate is 1 per 100,000 and rock climbing’s is 0.31 per 100,000.) Regardless of the statistics, Lucky soon began trying new jumps no one else would dare try. He gravitated toward the fringe sport of freeBASEing—climbing with only a BASE-jumping parachute for protection, which on Australia’s low cliffs pretty much means climbing with no protection at all. But Lucky never achieved much notoriety outside of Australia. (Neither Dean Potter nor Jeb Corliss, two of the most cutting-edge jumpers in the world, had heard of him before his accident.) Smitten played in five Australian states, and clips aired on TV and in festivals in Europe. Director Ed Thornhill described Lucky as an “athlete who could often make vastly complicated stunts appear effortless.” Still, his approach worried many who knew him, including Gary Cunningham, president of the Australian BASE Association. “His raw talent and background in other extreme sports allowed him to quickly excel to a level well beyond that of the average BASE jumper,” Cunningham said. “He would do advanced jumps that most people would not even consider. Many took the view that it was only a matter of time before he got injured or killed.”

Toby Benham’s short life came to an end in August 2008, when he walked into the Registry of Births Deaths and Marriages in the town of Wollongong, an hour south of Sydney, and legally changed his name to Lucky Chance. He was 24 and working as a circus performer, traveling across Australia doing what he describes as a high-wire spider-man routine. After Europe, he’d enrolled in a two-year program at the CircoArts school in New Zealand to perfect his balance, body control, and tumbling skills for flight. Before choosing the name Lucky Chance, he considered Phoenix in Flames. He loved the ancient myth, the bird that dies in a fire of its own making and then rises from its ashes. When he turned 18, he had a phoenix tattooed on his back.

His first six months as Lucky did not go as planned. He tore a muscle. His slackline snapped. The LEDs in his costume short-circuited. He lost his phone. A girl stood him up. He worried that his new name might be undermining his karma and tempting fate. But then his luck seemed to turn. He landed a great job riding jet skis and diving off 50-foot masts in the Pirates Unleashed show at Sea World, on Australia’s Gold Coast. By the summer of 2011, he considered his luck restored, perhaps even augmented. That’s when, in his red-and-white-striped pirate shirt, he fell 590 feet from the Death Swing and walked away.

“Oh, my god, you don’t know who he is?”

The women working the desk at the Edge, a climbing gym in a suburban strip mall, are Googling Lucky and watching his YouTube videos. Behind them on the floor, Lucky, in his Edge work shirt, is putting up sport routes for high school groups. He’s grateful to have the job; he needs the money and the distraction. But as anyone with a Web browser can see, Lucky is a broken-down version of his former self, a former emperor of the air who now looks exhausted and walks like a golden retriever with hip dysplasia.

Lucky grips the railing as he descends the stairs to find more footholds for gossiping high school kids. The other guys who work at the Edge bounce along on their toes, all smooth skin and popping veins. “It’s hard to lose so much physical ability,” Lucky admits in an unguarded moment. When his shift ends, he leaves immediately. His mother is driving him to another doctor’s appointment.

Lucky has lived in limbo since the crash. He doesn’t remember the first couple of months—those were for Carol to endure. She’d been half-waiting for the call for years. He takes calculated risks, she’d tell herself. He takes calculated risks. Three days after the fall, his mother and his sister, Melanie, flew to France. Lucky’s then girlfriend, 20-year-old acrobat and stuntwoman Nandalie Campbell Killick, met them there. When they finally saw their boy, comatose in the ICU, he was swollen almost beyond recognition. Carol later learned that Lucky’s doctors didn’t think he was going to live. “He had loads of tubes everywhere going in and out of his body,” she said. “A machine was breathing for him. It was very surreal. We could only touch his arms. I just kept holding his fat, puffed-up hand and thinking, He’s so big.”

The day after they arrived, a doctor cataloged Lucky’s injuries: the broken jaw, the fractured pelvis, the open fractures to the left foot and femur, the blunt contusion to the left side of his brain, the twisted neck, the air between his lung and thoracic spine, and the lacerations down the left side of the face. The pressure inside his skull was 30 mmHg, two to four times normal—a dangerous situation, as high intracranial pressure can lead to crushed brain tissue, brain herniation, and damaged oxygen supply. He lay with his upper body elevated 45 degrees. Given his condition, doctors couldn’t yet operate on Lucky’s broken bones, but no one considered this a major problem. Either his brain was going to survive the trauma or it wasn’t.

Early on, James Pearson visited as well. Lucky’s family spent the night telling funny stories about Lucky, but as Pearson recalls, “Things seemed bleak, to say the least. I left feeling that in a few days, weeks, or months, I would learn of Toby’s death—something that touched me more than I would have imagined.” Lucky or Toby or whoever he was then finally woke up one day when Carol stayed back in the apartment she and the girls had rented in Grenoble. Carol had a cold. Lucky assumed he’d get right back to being Lucky. Only slowly, he told me, did “the reality of how much I fucked myself up dawn on me.”

That is not to say the fall broke his spirit. In the hospital’s purgatorial-sounding post-reanimation ward, with a steel rod bolted to what remained of his left femur and infections raging in his foot and lung, Lucky tried to wiggle off the mattress and slide to the floor. In mid-October, once he could sit in a wheelchair, he appeared to break free. Nurses found his bed empty and called security. Friends on Facebook rejoiced: Lucky had made a runner! A grand gesture! The trickster had survived! Lucky, however, deflates that interpretation. “My aim was to get to the cafeteria to buy a pain au chocolat. They had these donuts with no holes and Nutella inside. They were mighty good.”

When Lucky returned home to Australia last November, three months after his fall, he set about rebuilding his body and his life. He still quickly fatigued, both mentally and physically, but his work ethic served him well. He set up a gym on his mother’s back porch. He relearned to walk on an old elliptical machine and gained strength with a chin-up bar and an ancient universal weight machine. But repairing his finances hasn’t been so easy. Lucky was not insured for the accident; not even the traveler’s insurance on his credit card covered him for “airborne activities.” Climbers, friends, and family donated a total of $30,000 to offset the cost of his medical-transport flight back to Australia. But Lucky owes an estimated $280,000 to the hospital in Grenoble, and he worries that his wages will be garnisheed for the rest of his life.

Lucky's world has contracted since his fall. Some of his close friends stuck by him, but the Australian BASE community has distanced itself, party because Lucky was always a little too interested in risk. They claim to revere safety, though promoting this message has required some political jujitsu over the years. Dwain Weston, one of Australia’s best jumpers and a childhood inspiration to Lucky, literally cut himself in half when he BASE-jumped from an airplane and hit Colorado’s Royal Gorge Bridge in 2003.

On the shelf of Lucky’s bedroom is his collection of Rubik’s Cubes: three-by-threes, four-by-fours, five-by-fives. One of his signature tricks, before his crash, was solving a Rubik’s Cube while standing on a slackline. (This is even harder than it sounds, because it means you can’t use your eyes for balance.) His cognitive function seems quite good, considering. Lucky declined to put me in touch with his doctors, but according to Alan Weintraub, medical director of the Brain Injury Program at Craig Hospital in Denver, even patients who’ve been in comas as long as Lucky was can improve dramatically. “Unexpected functional recoveries are entirely possible,” he told me. “Usually, this is the result of relentless effort and motivation by those patients, families, and loved ones.” Already, Lucky’s conversation and writing are lucid. But according to his mother, he still has some short-term-memory problems and what she describes as trouble “planning.” He can no longer solve Rubik’s Cubes at all.

Lucky is adamant that his crash not be viewed as a tragedy. “I’m excited about this second chance at life, and I will live it completely differently,” he told me. “Instead of living for myself, as I’ve done in the past, I will live for other people. Maybe volunteer overseas, teach English, work in conservation—try to be of use.”

The question of who to be kept nagging Lucky during my last day in Australia, when we drove to the Blue Mountains, the place Toby started climbing, where Lucky launched off the Death Swing. For the entire hour-long ride in the rain, Lucky hummed the Simple Minds song “Don’t You (Forget About Me).” When I asked why he seemed so melancholy, he told me what I’d suspected since I first met him, looking hollow in the Sydney airport: Lucky Chance died in Chamonix. He was trying to think of a new name.

“I consider this a new life,” he said when we stopped for breakfast before heading out to get soaked on the crags. “Lucky’s been great. He’s given me lots of amazing moments. But I’ve changed exponentially. I can’t feel bad about it or wish it didn’t happen, but I need a new name for these next years.” He was considering Avant Garde, though he didn’t think Avant was a great first name. He was also thinking about Stunt Monkey, but he didn’t particularly want to be called Stunt, either.

After breakfast we parked near a trail leading to the Three Sisters rock formation. A half-mile into our hike, a fence barred the track, announcing that it was closed. Still we walked on. Almost all BASE jumps are illegal. Lucky long ago made a habit of ignoring signs. He tottered wide-legged through puddles and over branches like an old man or a gremlin, experienced but wracked. He still has a steel rod in his leg; lingering damage to his left hip and both ACLs means his body can’t withstand the impact of landing BASE jumps anymore. But he’s got a few plans. He’d like to walk a gondola cable in the Jamison Valley, just below where we are now. He’d also like to walk municipal power lines. At an overlook, Lucky hoisted himself onto the railing along the cliff’s edge. You could tell he yearned for the freedom of falling, the freedom of not knowing what risks cost. “I’m glad to be out here instead of sitting at home,” he said, looking down toward the waterfalls and sandstone towers, none of which we could see through the clouds. “And we’re not dead! That’s fantastic! If you’re dead, you feel nothing.”

On the way back to the car, we played one of Lucky’s favorite games: What’s the most useless superpower? His initial vote was the power to see two seconds into the future—too short to alter it. Then he changed his mind. The most useless superpower would be the ability to see the future but to be mute, unable to warn anybody.

A few weeks later, I received an email from Lucky. “The time has come to change my name again. It’s as good as done,” he wrote. “I really feel like a different person yet again.” The ones Lucky was considering required only a new first name. He’d call himself Second, or maybe Next Chance.

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ARRIVING, YOU SEE THEM, the Iron People, cycling on Kona’s Queen K Highway in one-piece triathlon suits and aero helmets, these pilgrims’ ceremonial clothes. The ” target=”_blank”>Ironman World Championship is the hardest major race in the world: 2.4-mile swim, 112-mile bicycle ride, 26.2-mile run, all in the shadeless tropical heat. Yet the event is filled with unlikely apostles: mothers of young children, three-limbed amputees, octogenarians, all ticking Kona off their otherwise divergent bucket lists because of a fascination for what’s difficult. Because marathons have been ruined by people who think it’s fine to walk. Because life is too easy and Everest is too far away.

