THE MOST FUNCTIONAL CLASS of garment to come along since the waterproof-breathable jacket, soft shells have arrived en masse this winter. These technical woven numbers put the priority on letting out moisture (i.e., sweat) but still hold up well in the wet. Though once a cool, rare find in your local shop, soft shells now fill racks in a variety of flavors, from storm gear to fast-and-light coverings engineered for highly aerobic activities like trail running and ski touring. The move toward specialization is a boon in terms of performance, but the expanding range of choices can be intimidating.

Outdoor Gear Reviewed: Soft-Shell Jackets

Mountain Hardwear Synchro

Which piece is right for you? The following chart gauges the activities and temperatures for which various softies work best. We’ve also provided a peek at some technical details that are important to consider. And don’t forget these jackets’ admirable common denominator: supreme breathability. Enhanced airflow makes soft shells perfect for all your high-motion sports: climbing, mountain biking, barhopping in Telluride, and so on. True, they won’t always keep your back dry in sideways rain, but isn’t that what the lodge is for?

OUR CHART makes it easy to pick the right soft shell for your lifestyle. We’ve placed each jacket in the temperature range and level of aerobic activity for which it’s ideal, and you can use the handy features key (below) to locate the bells and whistles you want. Wondering what makes these babies run? Cozy on the inside, the majority of these jackets have a soft lining, like brushed fabric or fleecy material, which holds a layer of warm air against your body. ABRASION RESISTANCE is essential for pursuits involving hairy surroundings. Many of these pieces have exteriors coarse enough to resist snagging on rocks and branches. Since breathability isn’t a problem with these jackets, you can seal yourself in with a NECK CINCH and FITTED CUFFS to beat any cold that tries to fight its way inside. With so much competition, soft-shell makers are using desirable, functional add-ons like water-resistant REVERSE-COIL ZIPPERS, which some companies treat to make them 100 percent waterproof. A soft-shell fabric’s breathability is particularly important for stop-start activities like ski touring and snowshoeing. And—bonus!—these stretchy, water-resistant skins allow trimmer cuts and sleeker styling, unlike the glorified raincoats of the past. There’s a slew of these new materials, and their varying breathability levels let you regulate your temperature: To name just a few, SCHOELLER DRYSKIN is a combo of tough nylon and DuPont CoolMax; POLARTEC POWER SHIELD, usually sandwiched between layers of other performance fabric or nylon, cuts wind by 98 percent; and gust-proof GORE WINDSTOPPER is ultralight and plenty durable. Other companies have developed proprietary soft-shell materials in-house. What’s left? Why, you, of course.

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Lance Armstrong in Girona, Spain

“I don’t like to lose. I just despise it.” Armstrong in Girona, Spain, his spring training grounds for the 2003 Tour de France.

Armstrong on a road ride in Spain, March 2003

SATURDAY AFTERNOON IN AUSTIN, TEXAS, the warm air pungent with pollen, the sky sharp blue, the grass plain brown. Good day for a bike race. You’re standing in Walnut Creek Park, a terraced ramble of tennis courts, picnic cabanas, and cedar thickets, talking tire treads with one of the bike hounds who’ve gathered for a cyclocross event sponsored by the local REI, when a black Suburban rolls up and makes its own VIP spot along the curb. The vanity plate reads oct 2, and you don’t have to think twice about who’s inside. You remember the press conference—what was it, six years ago?—when he announced his diagnosis to a roomful of reporters who had grown accustomed to calling him brash and cocky and typically Texan, but who now had to figure out how to address an ashen-faced 25-year-old champion who’d just had a swollen, cancerous testicle cut away from his body and was talking about modest things like wanting to live.

That was the day everything changed for Lance Armstrong: October 2, 1996. Year Zero.

The Suburban’s doors open all at once and five man-boys clad in various hues of polyester pile out. Lance steps down from the driver’s seat—he can’t stand being a passenger, rarely lets anyone else take the wheel—and boosts himself into the back to change. Two product developers from Nike lean in when he gets to his bike shoes, recording the moment on digital cameras. The footwear is based on a prototype that Lance eviscerated to his liking with a pair of scissors, and they’re hoping he’ll wear the new design in July, when he goes for Tour de France victory number five.

“They feel good,” Lance says, standing and shifting from one foot to the other. He clomps over to his full-time mechanic, Mike Anderson, who is assembling his bike, and squeezes the rear tire.

“Flat,” Lance says. “What’s up with that?”

“I’ll fix it,” says Mike. “Maybe I’ll put in a puncture-resistant tube. Looks like there might be thorns out here.”

“Dude, I’m losing my warm-up time,” he says, sounding a little antsy. “I need to do some squats or something.”

You think about going over and saying something, because it all seems pretty mellow. But you don’t, and neither does anybody else. Probably best not to bother him before the race, even though it’s just a dinky cyclocross—cycling’s version of the steeplechase—and you’d love to ask him what the hell he’s doing here. It’s a training run, sure, but Lance showing up to hammer two dozen locals is like Tiger going to a mini-mall amusement park and wasting everyone at putt-putt. This guy needs to prove something?

Definitely not. At 31, Lance Armstrong is many things, most of which are listed on the cover of his best-selling 2000 autobiography, It’s Not About the Bike, in an order that seems telling: winner of the Tour de France, cancer survivor, husband, father, son, human being. He is also a philanthropist (the Lance Armstrong Foundation has raised $23 million for cancer survivors); an adviser to George W. Bush (he sits on the President’s Cancer Panel along with three world-famous oncology specialists); and a highly paid spokesman for Subaru, Nike, Coca-Cola, and Bristol-Myers Squibb. This summer, if he succeeds in matching the five-in-a-row record of Miguel Indurain, the mighty Basque who ruled the Tour from 1991 to 1995, Lance will be poised to attempt an unprecedented six victories—a feat that would secure his place among the all-time greats in the history of sport.

Just before the race starts, Kristin Armstrong, Lance’s blond, green-eyed 31-year-old wife, meanders over with their three-year-old son, Luke, and the one-year-old twins, Grace and Isabelle. Her parents, Dave and Ethel Richard, and her younger brother, Jon, have also turned out to cheer Lance on. It’s a few days before Christmas; six weeks from now, Lance and Kristin will separate, but you wouldn’t know it from the way the family looks today.

The racers start off full-tilt, cross-eyed with effort and flirting with lactic acid from the gun, dreaming, perhaps, that Lance is out of shape, or hungover, or doesn’t care about this pissant competition. For most of the race—an hour of laps around the park’s grassy circuit—Lance hovers 20 seconds behind the lead group, which dwindles from eight riders to one, and then he closes in on Will Black, the Texas state cyclocross and mountain-bike champion. At the finish it’s you-know-who in front. Lance crosses the line to scattered yelps and keeps on rolling back to the Suburban to switch bikes so he can ride the 15 miles home.

Black hustles over to shake hands with the Man.

“Hey, thanks a lot,” he says.

“No problem,” says Lance, toweling off his face. “That was good. You made me work today.”

“You coming out tomorrow for that other race?”

“Yeah, I’ll be there. Unless I drink too many beers tonight.”

“That’s cool,” Black says absentmindedly. “No! Wait. Do drink a lot of beers tonight.”

“OK,” Lance says, cocking his head agreeably. “I was going to anyway.” He looks around at his entourage and lets out a snort.

It would be nice if it were always like this—no press conference, no throng, no scandal, no pissing in a cup. Then again, normalcy is a place Lance only visits.

LANCE ARMSTRONG IS A WORKAHOLIC. Though his racing season runs March through September, he views his job as a year-round gig. Since he won his first Tour, in 1999, Armstrong’s responsibilities have steadily accrued as his appeal has evolved from a feel-good story about an athlete’s courage to one that ranges well beyond sports, tapping into Platonic ideals of willpower, leadership, discipline, and determination.

It’s demanding work. Armstrong owes 45 days a year to his 13 sponsors, the biggest of which each pay him north of $2 million a year to pitch their products. He puts in another ten days working with his foundation, not to mention countless phone calls and covert visits with cancer patients, sneaking them into his hotel rooms or slipping into their hospital rooms to deliver pep talks that border on tough love. Most recently, he signed a five-year, $12.5 million contract with Subaru. Between these agreements, his $4 million United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team salary, and the $3.5 million in bonuses he’ll receive if he wins the Tour again, he stands to make $16.5 million this year.