Chrissie Wellington

Just-crowned Ironman world champion Chrissie Wellington

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

Scenes from race day

The Ironman was not supposed to be for everybody. It was supposed to be for nut jobs. Twelve people finished the first, in 1978. Fifteen people competed in the second. Then, in 1982, Wide World of Sports aired pretty, limby, 23-year-old Julie Moss stumbling like a newborn giraffe across the finish line—muscles spent, personifying the ­limits of what’s possible—and the race jumped. These days, each of the 27 worldwide Ironman events sells out in minutes. Ironman Asia-Pacific sold out in five. The inaugural (in New York City and New Jersey) sold out in just over 11. The 60,000-plus race slots available in 2012 won’t begin to slake the demand.

The 1,855 berths at the Ironman World Championship are the most coveted. The event takes place in early October on the kona—translation: leeward—or dry side of Hawaii’s Big Island, in the mellow tourist town of Kailua-Kona. The swim is out and back from Dig Me Beach, a horseshoe of sand just off Alii Drive, Kailua-Kona’s main street and the course’s finish line. Both the bike and the run take turns through town, then head north on Queen K Highway, just inland from the island’s west coast, where the monot­ony of the black lava fields is broken only by racers’ names spelled out in small pieces of white coral. Athletes qualify for Kona by placing at the top of their age groups in earlier Ironman races, but the organizers do make a few exceptions. Two hundred people win slots through a lottery. Four buy auctioned spots on eBay. (Highest bid in 2011: $60,100.) The pro field includes 51 men and 33 women. Hopefuls crave slots at Kona like sinners aching to be saved.

“I needed this,” racer 1136 told me on Wednesday, three days before the Saturday race start, as we were standing in the lobby of King Kamehameha’s Kona Beach Hotel, the de facto race headquarters. “I needed to become the plot.” To reach this point, she’d paid the $650 registration fee plus a hefty scrip in tears—a job quit, a 401(k) depleted, a marriage strained—all for the chance to cover 140.6 miles over 10, 12, maybe 17 hours and end just a few yards from where she’d started, back on Alii Drive, just past the big banyan tree.

The Ironman, in his elected habitat, is not hard to spot: he has a visor, shaved legs, no body fat, compression socks, very little clothing, maybe a tattoo of the World Triathlon Corporation’s copyright-protected M-dot logo. The Ironwoman—though in the vernacular, she too is an Ironman—is not a cougar, exactly, more like a cobra: ripped, sinewy, focused, sometimes hissing, “We can do whatever you need to do, honey, ­after my bike is racked.” Most arrive nearly a week early to acclimate and bask, turning Alii Drive into Burning Man for Type A++ folks, the ultimate active vacation for people who like their daily workouts detailed (3 hr bike, including 6×12 min @ 95+ RPM, HR zone 3), each training session captured, quantified, uploaded, and analyzed, all the better to achieve. Must-do items before the event include the Underpants Run (ostensibly to make fun of Europeans, who once roamed the island in Speedos, but clearly a chance to strut disrobed), a swim out for a free cup at the Coffees of Hawaii catamaran, trolling the expo, maybe scoring a little cattle colostrum (yes, colostrum, the hyper-nutrient-rich liquid from a mammal’s breasts after pregnancy, to boost the immune system and abet recovery), and generally reveling among other people who understand what the hell you’re talking about when you say nutrition is the fourth discipline of triathlon and who don’t think it’s weird that you’re strolling around wearing your heart-rate monitor and not much else.
    
THE DAYS LEADING UP TO the race are a frenzy. By Thursday, Alii Drive is choked with a thousand-plus hardbodies shopping for skin suits, Garmin watches, Reynolds wheels, and PowerTap power meters. The Iron families descend on Lava Java. The Iron Prayer services start. (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” Philippians 4:13.) That morning, Dave Scott, six-time Ironman world champion and coach to Ironman queen Chrissie Wellington, drives his son, Drew—who is 21 and for two more days an Ironman Kona virgin—north along Queen K Highway and inland up to Hawi to scope the bike course.

“In here keep it smooth, relax your toes,” Scott Sr. says as we pass the airport, eight miles outside town.

A little later: “Here you’re 20, 40 miles into the race, and the novelty of being in an Ironman begins to wear off.”

In Hawi—a spacey metropolis of about 1,000 people, with avocados for sale in self-serve baskets by the side of the road—the highest point of the race, Scott overshoots the turnaround. (“I haven’t been up here in a long time.”) His phone is ringing nonstop: athletes stressing over minutiae, his teenage daughter, his sister, his ex-wife. “I’m ­going to die of a heart attack from ­emotional ­distress,” Scott says a few hours later as he parks in town. And this is even before the welcome banquet begins behind the King Kam hotel, a sort of revival meeting for endurance freaks, with fire-­eaters, hula dancers, and blaring rock ­anthems. The World Triathlon Corporation is hell-bent on inspiring. It’s as if Disney took over AA. The emcee calls Ken Glah, who’s competed in 27 consecutive Ironman Hawaii races, to stand for the crowd. Soon after: Lew Hollander, on his 22nd Kona start, at age 81.

The message: You will do this. Ironman will change your life.

Friday, the day before the race, is reserved for neurosis and vegging. “Some athlete’s ­going to call me and say, ‘We didn’t talk about if I’m going to take my right shoe or left shoe off first,’ ” Jesse Kropelnicki, coach to pro Cait Snow and others, jokes outside Huggo’s restaurant. (He’ll try to dodge the question, lest someone takes off a right shoe first and ­decides 20-plus hours a week of training have come to naught.) Mirinda Carfrae, the ­defending women’s champion, sits in her condo, in front of a fan, watching ­Jersey Shore. Luke McKenzie, another Australian pro, punctuates his naps with snacks. By dusk, Alii Drive is deserted. No more panic training, not even for the most compulsive. Each of the 1,855 athletes’ bikes is racked. The town is still until 4 A.M. Then, almost in unison, 1,855 slumbering hardbodies rise from their beds.

THE MORNING DAWNS solemn to trance music and helicopters. Families snap “before” pictures of loved ones, sure they’ll be transformed. Sally Crawford, 64, sits on the lawn in front of the King Kam with her husband, two daughters, and two granddaughters, all in matching green team Crawford shirts. “When you run out of energy, we will be your energy,” one daughter says to her mother. Then she adds, “Not that that would ever happen to you.”

By 6:15, everyone’s race numbers are stamped on triceps and calves. The pros collect on Dig Me Beach, the men focused as Delta Force operators; Wellington, disarming as ever, waves to the crowd. The start line is 400 feet out and patrolled by half a dozen paddleboarders and kayakers. The age-­groupers stare to sea, waylaid for now on the pier. The pro cannon fires; 84 red and blue caps take off. Then the masses file down the wide cement steps to the sand.

“Nine hundred and seventy Iron virgins here, only for a little while longer,” blasts the ever present emcee. Racers take a few last nips of Gu, dance to the Hawaiian mele hula drums, cross themselves. Still sitting on a rock at 6:50 is Dustin Brady, ­number 1556, one of the last men in the water. A ­Shimano rep, he knows he hasn’t trained nearly enough. But last year his fiancĂ©e died—­metastatic breast cancer. He promised her he’d do an Ironman, get himself healthy. He tucks an urn of ashes against the small of his back, then swims out to the paddleboards just in time for the 7 A.M. gun.

The race is nearly impossible to watch. To keep track of the bike segment, official spotters fan out along Queen K Highway. Injured triathlete Amanda McKenzie, a spotter and the wife of pro racer Luke McKenzie, offers color commentary: “Wow, that’s brave. White shorts.” But even with the jokes, the lava fields out here are existential and lonely. They say the Ironman World Championship tells you what you’re made of. Mark Allen, six-time champion, hallucinated the face of his ­future shaman while racing. Heather Fuhr, who started 15 times as a pro, says, “It’s all about managing your thoughts.” Kona is paradise and it is hell. The course is beautiful, cruel, multipartite, and long. Maybe you can swim like Andy Potts, the first man out of the water. Or maybe you can bike like Chris Lieto, who leads the pack of 30 men up to Hawi and down again. But if you can’t put it all together—if you push too hard too early and, in the term of art, blow up; if you can’t knock out a 2:50 marathon—not even the spotters really care.

MIDRACE, JULIE DIBENS is crushing the women’s field. At mile 38, around 9 A.M., Carfrae, the defending pixie, trails her rear wheel by nine minutes. Wellington is back 12.

Standing on the shoulder of the highway, looking as consequential as a speck in space, one of the spotters shouts to Carfrae, about Wellington, “She’s behind you!” (Carfrae has never beaten Wellington.)

Carfrae, hunched over her aero bars, looks even smaller than five-three. She swivels her head and mouths, “She is?”

At 11:45 A.M., when the first riders shoot down past a crossroads called the hot ­corner, about a block from the transition zone on the pier, the day is starting to shake ­itself out. Craig ­Alexander, 38, is in second place, but he runs his first mile in 5:35. He looks smooth and on fire. Meanwhile, Wellington has ­overtaken Carfrae. They’re both 15 minutes behind Dibens, but as expected, Dibens blows up spectacularly at mile eight of the marathon—even before she’s finished her turn through town and headed back up Queen K Highway—cramping so badly that she’s rushed to the hospital, as her husband tweets, “in a flashy car.”

At seven hours and 45 minutes into the race—during the most punishing heat of the afternoon—Alexander, a.k.a. Crowie, has a commanding lead. In his bright yellow sneakers, he’s cranking out a stream of six-minute miles, a faster pace than most spectators can hold for 100 yards. With a few miles to go, his race against the field is over. He’s now chasing the world record, set in 1996. Crowie’s quads may be screaming, but his face is handsome as ever, an impassive soldier’s mask. On Alii Drive, the crowd starts hooting and blowing conch shells. The victor’s pain does not evaporate, but with ­euphoria it does recede. Crowie crosses the finish line at 8:03:56 and then slumps to the ground—the world record broken, leafy garland on his head. His wife joins him, sitting on the blue carpet. His two young children climb into his lap. “I wish everyone in the world could feel what I felt in that last mile,” Crowie tells the assembled. Later, in private, he says of his family, “At the end of that day, they’re the only ones you want to see.”