Though his friends marvel at how he packs 25 hours of activity into every day, the obligations of superstardom are starting to tear at him. He’s finding it harder to balance his job, and the needs of his wife and children, with what he wants for himself. The way Armstrong sees it, he has one shot at true greatness—and because his very life, post-cancer, is a second chance, he’s determined not to let anything stand in his way. He needs to leave a monument to his suffering, a rock of proof that a fatherless loner from the Dallas suburbs could rise to the top and keep rising. He’ll tell you that he’s not interested in cycling records, that he just wants to be remembered as the cancer survivor who won the Tour (however many times). Not because his story is so improbable, but because it reflects, in universal terms, the pain he felt growing up. He can be understood. To explain himself, all he has to do is win a bike race.

“I don’t even know if it’s so much winning, but the fear of losing,” Lance tells me, slouching in a wooden rocking chair, a can of Miller Lite in his hand.

It’s Saturday evening, a couple hours after the cyclocross race, and we’re sitting on the porch of his small cabin on the west edge of Austin. Willie Nelson’s warbling through the stereo and the sun is slipping fast into the Texas Hill Country. The property is called Milagro—Spanish for miracle—because, he says, “Kristin truly feels like my survival and the births of our kids were miracles.”

“I don’t like to lose,” he goes on. “I just despise it. I mean, if I lost the Tour, I would be incredibly upset. With myself. If something bad happened—an accident or whatever—I would still be upset with myself. But if I just failed on a performance level, on a fitness level, that would not be”—he pauses, rubbing his ship’s prow of a jaw with his free hand—”acceptable.”

The drive out here—Lance hunched over the wheel of the Suburban, tacking through town traffic, Pete Yorn blaring on the stereo—testified to his competitiveness. He turned it into a private time trial. I was right on his bumper, determined not to get dropped, when we caught a yellow light. That’s when his hand darted up through the sunroof, waving me through, as if to say, “C’mon, don’t be a skirt!” Hauling ass to keep up seems crucial, as it must to everyone who deals with Armstrong.

Even now, he can’t stop talking about winning. “Like today. I’d have been mad if I didn’t win.” He laughs, snugging his cap down over his monk’s coif of graying hair. “I would have been livid.”

When Armstrong talks to you, he engages mentally and physically in the dialogue. He uses his hands like an Italian, his facial expressions like a Frenchman. He speaks in evidentiary terms, listing examples, citing details to support each point, slapping you on the knee for emphasis. His cadence is brisk, just as it is on the bike, but he is not terse.

He tells me about his routine. “I wake up and run right to the coffee,” he says. “It’s already made. Yeah, baby! Timer. I’d go nuts if I had to wait.” And about Luke. “When I get dressed in my cycling clothes, he tells me, ‘Have a good day at work!’ He was cool today, huh? I heard him every time I came around.” And whether it’s still anger that primarily fuels him. “Last year,” he says of the 2002 Tour, “there was no vengeance, no anger, no revenge. There was none of that… Maybe that made it less fun. Everybody likes to give payback a bit. That’s human nature.”

I want to know if he dreamed that he’d become as successful as he has. “I’ll never have to worry about money, and I never thought it would be like that,” he says, looking amused. “I always thought that would keep me busy. It’s an interesting place for me to be, because a lot of times when that happens to an athlete, then you see them change—you see their performance change, their motivations and their desires. Mine hasn’t changed. I still love it. I still need it. The riding, the training, the building, the crafting, and hopefully, ultimately, the winning. I just get off on it—the whole process.”

Still, surviving cancer left him with an almost manic urgency, and he’s perfectly aware of what this costs him. “I’m burning the candle at both ends more than I ever have,” he says. “In terms of training, fulfilling other responsibilities in the off-season. The last three weeks—the amount of travel I’ve done, and tried to train, and tried to do local races, and tried to have a family, and tried to lead a fairly normal life… That’s hard. I can see that there are ways to make it easier, and I can see the end of it coming.”

He’s talking about life beyond the Tour—when the hypermasochistic training regimen is over, when he doesn’t have to sleep in an altitude tent—but he really can’t let himself think too far into the future. For now, he loves his job. In February he’ll make his annual move to Girona, Spain, where preparation for the Tour becomes all-consuming. There’s nothing to do but ride.

“Simple, simple, simple,” he says. “Beautiful.”

And just when I’ve settled into what seems like a nice chat with the best and busiest bike racer in the world, I see the animation on his face vanish. My allotted 60 minutes are up.

“All right,” he says, hopping out of his chair. “I gotta run. You done with me?”

RIDING A BIKE IS EASY, but because the machine is so efficient, you have to go long and hard and often to reach your potential. So you sit on a wedge of leather and push the pedals for half a day at a time, constantly notching the chain up or down to calibrate that burning in your thighs, knowing that if you don’t taste the pain now, it will be incapacitating during a race. It’s normal for your hands, feet, and crotch to fall asleep. Cycling numbs the mind, too, and everything is reduced to a visceral level. You become a zombie.

On the subject of suffering and endurance, Armstrong’s authority is absolute. He was born in 1971 to Linda Mooneyham, who was just 17 when she had him, and his father split before he was two. He grew up with a stepdad he didn’t like and watched his mother struggle to make rent; Linda divorced Terry Armstrong when Lance was 14. His mother was never satisfied with the state of things, and strived to upgrade their lives. “When I used to baby-sit,” she told me, “I’d be in this nice home, and I’d say, ‘One of these days I’m going to have that.’ I wanted something more. I had every excuse to fail, but I was obsessed.”

She led by example, working her way up from secretary to global account manager at the wireless telephone giant Ericsson. Her son assimilated her drive. In his autobiography, he says that “everybody told us we wouldn’t amount to anything.” The message was ground into him at Plano East High School in the north Dallas suburbs, where he didn’t fit the middle-class mold. He wasn’t good at football, couldn’t afford Polo shirts, and didn’t belong to a country club. Life sucked.

So he channeled his rising anger into swimming and cycling, and soon began winning junior triathlons. He was particularly fast on the bike and discovered that his endurance level was higher than that of most of the adults he raced against. His mounting victories got him noticed by the U.S. Cycling Federation, and in 1990 he was tapped to join the national team. Even there he found reason to take umbrage: Chris Carmichael, a former Olympian who was the coach at the time, placed Lance on the second-tier squad—a minor distinction, really, but not to a young man determined to be somebody.

The best way to cope, he decided, was to torture himself on the bike. He quickly made a reputation for himself as “that brash Texan” by hammering his way to 11th in the amateur World Championships in 1990. (Carmichael told him that if he had paid attention to tactics, he’d have been on the podium.) Armstrong turned pro a year later and continued ticking off the wins—and his competitors—by snatching the pro World Championships in 1993, the Clasica San Sebastian in 1995, and two Tours du Pont (in ’95 and ’96). He raced in the Tour de France four times before developing cancer, winning a stage in both 1993 and 1995 but finishing the mother of all bike races only once.

The pace, and his stubbornness, is probably why he ignored the symptoms of choriocarcinoma for six months before he was diagnosed. The story is richly told in It’s Not About the Bike: The cancer had spread rampantly, and after the neurosurgeons removed two lesions from his brain, the oncologists had to tackle a “snowstorm” of tumors in his lungs. He refused to rule out cycling again, so they used a chemotherapy treatment that wouldn’t scorch his lungs. He received such intensive doses of the platinum-based drug cisplatin that, by the fourth round, it began to dissolve his musculature and burn his skin from the inside out.

Now cancer-free, he’s still spooked by the ordeal, almost seven years later. He celebrates October 2 as his birthday and sees things all the time that remind him. “I’ve never been scared for my life like that since,” he wrote to me in an e-mail. “When I go in for blood work, I see the blood coming out, and I wonder if it’s cancerous blood or healthy blood. It’s a bizarre and scary experience.”

Before cancer, Armstrong was a talented cyclist with enormous natural ability, but he didn’t eat like he should have or train like he could have. He was living large in Austin, with girlfriends, a million-dollar home, and a Porsche.