Other men trickle in. Andy Potts, the first American, throws a shaka and then, delirious, starts walking back toward the racecourse. Marino Vanhoenacker, world-record holder in the Ironman distance (set this year at Ironman Austria), places 36th, not aided quite enough today by what one spectator called “the field’s most aerodynamic nose.” The volunteer “catchers” help the racers finish with dignity, one under each armpit, preventing embarrassing falls. Shortly before the nine-hour mark, Wellington, age 34, arrives, victorious, Union Jack flying over her knock-kneed run. She’s crying and a bit disoriented, and can’t seem to land the winner’s garland on top of the sunglasses she’s tucked in her hair. As always, she smiles her happy-go-lucky smile. But make no mistake: Wellington is a killer. She’s won each of the 13 Ironman races she’s started, and she’s been narrowing the gap between the male and female winning times, down from between 9 and 11 percent in most track-and-field events to just 6 or 7. “This race means more to me than ­anything,” ­Chrissie, as she’s known to all, says to the gathered. For a good ten minutes, she lingers at the ­finish line, hugging people: her parents; Carfrae, who arrived less than three minutes after Wellington; the catchers; the race orga­nizers; her boyfriend, the triathlete Tom Lowe. She loves it here and clearly hates to leave, even for a shower. Before going, Chrissie grabs the mic one last time. “I want to say to my coach, Dave Scott: I just need two more wins here and I’ll catch you up.”

THE FINISH-LINE RUSH of age-groupers starts late afternoon. Between 4:30 and 5:30—ten and a half to eleven and a half hours into the race—an Ironman is minted every six seconds. Yet even in the bustle, the finish line is deeply personal, a crossing over. Like door hosts at the pearly gates, the catchers ask athletes orienting questions. (“What’s your name?” “Where did you qualify?”) Then they are escorted back to the transition zone, where each new Ironman is doused in ice ­water and offered flat Coke; deposited, if need be, in the medical tent (IVs and ice baths for the worst off); or taken to the Shangri-La of the King Kam’s lawn. This truly is the after­life for triathletes: adoring families, pizza and ice cream, 60 volunteer masseuses, and white-sheeted tables available for free ­massage. Each Ironman here has tested himself in the birthplace of his sport, on the same course and the same day as the pros. As one explained the masochistic allure, “When you override those feelings of fatigue, you realize anything is possible.”

The real Ironman fervor is saved for the end, 10 p.m. to midnight, and the race’s last finishers. The mood on Alii Drive is Pentecostal. The throng, now a thousand thick, grows more heated and more ­ecstatic as the night wears on. Everyone admires Chrissie and Crowie. But they are not us. Most days we do not sprint to the finish and break the world record. Most days we are the people still out there 15 or 16 hours into the race. The people persevering. The ones who don’t feel as hard or as invincible as they’d like to be. The people who’ve had a tough day.

At the corner of Alii and Hualalai, just up from the finish, styles of suffering are on display. The race passes through this spot three times—once on the bike, twice on the run. Here, in the dark, late at night, some people shuffle, rigid as robots. Others grimace. Most are bent at the waist. Nobody is elegant, ­nobody is lovely. But there is grit and grace.

Nearing midnight, the race cutoff, ­Chrissie and Crowie return to the finish line to dole out Ironman leis. The inspirational rock and hip-hop are deafening. PR flacks wheel out suitcases of swag, then run up and down the racecourse throwing T-shirts, PowerBars, and water bottles, frothing up the crowd. The whole town is cheering, maxing, ­ecstatic. Chrissie eats a hamburger and dances; it feels like a giant rave. Eventually, the emcee tells the assembled that three 80-year-old men are approaching, each running within a few minutes of the other. Alii Drive goes wild. Tomorrow morning the steeliest—or perhaps just craziest—of the Iron People will be back out on Queen K Highway, in M-dot tattoos and compression socks, running and riding in the heat. But for now, everybody knows why we have come: not to prove ourselves but to believe.

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The problem with an all-girl, cross-country climbing trip is that it doesn’t remain all-girl for long. The rock-climber boys see sports bras drying on the slackline and take to sneaky strategies, like bivying in their trucks right next to your campsite. Still, the North Conway crew was making a valiant effort to remain Y-chromosome-free. Two weeks ago they’d lit out from New Hampshire; 2,400 miles later they’d landed here in Beef Basin, Utah, to hone their crack-climbing skills on the erupting red-sandstone crags of Indian Creek. The all-girl plan hadn’t been a huge deal, really: They’d simply wanted to train on their own. It wasn’t that they didn’t have boys to climb with—in truth, three out of the four had strong, young climber boyfriends, one of the small perks and complications of being a contemporary climber girl—but, as Sarah Garlick, the blondest and waifiest of the four, explained, “climbing with our boyfriends isn’t nearly as much fun.”

Sarah Garlick, Anne Skidmore, Sheyna Button, and Janet Bergman

THE NORTH CONWAY CREW: from left, Sarah Garlick, Anne Skidmore, Sheyna Button, and Janet Bergman

Sheyna Button

BABE IN THE WOODS: Sheyna getting cozy in Camp 4

Sarah Garlick

GROUNDED: Sarah rests up for the next ascent.

Camp 4

WHERE THE BOYS AREN’T: dinnertime at Yosemite’s Camp 4

Sheyna Button

FIRED UP: Sheyna on Cookie Cliff, in Yosemite Valley

Sarah and her friends Janet Bergman, Sheyna Button, and Anne Skidmore were all 24, all solid amateur climbers, all poised on the precipice between college and adult life. The girls—who were, of course, young women but mostly referred to themselves as girls—lived in North Conway, a vacation and climbing town in eastern New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Valley. Anne and Janet had started climbing together in 1998, as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire at Durham; they’d met Sarah when she’d drive up on weekends from Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, to climb at nearby Rumney and Cathedral Ledge. The year before, Sheyna had appeared as a new face at Cathedral Ledge; they’d adopted her instantly, because she seemed to pull herself up rock on grit alone.

Like many of their peers of both sexes, the four held down various disposable jobs around North Conway to support their rock habits: Janet worked as a freelance writer; Sheyna managed the terrain park at Attitash; Anne was starting out as a photographer and cobbling together shifts at a climbing store and a coffee shop, where Sarah jerked lattes as well. As for careers, well, they had ideas—geologist, nonprofit manager, aesthetician, photo editor—but right now they wanted jobs they could quit, or at least bail on, for six weeks at a time.

Trips like this used to be the sole province of guys. Not anymore. The girls had put together their own racks of climbing protection, and they’d tricked out Janet’s Subaru wagon and Sarah’s Toyota truck themselves with a dozen bins for food, clothes, and gear. Under Sarah’s camper shell there was also a sleeping bunk that she’d built with her dad. The plan was to spend three weeks in Indian Creek, then drive to Camp 4, in Yosemite Valley—stomping grounds for every big-wall great from Royal Robbins to Dean Potter—where they’d rendezvous with their boyfriends and test their skills on 3,000-foot faces. From there, Sheyna and Anne would head back to New Hampshire. After a brief pit stop in North Conway, Janet and Sarah would fly to Peru to attempt the first all-female ascent, via the 14-pitch Original Route, of La Esfinge (the Sphinx), a 17,470-foot granite wall in the Cordillera Blanca.

That April, as always, Indian Creek was a mecca for rock rats. The rutted roads were thick with mostly male and coed groups, camped where the piñons give way to cottonwoods down by the creek. Their all-girl posse attracted attention, but thus far the crew had been able to simply focus on the rock and one another. They had a friend climbing with them for the Indian Creek stint, a 31-year-old publicist from Boston named Alycia Cavadi, and the only guy around was Janet’s 27-year-old brother, Andy. Andy had just gotten out of the Navy and driven his own truck out from California, plus he made killer peanut-butter-and-pineapple pastries, so no one had the heart to turn him out. Day after day, the girls woke up to a high-desert Eden, emerging with teeth unbrushed and hair in knots to do yoga, knit, and swap barrettes before hitting the rock all afternoon.

In one more week, they’d be leaving the idyllic spaciness of Indian Creek for the hothouse of Yosemite. Along the way, they faced gnarly off-widths, gobies that wouldn’t heal, the predictable road-trip squabbles, routes with macho names like Way Rambo, and, more than anything, the not-unwelcome distractions of climber boys.

“I’VE NEVER HAD GIRL POWER like this before,” said Janet, crawling out from the tent she shared with Sheyna. Dark-haired, quiet, and freckle-faced, Janet was the group’s de facto leader and its most committed climber, even toying with the idea of going pro. She sat in the morning sun, her blue eyes deep and clear as a piece of stained glass, stretching her powerful arms while Sheyna balanced on the slackline.

“Oh, my God, I’m glad I’m not a boy,” Sheyna said as she fell, landing with the rope between her legs.

A few minutes later, Sarah emerged. She’d had a nightmare, she announced groggily—a man chasing her with a knife. Janet said she’d had one, too: She and Sarah had found a huge bin of Patagonia pants on sale but had to leave the store without buying any.

The crew took their time, warming themselves like lizards on the red earth, and it was noon before all the gear and lunches were packed and they made the short drive to a cliff called Scarface Wall.

In the warm early afternoon, Sheyna slouched on a marbled outcropping, contemplating a 5.10 route called Wavy Gravy. “Pretty gnarly roof move not very far off the ledge,” she said. With her loose brown pigtails and comic-book-heroine figure, Sheyna was an incredible natural athlete. She was also the least experienced climber of the bunch.

“Do you think I should just do it?” she asked.

“You’re all giggly—it’s cute,” said Anne, her thick waves pulled up against her head. Anne was easy to underestimate both on and off the rock. She’d been climbing longer than the others, having started in a gym, but she’d switched to traditional climbing only two years ago. In trad climbing, the climber places her own protection, whereas in sport climbing the routes are already bolted.

“I’m, like, nervous-excited,” Sheyna said.

“Push it up, Sheneyney!” Sarah called out as Sheyna cinched her harness around her strong legs and left the ground.

“Way to go, honey,” Anne said. “Killer.”

As Sheyna laybacked up to the anchor, the shiny scar that ran the length of her spine shone in the sun. After lowering off the climb, she assessed the damage—chunks missing from her left hand and right index finger—and the group scrambled around the crag to watch Janet fist-jam up a long, hard line. The other girls stretched out on the trail below her, Sheyna’s head on Anne’s belly, thrift-store plaid shirts pulled over bright, tight sport tops. After nearly half an hour Anne called out, “I know you can do this, Janet!”

“I’m so, so exhausted,” Janet replied.

“C’mon, J-Nut,” said Sarah. “Fire it to the top.”

In the sky, which they were now a part of, you could hear the clouds moving. The road looked as if it were miles below. Finally, Janet reached the top and sat in her harness, wiped out. “That squeeze chimney at the top was practically a joke,” she said. “Do any of you guys want to follow?”

No one volunteered. The sun had nearly set anyway, so Janet came down, the girls restuffed their heavy packs, and everybody headed back to the car.

“Man, I’m so buzzed,” said Sheyna. “That was so rad! My mom thinks all this stuff I do is dumb and that I should care more about work. But the only reason I ever work is so I can climb and snowboard and ride my bike.”

THE PHYSICAL LIFE IS HEAVEN for young women. But as obvious as that seems these days, it used to be a well-kept secret. I learned it firsthand back in the late eighties, when I was 19 and working as a volunteer ranger at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, running up and down a mile of vertical relief every day and biking 50 miles to mountain hot springs on my day off.

Nothing can compare to being alone or with other girls, sweating the pure, clear sweat of youth, enjoying day after day of adrenaline followed by perfect sleep. For the first time since childhood, your body is fully organized, you feel great about yourself, and you’re ensconced in a subculture with a ready-made sense of belonging and a ban on practical thoughts about the future. Your goal for the day is to bag your fourteener, flash your 5.12, beat your own speed record—that’s it.

All the things I got from running and biking—fitness, focus, calm, direction—you get ten times over from climbing. It’s also a nearly perfect sport for women, one in which balance, finesse, and strength-to-weight ratio are more important than stand-alone power or speed. That’s why, relatively early on, men had to accept women as equals. Climbs are rated according to an old class system that ranges from 5.0 to 5.15: A 5.1 climb is cake; at 5.13 you enter the realm of physical specimens who also happen to be climbing maniacs. By 5.14, you’re talking mysticism and special effects, what my formerly 5.12-capable husband describes as “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon stuff.”

At that rarefied level, women have proved themselves frighteningly strong. In 1979, an 18-year-old kid named Lynn Hill put up the first ascent of 5.12+ Ophir Broke, a 400-foot route outside Telluride, Colorado. In 1993, she became the first person, male or female, to free-climb—that is, ascend without artificial aids—the 5.13+ Nose route up Yosemite’s El Capitan, North America’s classic big wall. In 1994 she was the first to free the Nose in one day. Both feats remain unrepeated by anybody, male or female.

Other women followed. In 1999, then-18-year-old Katie Brown on-sighted—climbed without having seen the route before—a 5.13d called Omaha Beach, at Red River Gorge, Kentucky. And last fall at Smith Rock, in central Oregon, 24-year-old Beth Rodden redpointed—led without falling—a thin seam called the Optimist, rated 5.14b, the hardest climb ever completed by an American woman. Her husband, 26-year-old Tommy Caldwell, arguably the country’s best male climber, tried the route but failed to link it up.

The whole world had changed in the 20 years between Hill and the new generation. Whereas Hill learned her chops trad-style on the cliffs of Joshua Tree, Rodden cut her teeth on plastic holds. She and her peers were not so much feminist as postfeminist; they’d grown up in climbing gyms and reaped the benefits of Title IX, the 1972 law mandating gender equality in scholastic athletics. They’d never think of sitting in a meadow in a lawn chair with a nice pair of binoculars, watching their boyfriends’ studly moves.

NONE OF THE NEW HAMPSHIRE WOMEN—so postfeminist they called one another both “hon” and “dude”—imagined she’d be the next Lynn Hill. Their more immediate role model was Heidi Wirtz, a.k.a. Heidi Almighty, whom Janet and Sarah had met the year before at Indian Creek.

At 34, Wirtz had fed her climbing jones with a smorgasbord of jobs, including baker, crab cooker, log peeler, builder, landscaper, guide, and speed climber at SeaWorld. She’d spent two winters living out of a tent in Crested Butte, Colorado, and nearly a dozen camping in her truck. In British Columbia’s Bugaboos in 2002, she put up a 5.12 first free ascent called Bad Hair Day with Lizzy Scully, the 31-year-old publisher of She Sends, a Colorado-based climbing magazine for women. It was just the kind of thing these road-tripping girls admired.

Of the four, Janet was the closest to leading the committed life. She was working on moving from 5.11’s to 5.12’s and specializing in “off-widths”—cracks too big for hand-jamming but too small to wedge your body into. Peru would be her first major expedition.

Sheyna, on the other hand, was just getting started. A serious snowboarder from Center Ossipee, New Hampshire, she’d learned to place gear only six months before, at Cathedral Ledge. She was a natural, drawn more than the others to climbing’s life-or-death bargain. Five years earlier, her older brother had died; he’d spent the four years before that in a coma after a car crash. Since the coma, she said, she felt like she’d been living for both of them, which meant she’d been going full-blast. The long scar was from a snowboard accident; she’d broken her back so badly that she’d had to have vertebrae T11 and T12 fused. In another snowboard fall, she’d shattered her tibia and fibula; they’d been mended with a titanium rod. Sheyna was comfortable trad-climbing at 5.10, but not much higher—though things wouldn’t stay that way for long.

If Janet and Sheyna were ramping up, Sarah and Anne seemed to be shifting focus. Anne, tall and poised with a sly, silly streak, came from a well-to-do Connecticut family—she’d flown out to Utah while the rest had driven—and displayed the best technique of the bunch. But for now, at least, she seemed to have the least fire in the belly to push herself further. An ace photographer—she’d nearly swept Climbing magazine’s reader photo competition in 2004—Anne would spend hours taking pictures on a static line instead of climbing. In her quieter moments she talked about trading her retail shifts for a job as a photo editor and, possibly, way off in the future, family life with a husband and kids.

“What do you think is the right age to get married?” she asked me one morning. She’d been invited to the wedding of a friend, the first in her group to marry, and it had gotten her thinking.

Sarah—Janet’s longtime climbing partner—was preparing to let go as well. A petite North Carolinian, she’d enrolled in a Ph.D. program in geology at the University of Wyoming and was moving to Laramie in the fall. She and Janet climbed at roughly the same level—competent 5.11, working on 5.12’s, the upper limit for most mortals. She too had considered going pro but had since abandoned that goal. Even the top women climbers, she pointed out, had a hard time making ends meet.

“I’m not sure I want to live that way,” Sarah said.

ON THE GIRL’S LAST DAY in Indian Creek, Sheyna emerged from her tent announcing that she’d been up all night thinking about her boyfriend, or freshly ex-boyfriend. As everyone knew, Sheyna had moved his stuff out of their group house just before she’d left New Hampshire. She’d been working 16-hour days, she said, and whenever she came home, their room would be a mess, laundry everywhere, and the bed unmade.

After some painful conversations, her ex, a pro climber, had moved to Boulder. Now he was leaving messages on her cell phone, and she missed him. “I’ve never had a guy cry over me before,” Sheyna explained as she slid onto the tailgate of Andy’s pickup, spoon poised over a salted avocado. “But he’s just really spoiled, you know?”

So far the trip had been going pretty smoothly. But the emotional undercurrents were more complex: These women were shockingly nice to one another, really—lending gear, kissing each other goodnight—but that didn’t mean a few tensions didn’t threaten their cohesiveness. First, only Sarah and Janet were training for Peru. Second, Sarah would soon be abandoning the gang for Wyoming. Third, Andy, sweet as he was, had provided an entrĂ©e for male interlopers, several of whom had parked their trucks for days right next to the girls’ campsite. And fourth, and perhaps most destabilizing, Sheyna was officially single, a situation guaranteed to trigger drama and chaos.

The morning drifted by as always, a slow mix of yoga, coffee, and discussions about the questionable appeal of Victoria’s Secret underwear. Sarah preferred the selection at T.J. Maxx and, as she would do today, occasionally climbed in a girlie camisole. Around noon, the girls scrambled up to the Way Rambo wall, emerging from the boulders under a party of three handsome men.

“Sick! This is gonna be sick!” a shirtless guy in dreads yelled to his partner as his friend started up a route called the Monk. The boys’ comments stood in stark contrast to the girls’. While the guys shouted, “Sports action! I like to take in sports action when I can, and run from whipper to whipper!”—”sports action” meaning drama, and “whipper” meaning fall—Janet and Sarah, who was climbing in a red cotton-and-lace camisole, affectionately hooted at each other, “Hey, white legs! They’re hot!” and “You rule! And you rule in sexy lingerie.”

Janet was lighthearted and joking, but there was a depth to her that made her seem older than she was. She’d found a real home in climbing, a break from the equestrian circuit she’d competed in back in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, and an outlet during her parents’ pending divorce. “It’s all about flowing through fear,” she said, airing out her feet and watching Sarah on belay. “It’s just raw living.”

Last winter, Janet’s mother had come up to New Hampshire, taken a bunch of Janet’s friends out to a bar, and asked the obvious parental question: “You all know people who have died climbing. Why do you do it?”

“There’s no good answer,” Janet admitted now, wiggling her toes in her flip-flops. “You just have to do what fulfills you, and for me climbing is fulfilling.”

As her friends belayed each other, Sheyna joined the boys, heading off with a buzz-cut climber in painter’s pants. Her plan after the trip was to train as an aesthetician, maybe out west, and work in a resort town as a facialist and massage therapist. Her mother, for her part, hoped her daughter would come home to New Hampshire. But Sheyna was having too much fun; she was committing to nothing, at least for more than a few hours at a stretch.

Finally, around sundown, she reappeared, face lit up, fresh red gobies dotting her arms. The light was perfect, mysterious, and kind, bringing out beauty in the rock that you never knew was there. While the others sneaked in a last route or two, Anne ascended a static line, collecting her camera and jumaring toward the sky. The cottonwoods shimmered, the dirt turned gold, but back at camp that night, everyone’s nerves frayed from a long day on the rock, emotions ran high.

Anne’s simple question “What should we have for dinner?” boiled over into an outburst from Sheyna about how certain people never bought any food, even though their parents were loaded—the standard too-close-for-comfort stuff. Meanwhile, Sarah had turned inward, worried about whether her relationship with her boyfriend, 35-year-old adventure cinematographer Jim Surette, with whom she lived in North Conway, could survive her going off to earn a Ph.D. in Laramie.

Janet paused to join Sarah for a moment, the two girls sitting close on the tailgate like the roommates the four all used to be before Sarah had moved in with Jim.

“She’s not just leaving her man behind,” Janet reminded me warmly, though not without making her point: At the end of all this, Sarah would be abandoning her climbing partner, too, and the trip was already half over. Tomorrow the girls would be leaving Indian Creek, pushing through Las Vegas and on to Yosemite.

“You know, right now I don’t even know if I want to go to the valley,” Sheyna confided just before she turned in. She was worried about climbing over her head, worried about her money running out. Plus, she said, “Everyone’s going to have a boyfriend.”

The moon shone like a sequin, and the air smelled like sweat and sage. Sheyna pulled her knit cap tight over her head, as yet unaware that a single girl in Yosemite was as rare as summer rain.