“The odd thing is that Lance was, by comparison [with his current incarnation], a slacker,” Washington Post sportswriter Sally Jenkins told me. Having worked with him closely, ghostwriting his autobiography and Every Second Counts (his next book, due out this fall), Jenkins explained that, above all, cancer made him serious. “A lot of people have cancer and come away with a gauzy outlook, a determination to work less hard, enjoy their family more,” she says. “He’s peculiar in this regard. He came out of it ready to work hard. He’s been given the capacity to be the best cyclist in the world, and he feels obligated to make the most of that.”

Bart Knaggs, 36, a partner at Capital Sports & Entertainment, the firm that manages Armstrong, thinks it was a leaner temperament that transformed his best friend. “He had to beat cancer with his brain,” says Knaggs in his singsongy twang. “He was instrumental in the way he was treated. That’s when he started to trust his own noggin. He went, ‘Wow, holy shit! Maybe I am smart.’ He moved from a boxer’s mentality to a marathoner’s mentality.”

ARMSTRONG HAS BUILT a rigidly ordered world for himself that turns on hard work, perfectionism, and a palpable loathing for the forces of chaos. He compartmentalizes the disparate aspects of his life and shifts gears between them on the spot, rarely looking back. Certainly it’s an advantage that he has a crystal-clear goal, but what enables him to operate with such singular purpose is the protective shield of his inner circle. He runs this informal organization like a CEO, handpicking smart and successful people to orbit him like satellites.

“I’m careful and wary of new people,” he says. “I have a close circle of friends and advisers, and I try to keep it that way.”

There’s a certain type of man he’s always sought out: older, wealthy, and wise. Men like Thomas Weisel, 62, the maverick San Francisco financier who put together the Postal Service team and manages a lot of Armstrong’s investments. Or Jeff Garvey, 54, founding chairman of the Lance Armstrong Foundation and a venture capitalist who used to manage a $1.5 billion hedge fund. Or Jim Ochowicz, 51, Armstrong’s former team director (at Motorola) and Luke’s godfather, who is a broker for Weisel.

Slightly closer to the nucleus are a few friends—young, raw, determined guys willing to be groomed for service. These he calls “brother.” Foremost among them is 37-year-old Bill Stapleton, Armstrong’s agent and confidant, who founded Capital Sports & Entertainment not too long after landing Lance as his first client, eight years ago.

Six feet tall, with loosely swept-back black hair and a broad face, Stapleton is a former Olympic swimmer who was working in an Austin law firm and hating it when, in 1995, he got up the nerve to approach Armstrong about representing him. Armstrong met him, mulled the pitch for five months, and chose him because he didn’t want to be “swallowed up” by a larger firm.

These days, Stapleton is inseparable from his client, serving as advocate, personal secretary, and the bad cop who shuts down photo shoots on time, since Lance hates them. He travels with him on every business trip, working out schedules on the plane, usually a private jet (Armstrong has a 100-hour time-share). At last year’s Tour, Stapleton baby-sat comedian Robin Williams, Sally Jenkins, former Wallflowers guitarist Michael Ward, and producer Frank Marshall, who’s interested in making a movie about Lance.

Their relationship is a testament to the loyalty Lance demands of his posse. The two men are bound by a simple two-page contract that either side can terminate on 30 days’ notice. And loyalty pays well. Considering that the typical sports agent’s cut is 15 to 25 percent of a client’s salary, Stapleton makes roughly $2 million a year.

“What I like is that when Lance needs something, I’m the go-to guy,” Stapleton says. “I have a tremendous respect and admiration for this guy. To have someone I admire look to me for advice and counsel means a lot. I mean, I’m a fan. I’m not a freaked-out fan. I’m not a geeked-out fan. But I believe in this guy.”

Busy as Armstrong is, he’s diligent about responding to the 50-plus e-mails and phone calls he gets each day: queries from Carmichael, checking in on his training regimen; from his mother, asking about the new cancer center in Dallas that is naming a surgery room after him; from Johan Bruyneel, the director of the USPS team, confirming his racing schedule; from U2 frontman Bono, asking if he can speak at an AIDS benefit in Omaha this weekend; from Kristin, about when they should move into their new house in Austin; from Sally Jenkins, wondering if he’s read the latest chapter of the second book; from Stapleton, asking if he can sign 600 posters for charity; and from John Korioth, a cycling brother, wondering when he wants to meet tomorrow—to ride.