TWO WEEKS LATER, SHEYNA WOKE UP under a pine tree in Camp 4, her green flannel pillowcase set right on the fallen needles, her body wrapped in a sleeping bag. They’d arrived ten days ago; along the way, Andy had peeled off for Alaska, and they’d side-tripped to the Salt Lake and Oakland airports to pick up the other girls’ boyfriends.

Now, after more than a week of climbing, as many as seven men were hanging around the campground. Anne’s boyfriend, 27-year-old Bayard Russell, a guide in North Conway, was shaking out a tent, and Janet’s boyfriend, Freddie Wilkinson, 24, another North Conway guide on a break from leading trips up Alaska’s Mount McKinley, was cooking hash browns. But the real reason for all the guys was that Sheyna and her ex were truly through, and she looked vulnerable, wild, and sad, wrapped in her tangled bedding.

Sheyna had come into Yosemite like a force of nature. Now, after folding her bedding, she hitched a ride out to El Cap Meadow, to sit among the irises with six unattached boys. Her stuff was in one guy’s car; seated on her right was a man who’d been buying her beer and cookies; and yet another guy was fishing his van keys out of his pocket so that Sheyna could watch it while he did a push ascent, without sleeping, of El Cap’s Pacific Ocean Wall. She’d been spending her nights drinking wine at the search-and-rescue site, and in the mornings, as she left Camp 4, she’d had her pick of climbing partners: Ryan, Ivo, Bob, and Andrew.

“Hey, Sheyna, whatcha up to today?”

“Hey, Sheyna. Wanna get on some rock?” She knew the name of every guy changing his shirt on the side of the road, and they knew hers. As she put it, “I don’t think there are too many girls around here.”

Today’s winner in the battle for her attention was Bob, a 31-year-old guy “kind of from Arizona.” As he and Sheyna climbed at Arch Rock, on the western edge of the valley, Bob stared up at her determined, tanned face. “I can tell you’ve been climbing at Indian Creek,” he said.

Bob was strong and steady-eyed, with golden hair and golden skin from years of climbing, surfing, and working construction. “I’ve never seen anybody pick up climbing that quick,” he told her. “You must have been hanging out with people who were really pushing you. Mega-senders. I mean, God, you’re so smooth.”

Bob had brought a loaf of wheat bread and peanut butter, and while he climbed a tough 5.11c crack, Sheyna told me about her girlie side, the part that loved going to the Bellagio in Vegas, even though, by her own admission, “that city brings out the evil in me.” She also, at the moment, wanted to visit a spa. “I like to be pampered,” she admitted. “Facials, waxing… I could use a facial.”

Sheyna, with all her charms, caused some affectionate eye rolling among the girls. But truth be told, even the guys who’d been explicitly invited were cramping the all-girl scene. Women climbers cite many reasons for preferring female partners to male. Among them, predictably, are the inevitable intrigues that crop up when young, carefree men and women with beautiful bodies spend lots of time hanging around. Lizzy Scully, the She Sends publisher, cites a less obvious peril: “Men freak out when women cry.” For this largely compatible bunch, however, the problem seemed to be sheer absence.

For five days now, Sarah and Jim had been up on the SalathĂ© Wall, 35 pitches of exposed off-widths and strenuous crack and aid climbing. Nobody knew when she was supposed to be down—the last time Jim had climbed the SalathĂ©, he’d taken only 15 hours—and the fact that days had passed was provoking concern.

GARLICK!!!! WHERE ARE YOU???? Janet scribbled on a sheet of notebook paper that she slipped under Sarah’s windshield wiper. Of course, in addition to her worry, Janet had her own agenda: She’d already ticked off two big walls with Freddie—Tangerine Trip, a wildly overhung three-day aid route on El Cap, and the Chouinard-Herbert Route, a 15-pitch free climb on Sentinel Rock. Wasn’t it time she and Sarah started training for Peru?

Shortly before Freddie was to return to Alaska, he and Janet, along with Anne and Bayard, spent a day noodling around at the Cookie Cliff, a popular day-climbing site just off the Merced River, with routes like Wheat Thin and Pringles. On a single-pitch, bolted 5.12 route called Nutter Butter, Anne belayed as Janet struggled on the crux move near the top. Freddie, buoyant and flinty-eyed as always, leaned against a downed tree with Bayard, whittling a twig into a pair of chopsticks and discussing how fashion is safety, because if you look good, you feel good, and if you feel good, you climb well, and if you climb well, you climb safe.

“I have no idea what I’m doing up here,” Janet groaned.

“You’re going to send,” Freddie called.

“Oh, my God, this totally sucks.”

“C’mon, J-Nut. Smart feet, baby. Breathe. Don’t forget to breathe.”

Freddie, of course, meant well, but he missed Janet’s drift. She was at her limit; she needed him to tune in.

“There’s no hands, and the feet suck. I don’t think I can do it.”

“Just go fully friction. You can do it, baby.”

And then Janet fell.

Not a big deal—only ten feet—but it was Anne who consoled her while Freddie stared sheepishly at his twig.

THE WEEKS UNFURLED in a sunstruck glow, the girls leaving the guys behind to do yoga in El Cap meadow and joining up with the gang again later, experiencing the joy of being fully contained and yet part of a group at the same time. But trip endings are always difficult and, with three days to go, Janet was antsy

“I just feel like I’m on an edge right now,” she said, “where climbing could be a lot more of my life than it is, for maybe the next 10 or 15 years. I could start to train harder, spend more time on the road…” The idea clearly captivated her; she wanted to get started, to gear her energies toward Peru. But how to proceed, with Freddie gone back to guide in Alaska and Anne preoccupied with Bayard and photography, and Sarah still—still—up on the SalathĂ© Wall?

Sheyna, meanwhile, was making the most of the present, hurling herself at every day. In front of the van she was baby-sitting, a small city of young men sprouted, gear spread on tarps, coffee cups filled, the guys talking about which 5.13 sport climbs they were going to try. Sheyna more or less ignored them, contemplating the moment’s bigger questions—like whether to let a local climber take her up El Cap, whether to see her ex in Boulder on the ride home, whether just to stay in the valley for the summer, and whether to have her picture taken au naturel for a calendar called Stone Nudes. This last opportunity had been extended to her by a photographer in the Yosemite Lodge Cafeteria, right in front of Janet and Anne. In the end, she said yes.

For the boys’ part, none of it much mattered except whether or not Sheyna would stick around: If one of you proves entertaining enough, her vibe seemed to say, maybe I’ll stay. “I didn’t sign up for this,” one of them finally complained, taking himself out of the competition.

In just two more nights, Janet and Sheyna would be driving toward New Hampshire, Anne and Bayard flying home, and Sarah and Jim heading east in Sarah’s truck. The Merced River gushed like love, the sun so bright you could pick out separate needles in the shadows of the pines. Up on Cookie Cliff, Anne clicked pictures, while Sheyna led Wheat Thin. At the end of the day, Sarah’s truck remained unmoved, its windshield piled with notes; Janet was now so worried and peeved that she hiked out to the base of El Cap alone.

“I’m just going to go look for my sunglasses,” she explained as she marched off, though it was obvious to all that she just needed some time to herself.

Under a big live oak in El Cap Meadow, a crowd had gathered, listening to trance music and watching the flowers fade with the sun. Another young woman’s birthday was being celebrated, and the trip-hop, the bodies, the scenery, and the freedom were beautiful and mesmerizing. Before anyone could even imagine it, this moment would be over. Janet and Sarah would fly to Peru, successfully completing their ascent of La Esfinge. After six short weeks in North Conway, Sarah would head to Wyoming. Sheyna would end up spending the summer in New Hampshire, buying a Subaru, and heading to Breckenridge to pass the winter working at a spa.

But while their group would scatter, the trip had given them an irrevocable confidence, a feeling that if you pile enough girls and gear in your wagon you can redpoint whatever obstacles appear in your way. By winter, Anne would already be convincing Janet to join her on another road trip, and Sarah was hoping to come, too. But back at Camp 4 that final evening, Janet could not sit still: She was still worried about Sarah. “I’m sure they just found some extra water and are hanging out on top,” she said as she trotted through the maze of tents and hopped back into her car. Her blue eyes looked unsteady, yet once she reached El Cap Meadow, all that evaporated. Up ahead, Sarah lay in the tall grass, a white speck on the green, blissfully tired and dirty.

“You’re alive!” Janet yelled, running out and skipping. The girls hugged and sank back into the grass. They’d be back next spring, or so they hoped, once again strong-arming their boyfriends and worldly concerns to carve out time to climb together. It wouldn’t be easy, but this summer’s lesson was clear: For the all-girl road-tripper, man is never a replacement for rock.

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Plenty of people rocked our world this year—like resilient shark-attack survivor Bethany Hamilton, Olympic supa-swimma Michael Phelps, valiant Iraq war photographer Chris Anderson, and (of course) Lance, with his butt-whompingest Tour win yet. Meet the top 25 picks in our roundup of adventure heroes who stand a cut above.

Laird Hamilton

Laird Hamilton

Misty May & Kerri Walsh

Solid-Gold Spikers

Despite the anything-can-happen aura surrounding this summer’s Olympic Games, certain outcomes seemed inevitable: There would be drama and tears in the gymnastics competition, archery would not make prime time, and the American women would win beach volleyball gold. Of course, it’s easy to achieve world dominance on the sand if you are the formidable twosome of Misty May—a five-foot-nine, 150-pound 27-year-old with coils for legs—and Kerri Walsh, 26, whose six-foot-two, 155-pound beanstalk body lets her cover every inch of the net and court. It’s not surprising that both women are blessed with Athena-given genes—May’s mother was a nationally ranked tennis player, while Walsh’s mom was voted MVP on her college volleyball team at Santa Clara University—and both were college superstars in their own right. At Long Beach State, L.A. native May led her team to a 36–0 record and the 1998 NCAA championship, while Walsh, a native of Santa Clara, California, racked up four All-American honors and two consecutive NCAA championships at Stanford. The two paired up in 2001 and were ranked number one in the world by the end of the 2002 season, becoming the first American team to win the world championships, in 2003. Three years of playing solid ball together certainly paid off: The duo (who beat Brazilians Shelda Bede and Adriana Behar in the gold-medal round) didn’t drop a single game in Athens. “We played consistently and aggressively from the very first game,” says May. “I didn’t have any doubt we would win gold.”

Rush Sturges, Marlow Long, & Brooks Baldwin

Mad Auteurs

Judging from the footage in Young Gun Productions’ 2004 DVD New Reign, extreme kayaking has found its heirs apparent. The flick, 30-plus minutes of pure kayak porn, stars the trio and a cadre of their underage, overtalented pals running 70-foot waterfalls, cartwheeling through ten-foot standing waves, and raising hell on some of the world’s fiercest waterways, from Uganda’s White Nile to Canada’s Slave River. Set to rap and hip-hop, it forgoes narration for frame after frame of lemming-style plunges and teenage rowdiness. (In one scene, paddler Merlin Hanauer cranks the rental van through high-speed donuts in a Norway parking lot.) Talent and guts notwithstanding, the Young Guns’ irreverence and Hiltonesque reputation for partying haven’t gone over well with the sport’s veterans. “Don’t get me wrong—they go huge,” says Clay Wright, 37, a member of the U.S. Freestyle Kayak Team since 1995. “But they need to learn that people aren’t just watching them when they’re on the water.” Which, as it turns out, is most of the time: Long, 20, Baldwin, 20, and 19-year-old Sturges, the 2003 junior world freestyle champion, made their first movie, The Next Generation, in 2002 as students at the Vermont-based kayaking academy șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Quest. For their next offering, Dynasty, due out in late 2005, they’ll head to the Congo’s big water. “With a 15- or 20-foot wave,” says Sturges, “anything’s possible.”

Keir Dillon

Snowboarder

Keir Dillon

Keir Dillon

Keir Dillon couldn’t concentrate. It was the February 2004 World Superpipe Championship in Park City, Utah, and the pipe’s 18-foot walls were booming with the sound system’s house music and the noise of the raucous crowd. So he put on his earmuff-size Sony headphones, tuned in to the mellow vocals of a singer from his church, dropped in, and won gold. That same focus earned Dillon third-place finishes in both the X Games in January and the U.S. Open in March—a trifecta of podium appearances at the sport’s most renowned contests. In the pipe, Dillon, 27, is known best for his personalized McTwist—a 540-degree spinning front flip—and soaring amplitude. Off the snow, the Carlsbad, California–based boarder—who is married and sticks to a rigorous year-round training regimen in hopes of making the 2006 Olympic squad—is leading a new revolution of career-focused riders by being up front about who he is and what it takes to win. “You can’t be pro these days and be a complete derelict,” he says. “It’s about being dialed.”

Lauren Lee

Model Climber

“I don’t have the patience for sticking around climbs very long,” says 24-year-old boulderer Lauren Lee, “so I just send them [climb without falling] as quickly as possible.” In her case, impatience is a virtue. After less than two years of crag time, the five-foot-five, 110-pounder from Cincinnati was snagging first-place finishes at the 2001 American Bouldering Series and the Subaru Gorge Games. In 2002, she finished second to France’s Myriam Matteau at the Bouldering World Cup in Rovereto, Italy, then went on to win the prestigious Phoenix Dyno competition in April 2003 and the Professional Climbing Association competition in Salt Lake City in January 2004. But just because Lee can rage on the rock doesn’t mean she’s a dirtbag climber: A model for gearmakers Five Ten, Prana, and BlueWater, Lee has been known to compete in a skirt. True to form, she’s throwing herself headlong into the next step: sport climbing. In July, Lee put up the fastest female ascent on Dumpster BBQ, a notoriously difficult 5.13c pitch outside Rifle, Colorado. And in September, she became the youngest American woman, and third overall, to send a 5.13d. “It’s one thing to be strong, but it’s another to know how to move on the rock,” says World Cup climber Chris Sharma, 23. “Lauren has both. She’s got huge potential.”

Stewart+Brown

Eco-Fashionistas

Stewart+Brown

Stewart+Brown

At long last, the human species has evolved to the point where we can grasp the concept that earth-friendly fashions need not stop at hemp. This is due in no small part to Stewart+Brown, the Ventura, California–based green-produced, downtown-inspired apparel company created in 2002 by the husband-and-wife team of designer Karen Stewart, 35, and brand guru Howard Brown, 37, alumni of Patagonia and Urban Outfitters, respectively. “You know the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax? ‘I am the Lorax, I speak for the trees!'” says Brown, by way of explaining their mission. “We want to mix environmental consciousness with good, cool design.” Toward that end, Stewart+Brown gives 1 percent of its gross profit to environmental causes. All of their cotton products are 100 percent organic; the cashmere comes from a fledgling Mongolian cashmere co-op run by herders who process the woolly stuff themselves; their Surp+ tote bags are stitched from leftover ripstop nylon and the remnants of fly-fishing waders; and their fleece is Stewart’s own invention, a proprietary blend of organic cotton, polyester, and spandex. They’d intended to take their new line slowly, conceiving the company while raising their two-year-old daughter, Hazel. But when the zeitgeist calls, you have to answer, particularly when those calls are for cashmere and they’re coming from national franchises like Anthropologie, trendsetting boutiques like Butter, in Brooklyn, and celebs like Cameron Diaz and Liv Tyler (who ordered their infant line: cashmere baby blanket, hat, and neckie). While tastemakers swoon—”Oooh, the hats!” cries Organic Style‘s Danny Seo—Stewart and Brown are planning to expand, and scrambling to keep up with existing sales. “Did you hear that sigh?” says Brown. “I just spent six straight weeks packing boxes, and people are already placing reorders. Stores are selling out.”

Alexander Fyfe

Soccer Captain

While the Iraqi National Soccer Team was gearing up for its knockout performance at the 2004 Summer Olympics, U.S. Army captain Alexander Fyfe was helping the country’s next generation of athletes sharpen their dribbling skills. Fyfe, a civil-affairs officer with the Fort Lewis, Washington–based 1st Battalion, 37th Field Artillery Regiment, was stationed in Mosul, Iraq, last February when he noticed some local kids playing with a makeshift ball made of straw. The 26-year-old West Point grad—a standout midfielder as a teenager in Rocky Point, New York—e-mailed his high school coach, Al Ellis, and asked him to ship over a few balls. Ellis broadcast the request over the Internet, and soon Fyfe had received $25,000 worth of jerseys, balls, and other soccer equipment from the United States and Japan, which he helped distribute to children throughout northern Iraq. Though his is a goodwill mission, Fyfe still has to watch his back: In June, while on a delivery run to schools near the town of Qara Qosh, his convoy was ambushed by anti-American insurgents. The soldiers escaped harm, but the incident rattled Fyfe, who hopes to end his tour of duty by year’s end and return home to the Northwest for a winter of hiking and skiing. “This soccer project is one of hundreds of good news stories happening here every day,” he insists. “I’ll leave Iraq knowing that I played a small part in a very big production.” Whatever the outcome in Iraq, it’s hard to contest the rightness of kids playing sports outside.

Joe Don Morton

Smoke Jumper

The wildfire outside the Alaskan town of Arctic Village was small, maybe only five acres, when veteran firefighter Joe Don Morton hurled himself from the belly of a Casa 212 aircraft on June 22, 2004. Even 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the sparsely vegetated foothills of the Brooks Range, it took eight men and two CL-215 tanker planes three days to douse the blaze. Morton, 34, is a veteran Alaska Smokejumper, one of 68 elite firefighters who serve as the Last Frontier’s first line of defense against wildfires, parachuting into the backcountry as soon as flames are spotted. Smoke jumpers are a burly breed, but in Alaska—where 99 percent of the state is wild and roadless backcountry—the job redefines hardcore. “When I heard about guys throwing themselves into the middle of burning, untamed wilderness 500 miles from the nearest road,” says Morton, a former Navy search-and-rescue swimmer who got his start fighting fires in Arizona, “I knew it was my calling.” Good thing, because 2004 was Alaska’s worst fire season on record, with 680 separate blazes charring nearly 6.5 million acres across the state, including the headline-grabbing Boundary Fire, which scorched 537,000 acres of the White Mountains National Recreation Area and threatened suburban Fairbanks in June. “It looked like a war zone,” says Morton, who made nine jumps between May and late September, often hauling up to 110 pounds of gear (including a Kevlar jumpsuit, hard hat, ax, and chainsaw) to clear terrain just ahead of the flames. “The large fires kept our guys out there a long time,” says base manager Dalan Romero. “They were a challenge to everyone’s endurance.”

Lance Armstrong

The Boss

More Lance? Yeah, more Lance. Because a cyclist now ranks alongside transcendent, single-name icons like PelĂ© and Jordan. Because, as a 32-year-old cancer survivor, he accomplished something after cancer—six Tour de France victories—that no one else has managed in an entire career. Because here’s how he described this summer’s 2,110-mile battle for his record-setting yellow jersey: “It’s as if I was with my five friends and we were 13 years old and we all had new bikes and we said, ‘OK, we’re going to race from here to there.'” Because rather than quit now, he is out there training, getting ready to unleash another season of hurt on the competition. Because he stamped LIVESTRONG on a yellow rubber band, sold it for a buck, and has generated upwards of $13 million for his cancer foundation. Because his rock-star girlfriend lives in L.A., and his career is based in Europe, but he insists on training in Texas so he can be closer to his kids. Because his cameo was the best part of Dodgeball. Because no matter how much is written about him, the next time he races, you’ll watch.

Bethany Hamilton

Surfer

Bethany Hamilton

Bethany Hamilton

“Then it happened,” writes 14-year-old Bethany Hamilton in her new book, Soul Surfer. “A wave rolled through, I caught it, put my hand on the deck to push up, and I was standing. I guess I started getting the technique wired after that.” Let us be the first to say that this is a massive understatement. Last January, ten weeks after losing her left arm in a grisly shark attack that made international headlines, Hamilton rode a six-foot wave on her six-foot-two-inch surfboard and placed fifth in her age group in a National Scholastic Surfing Association meet in Hawaii. In August she won the women’s open division of an NSSA Hawaii conference contest, outsurfing the reigning champ, 12-year-old Carissa Moore. How is this possible? Hamilton credits her family (her parents, Cheri and Tom, and two brothers, Noah and Timmy, all surf), supporters in her hometown of Princeville, Kauai, her strong faith, and her unwavering mission to turn pro. In addition to physical therapy, her daily workouts include beach sprints, crunches, stretches, and balance work. She also surfs three times a day on Kauai’s best breaks, fine-tuning her technique with help from surf-training legend Ben Aipa, 63, who has coached Kelly Slater and Sonny Garcia. Though she wears a prosthetic on land, she rides the waves without one: paddling with her right arm, kicking hard, planting her body in the middle of the board, standing up, and then dropping in. “For most of us, surfing with two arms is hard enough,” says Sunshine Makarow, publisher of Surf Life for Women. “But Bethany’s still out there surfing competitively, and she can rip!”

Justin Carven

Guru of Grease

No doubt you’ve been hearing the buzz about biodiesel. A chemically processed mixture of vegetable oil, methanol, and lye, usually blended with other diesel fuels, it sells for about the same price as unleaded gas, with fewer greenhouse-gas emissions and up to 40 percent better mileage. But 27-year-old Justin Carven, of Florence, Massachusetts, has come up with a smarter, cheaper way to drive greener. Carven’s Greasecar Vegetable Fuel System modifies any diesel engine to run on pure recycled cooking oil—cleaner and more fuel-efficient than biodiesel and free at Chinese restaurants and fast-food joints nationwide. Carven developed the Greasecar concept while studying mechanical design at Hampshire College, in Amherst, Massachusetts. His first real road test—a 2000 postgraduation trip from Cape Cod to California and back in a grease-powered VW Westfalia—drew so much attention that he soon began marketing easy-to-install Greasecar kits to the public. Carven and his staff of three (who produce all the components by hand in East Hampton, Massachusetts) report that 2004 sales are up 500 percent over last year, with 60 Greasecar kits, at $795 a pop, being ordered each month by a customer base that’s grown beyond the original dreadlocks-and-patchouli crowd. “I tried using biodiesel, but it was hard to find, and I figured why not go 100 percent?” says Mark Howard, an information-technology consultant in New Hampshire who installed a Greasecar system on his 1997 VW Passat last spring. “I estimate that I save $80 to $100 a month on gas.” Carven admits that vegetable oil is not the perfect replacement for gasoline—for one thing, lugging around vats of grease and filtering out the McNugget batter and other impurities can be a chore. But he thinks it’s a worthy alternative until another green fuel is developed. “It’s renewable, produced domestically, and not going to run out like fossil fuels,” he argues. “This stuff literally grows on trees.”

Danny Way

Big-Air Huckster

Danny Way

Danny Way

In the four-wheeled world of skateboarding, the name Danny Way has always been synonymous with big. That’s because, from the start of his pro skateboarding career, at age 14, Way has never stopped flying. The 30-year-old vert (a.k.a. halfpipe) skateboarder and father of two from Encinitas, California, made headlines in 1997 when he became the first skateboarder to jump from a helicopter onto a vert ramp—a move he aptly named the “bomb drop” and repeated two years later for MTV. In June 2003, Way set two back-to-back world records in a single jump at a mega–skate ramp in Temecula, California: First he landed a 75-foot-long backside 360 over a 40-foot gap, with the momentum carrying him into the vert pipe, where he soared to 23.5 feet of vertical. This August, he wowed audiences at the X Games in Los Angeles by breaking his own world record with a practice jump of 79 feet—and then going on to win the big-air ramp event. Needless to say, it can be messy work: In the past year, Way has received 25 stitches on his right elbow, ripped off all the skin on his stomach, and been knocked unconscious twice. But that’s nothing compared with his eight surgeries—six on his left knee alone—in the past ten years. Way is just as aggressive off the ramp. In 1995, he helped his brother, Damon, and friend Ken Block start DC Shoes, a San Diego–based skateboarding-apparel company, which they sold to Quiksilver in March 2004 for $100 million. Now he has the windfall to develop his latest idea—a portable 90-foot-high, 300-foot-long ramp that, he hopes, will kick off a big-air world tour. “Trying something new can be rough,” Way admits, “but once you make it happen, the possibilities are endless.”

Becky Bristow

Expedition Kayaker

Just eight weeks after the U.S. State Department warned Americans off traveling to Iran this May, 27-year-old expedition kayaker Becky Bristow drove overland from Turkey with a team of paddlers from Britain and Argentina for a series of self-supported multi-day descents down Iran’s Class IV and V Bakhtiari, Zez, and Sezar rivers. As it turns out, pushy water was only half of the challenge: Reconciling river-rat culture with Islamic law came with its own set of hardships. Despite 100-degree average temperatures, Bristow paddled in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt and donned a head scarf while portaging. At one point, three villagers accosted the team along the Zez River—holding Becky in her boat and making menacing hand gestures until the team’s British photographer, Alex Nicks, handed over his camera to appease them. “That was some outrageous stuff that I don’t think happens over there that often,” says Bristow. “The majority of the time we met beautiful people who were generous and friendly.” Bristow got her start on tamer waters in 1989, paddling the North Saskatchewan River near her home in Rocky Mountain House, Alberta, in a 13-foot fiberglass kayak her father bought at a garage sale. Fourteen years later, she has notched first descents in Alaska, Ecuador, Russia, and B.C. (she scouted drainages from a helicopter during the three summers she fought forest fires), starred in TGR’s film Wehyakin and Scott Lindgren’s Aerated, and is in the process of launching her own production company, Wild Soul Creations. “She comes off as an unassuming, mild-mannered Canadian,” says fellow paddler Kristen Read, 29. “It turns out she’s also a total badass.”

Kit DesLauriers

Freeskier

Kit DesLauriers

Kit DesLauriers

When Kit DesLauriers, 35, arrived at the base of Alaska’s 20,320-foot Mount McKinley this May, the entire summit was capped in blue ice. But a little hardpack wasn’t going to stop her from becoming the first American woman to ski the continent’s tallest peak. For 26 days, she and her husband, Rob, assaulted the mountain, helping to rescue a stranded Korean party and enduring biting snowstorms. At the summit, DesLauriers strapped on her alpine planks and skied down windswept icefields, arriving, eight hours of skiing later, at base camp at 7,200 feet. As an extended warm-up to the McKinley expedition, the Jackson, Wyoming, local carved turns on 13,770-foot Grand Teton in June 2003 and, the following November, clinched the first female ski descent of New Zealand’s 9,960-foot Mount Aspiring. This spring, DesLauriers will attempt two more ski expeditions—one to the Himalayas or Greenland and one to an undisclosed peak in Chile. “Skiing is life,” says DesLauriers. “I love winter. I love the mountains. Sometimes it feels like the easiest thing in the world to be doing.”

Jimmy Chin

All-Mountain Man

Jimmy Chin

Jimmy Chin

How do you get to be a professional adventurer? It’s a frequently asked question, and 31-year-old Jimmy Chin has the bona fides to answer. Based in Jackson, Wyoming, he has made newsworthy ascents in the Karakoram, the Himalayas (including Everest), and the tallest sandstone towers in the world, in Mali. A couple of years ago, he joined mountaineer Conrad Anker, the late photographer Galen Rowell, and me on a 275-mile unsupported traverse of a never-explored corner of northwestern Tibet, where each guy had a 250-pound rickshaw strapped (as Jimmy put it) “to our asses.” Jimmy proved his strength, not only carting gear at 16,000 feet but capturing the decisive moments with both still and video cameras. But that’s the easy part of what you need to be a pro. The more difficult (and important) part is something you’re born with, and it makes you the type that other adventurers want on their team: You can’t stop smiling, no matter how tough it gets; you never complain, because your glass is always half full and there’s nothing to complain about; and your ego is post-Copernican—out there orbiting around with everyone else’s, not at the center of anything. And, oh, yeah, I forgot—I guess it doesn’t hurt if People magazine votes you one of the country’s most eligible bachelors.

Michael Phelps

Heavy-Medal Swimmer

In case you fell asleep during the gazillion hours that the Olympics were televised this August, here’s a news flash: Michael Phelps was the Man. Swimming 17 races in seven days, the 19-year-old Maryland native nabbed six gold medals and two bronzes, a record haul for any sport in a single, non-boycotted Olympics. Although Phelps’s physique guarantees domination in the pool—observe his lean six-foot-four, 195-pound frame, flipperlike size-14 feet, six-foot-seven-inch wingspan, and extra-long torso—it was his bring-it-on mentality that cemented him as the one to beat in Athens. “He went after competition, not glory,” says Olympic commentator Rowdy Gaines, who won three gold medals at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. “He wasn’t afraid to take on the world’s best.” Case in point: Instead of entering the 200-meter backstroke—an event where at least a silver medal was a lock—Phelps swam against his Australian rival Ian Thorpe in the 200-meter freestyle, losing to Thorpe but snagging the bronze and breaking his own American record. But the much-heralded sportsmanship moment came when Phelps gave up his butterfly leg in the 4-by-100-meter medley relay to then-medalless teammate Ian Crocker. The U.S. team proceeded to win gold. Phelps’s pro status makes him ineligible for collegiate competition, but he’s still logging 50 pool miles a week as he prepares to start his freshman year at the University of Michigan, under the watchful eye of his longtime coach, Bob Bowman. It’s never too soon to start training for Beijing.

Rush Randle

Wave Doctor

Rush Randle, the greatest wave-sports athlete you’ve never heard of, lives for the cutting edge. Ever heard of tow-in surfing? Randle, 31, along with fellow all-star Laird Hamilton, invented it on Maui’s north coast in the early nineties. Ditto for kiteboarding, which made its debut in 1994–95, also on Maui. But his latest and greatest concoction is the upstart sport of foilboarding. The hybrid invention—which mounts an aluminum or carbon hydrofoil blade onto a wakeboard—got Hollywood treatment in Step Into Liquid and Billabong Odyssey, with sequences of foilboarders riding long, graceful swells. The physics are like that of an airplane wing: As the blade slices cleanly through the water, it provides so much lift that the board glides clear above the surface of the wave. The result is longer, faster, smoother rides—which may someday be the key to catching 100-foot waves. “It feels like flying,” says Randle, who builds and sells foilboards on Maui, where he lives with his wife, Erin, and their seven-year-old son. “It’s like being a pelican, riding the swells.” So for now, the Oahu native has dialed back his competition in the wildly nichefied sports of flow surfing (done in artificial pools) and sling surfing (in which a jet ski flings the surfer at a wave, launching him into acrobatic aerials) to concentrate on the hydrofoil. When the right swell hits this winter, he’ll be out there going the distance: “I want to take the longest ride on a single swell ever,” declares Randle, whose personal best is two miles. “With the right swell, I think I can go 50.”

André Tolmé

Golfer in the Rough

For most duffers, losing 509 balls and shooting 290 over par in one round would be a sign to quit the sport. Not for AndrĂ© TolmĂ©. His epic traverse of the world’s longest, most unconventional links—the 2.3-million-yard, par-11,880 country of Mongolia—made him the global spokesman for a nascent sport: extreme golf. In July, the 35-year-old civil engineer from Northfield, New Hampshire, completed his epic 90-day, 1,300-mile golfing expedition across the Mongolian steppes, where he spent most days fighting off fierce Siberian winds as he whacked balls with a 3-iron. What kept TolmĂ© going were the nomadic Mongolians who welcomed him into their yurts at night and fed him high-calorie (if not haute-cuisine) slabs of mutton fat, fermented mare’s milk, and sheep-brain pùé smeared on sliced sheep’s liver. TolmĂ©’s efforts landed him a spot on Jay Leno’s guest list in August and the coveted title of Golfer of the Year (as proclaimed by venerable New York Times sports columnist Dave Anderson)—beating out country-club champs Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson. When asked what could possibly top teeing off across Mongolia, he would only say, enigmatically, “I’ve got a few ideas.”

Tim Bluhm

Vagabond Rocker

Tim Bluhm

Tim Bluhm

Tim Bluhm lives in a 1995 Chevy Sportvan, but don’t let that throw you: The lead singer of the San Francisco band the Mother Hips has still managed to release nine albums, play more than 2,000 concerts, and build a cultish fan base—all the while stringing together a life of wilderness rambles that are as much Jack London as Jack Johnson. He tramps up and down the Golden State, skiing Mount Shasta, free-soloing Tuolumne Meadows’ Cathedral Peak, surfing the cold Northern California coast, and telemark-skiing the Sierra. This summer, he broke a 14-year concert streak and worked as a climbing guide in Yosemite. With a sun-soaked sound that blends Merle Haggard with the Beach Boys, Bluhm pitched his tent on a plot of California’s imagination and has been singing into the roar of the bulldozers ever since, a self-proclaimed “time-sick son of a grizzly bear” along the lines of Gram Parsons and Townes Van Zandt, with a similarly loyal following. In February, lines formed around the block in San Francisco for the premiere of Stories We Could Tell, a feature-length documentary about the band. This month, Bluhm releases California Way, a two-day session that Fog City Records producer Dan Prothero calls a “love letter from and about a disappearing place.” Reached by cell phone on a highway in the Sierra, Bluhm admitted that if he’d hit the jackpot ten years ago, he “probably would have just spent it all. Now,” he said, “I’d buy a better van. Or at least get my brakes fixed.”

Dwight Aspinwall & Perry Dowst

Gear Savants

What do you get when two New Hampshire engineers train their Ivy League brains on the lowly camp stove? Say hello to the Jetboil, a snazzy, all-in-one portable kitchen that—in 11 months on the market—has revolutionized backcountry cooking. It began as a brainstorm back in the nineties, when software engineer Dwight Aspinwall, now 43, was trekking Tasmania’s rain- and wind-pummeled South Coast Track. Every day, he’d watch his Aussie friends root around in their packs for their stoves, their pots, and their matches to make afternoon tea. Gotta be a better way, he thought. In 2001, Aspinwall teamed up with his second cousin, engineer Perry Dowst, 44. Three years and a few accidental fires later, the $80 Jetboil Personal Cooking System was born—an integrated fuel burner/pot/mug combo with a Star Trek–looking “FluxRing” heat exchanger that gives it double the heat-transfer efficiency of most other backpacking stoves. All you really need to know, though, is that, with infomercial-worthy ease and a flick of a knob (no lighter required!), it boils a cup of water in 60 seconds and uses 50 percent less fuel than a standard camp stove to do it. Since arriving in outdoor stores last January, Jetboil has become the buzz of bivy ledges and surf breaks nationwide—with everyone from firefighters to alpinists preaching the gospel of a fast cup of joe on the go. “A monkey could put this thing together and start boiling water within a minute,” says mountain guide Steven Tickle, who packed Jetboils for his clients’ fast-and-light assault on Nepal’s 22,494-foot Ama Dablam this fall. “You can always rely on it.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Environmental Action Hero

When he took over as governor of California in November 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger, the 57-year-old, Austria-born bodybuilder and action-film star, was poised to do what many thought was impossible: turn the GOP—or at least his Left Coast slice of it—green. ” ‘Jobs vs. the environment’ is a false choice,” he said on the campaign trail, and then he backed it up with an ambitious environmental action plan for California that included mandates to cut air pollution in half by 2010; start a Green Building Bank, offering incentives to eco-friendly construction projects; and ensure that 20 percent of California’s power comes from renewable sources by 2010 (and 33 percent by 2020). So how’s he doing so far? After focusing on budget deficits and government restructuring for the first ten months of his term, in September the Governator signed into law more than 20 pro-environment bills, creating the Sierra Nevada Conservancy to protect 25 million acres of central California and cracking down on cruise-ship pollution, while also backing a 25 percent reduction in exhaust emissions from cars and light trucks by 2016. Even skeptical groups like the Sierra Club are giving him a cautious thumbs-up. “He’s off to a fair start in signing legislation,” says Bill Allayaud, legislative director of Sierra Club California. “But his whole record is uneven.” Right, and what about the famous vow to modify one of his Hummers into a hydrogen-fuel-cell hybrid? California EPA director Terry Tamminen, the former head of Santa Monica BayKeeper whom Arnold appointed at the recommendation of cousin-in-law Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is standing by his boss. “He promised to convert one of his Hummers to hydrogen during the campaign,” says Tamminen, “and the governor is always a man of his word.”

Chris Anderson

Frontline Photographer

Chris Anderson

Chris Anderson

American Chris Anderson didn’t set out to become a war photographer. “It chose me. I didn’t choose it,” he says of his recent status as the intrepid shooter on every photo editor’s short list. At the relatively young age of 34, he has all the trappings of a grizzled photojournalist: an assortment of dented and dust-clogged rangefinder cameras; barely lived-in apartments in Paris and New York; a prestigious Robert Capa Gold Medal, awarded by the Overseas Press Club for exceptional courage and enterprise; and a passport bloated with stamps from conflict-torn hot spots in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Israel. In truth, when Anderson signed on with U.S. News & World Report to spend three months covering the war in Afghanistan—and, 16 months later, with The New York Times Magazine to cover the war in Iraq—all he really desired was to see how people live their lives and to capture moments of human drama by “shooting stories at eye level,” as he calls his brand of experiential photography. “Chris is the embodiment of the creative spirit: restless, searching, always moving on,” says legendary photojournalist James Nachtwey, 56. “He wants to know how things look out of the corner of his eye, on the dead run.” Such was the case on April 7, 2003, two days before Baghdad fell, when Anderson was riding with an armored column through the center of the city, the only journalist to do so. He survived a direct RPG hit on his vehicle and, despite nearly losing an eye to shrapnel, joined a similar mission two days later. “People are usually shocked that I enjoy my job as much as I do,” he admits. “But with all the strife and chaos going on around me, as sick as it sounds, it’s an absolute adventure.”

Jim Prosser

Sustainable Vintner

Oregon winemaker Jim Prosser says his delectable 2002 vintage possesses “an ageable combination of power and grace.” The same can be said of the 41-year-old recreational mountaineer–cum–professional vintner, whose 1999 debut pinot noir turned international critics into salivating sissies. Prosser’s J.K. Carriere label continues to wow oenophiles at restaurants from NYC’s Oceana to Aspen’s Ajax Tavern, with pinots ranging from $18 to $65 that, Prosser says, are “more about seduction and less about ‘haul you back to the cave by the hair.'” He and his crew of 16 produce the wine in a converted hazelnut barn in the Willamette Valley, using centuries-old techniques and locally grown, pesticide-free grapes. “Great wines are made at the margins,” says the Peace Corps alum (he served as a small-business consultant in Lithuania from 1993 to 1995), who compares winemaking’s risks and rewards to those of climbing a peak or catching a trout. When he’s not off skiing Mount Bachelor or fishing the Deschutes, Prosser relishes the long hours caught up in the vines or on the crush deck. But things get less rosĂ© when the bees come out to bite. Deathly allergic, he’s twice ended up in a near-coma working in the vineyards. “It reminds me I’ve made a conscious choice to do what I do,” declares Prosser. “Know thine enemy, I say.” Fittingly, his label pays tribute to his nemesis: A big wasp underlies the vintage.

Jim Fraps & Jeff & Paula Pensiero

Big-Pow Hoteliers

Annual snowfall of 42 feet, 36,000 acres of untracked bowls, and 18,000 vertical feet of deep turns a day: Welcome to the “church of the fall line” at Baldface Lodge, one of North America’s largest—and newest—snowcat skiing operations, whose worshipers have included late snowboarding king Craig Kelley, Pearl Jam guitarist Stone Gossard, and Foo Fighters bass player Nate Mendel. Eight years ago, the founders of this 24-guest powder haven in the heart of British Columbia’s Kootenay Mountains, 37-year-old Jim Fraps and his college buddy Jeff Pensiero, 35, were working and boarding in Tahoe—surviving on ramen noodles and a dream: to cash in on B.C.’s backcountry. The two scraped together $50,000, then scouted an area near Nelson that raked in consistently huge snowfalls. By the time they were granted tenure from the B.C. government for the land, in 2000, their $50,000 was history. Then a friend introduced Pensiero to Mendel and Foo Fighters lead singer Dave Grohl, both eager investors. In December 2002 the duo, along with Pensiero’s wife, Paula, opened the lodge, a timber-framed structure perched at 6,750 feet on a ridge linking five peaks. A steady diet of cabernet and plank-grilled salmon—along with guides like 1998 Olympic boarder Mark Fawcett—and a happy, happening vibe have charmed guests ever since. “Their enthusiasm is infectious,” says Mendel. “It spreads throughout the whole operation.”

Darren Berrecloth

Freeride Mountain Biker

Darren Berrecloth

Darren Berrecloth

Darren Berrecloth, 23, remembers the exact moment he decided to dedicate his life to mountain biking. It was the summer of 2002, he’d taken the day off from his job at a Vancouver, B.C., machine shop to compete in a dirt-jump contest in Whistler, and his boss was pissed. “This skinny, nerdy guy was yelling at me that I needed to snap out of this biking thing,” he remembers, “to wake up and smell the coffee.” Berrecloth was fired on the spot. That fall, he showed up in Virgin, Utah, for the Red Bull Rampage—freeriding’s premier huckfest—unregistered, unsponsored, and virtually unknown. He took third. Since then, “Bear Claw” has almost single-handedly radicalized freeride mountain biking by bringing BMX stunts like spins, hand grabs, and no-hands seat grabs to an already extreme sport. With signature moves like the Superman Seat Grab Indian Air (translation: flying through the air, feet off the pedals, bike out in front, one hand on the bars), he won both the 2003 Joyride Slopestyle Expression Session, in Whistler, and the 2004 Monster Park Slopestyle Invitational, in Marquette, Michigan. While Berrecloth’s outta-nowhere podium finishes have raised eyebrows, his film segments have redefined what’s possible with two knobby tires and eight inches of travel. In the 2003 video New World Disorder IV: Ride the Lightning, he pulled a 360 off a 25-foot cliff in Kamloops, B.C. “People were blown away,” says filmmaker Derek Westerlund. “It was a big jump for most riders to even go off, and Darren rode up and did a 360 off it.” In Westerlund’s latest film, Disorderly Conduct, Berrecloth clears a 50-foot jump over a canyon in France. One man’s lunacy is just the logical next step for Berrecloth: “I’m always pushing myself to learn new things,” he says. “That’s what makes me tick.”

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