THERE IS ONE FEAR that everyone in the inner circle shares: disappointing Lance. “There are examples of guys who have endured with Lance and there are guys that haven’t,” says Bart Knaggs. “Very few of us are the best in the world at what we do. You’re at pretty big risk of not living up to Lance Armstrong’s standards. Shit, Lance just expects as much out of everybody else as he does himself.”

If Lance senses the slightest hint of disloyalty or lack of dedication, you’re gone. “The world is black-and-white to him,” says Korioth, 36, an old friend who now sells insurance for a living. “And it’s a lot easier to make decisions when it’s that way.”

Shortly before he was diagnosed, Armstrong had signed a two-year, $2.5 million contract with the French cycling team Cofidis. When his illness forced him to sit out the 1997 season, Cofidis dumped him. For Armstrong, it was an ignominious, disloyal move and an incredible blow to his fast-healing ego. (On the other hand, Armstrong has vowed to stick with Nike and Oakley for life, because they honored their deals with him.) Newly unemployed, he showed up with Stapleton at the Interbike trade show in Anaheim, California, that August and announced that he was about to make “the greatest comeback in the history of sports.” Then the two sat back and waited for the offers to roll in. Nobody responded.

Armstrong was furious. It didn’t register that potential sponsors might see him as a risk, or even damaged goods. He had survived cancer and decided to race again. What more did they need to know? Even Weisel, who had bankrolled Armstrong’s first pro-am team, Subaru-Montgomery, and had just started the USPS squad, was lukewarm. Lance took it out on his agent. Stapleton had finally decided to quit the law firm and was working at home for his one and only client when he got the scare of his career.

“It was like ‘I’ve made my comeback, and I want all this stuff, I want all these deals, and they’re not happening,'” he recalls, sounding a little queasy. “He sent me an e-mail and told me I had a deadline of three months to get some stuff done or he was going to find somebody else. I was sick to my stomach. I was physically ill. I was like ‘I’ve put so much into this and I’m going to lose him.’ It was a real test for me.”

Stapleton passed, nailing down the Postal Service contract in six weeks, with Lance getting $200,000 a year and huge winning bonuses to start. The experience cemented their relationship, but the way it played out—Make this happen, or adios—showed how calculating Lance had become. Combined with his ruthless dedication to his schedule, such episodes have led those outside the inner circle to characterize Armstrong as a machine. But Knaggs says the guy he’s gotten to know over the last 12 years does indeed have a soul. “His assessment of talent, his insight, is not formulaic,” Knaggs says. “The gut hunch is very good.”

Armstrong’s relationship with John Korioth also shows that he’s human. Korioth had gone from brother to persona non grata after being forced out of his post at the foundation in 1998. The two didn’t talk again until Korioth popped up in a July 2001 Texas Monthly article, defending Armstrong against long-percolating accusations that he used EPO—erythropoietin, a drug that boosts oxygen levels in blood and is banned from use in cycling. Armstrong was floored that Korioth had stood up for him, and rekindled their friendship by flying him over for the last week of the Tour.

“It was just two dumbass guys holding a grudge,” says Korioth. Now, when Armstrong is in Austin, the two ride together every day.

For every example like Stapleton’s brush with unemployment or Korioth’s deep freeze, there are instances of Armstrong reaching out and giving people a lift. Stephanie McIlvain has been his liaison at Oakley, his sunglasses sponsor, for 12 years. When her three-year-old son was diagnosed with autism two years ago, she quit so she could stay at home and care for him. Armstrong wouldn’t have it. He told Oakley he wouldn’t work with anyone else, so the company rehired her and let her work from home, with the sole responsibility of tending to Lance.

“He sent me this e-mail the other day that actually made me cry,” she told me. “I don’t remember why, but he just said, ‘Steph, you’re an awesome person, you’re a great mother, and for that you’re a hero.'”

Lee Walker, 62, a key adviser who has taken over as chairman of the foundation, praises Armstrong’s “emotional intelligence.”

“Lance has a great capacity for making you like him,” says Walker, who is six foot ten and wears a black cowboy hat that he calls his “air bag.” “So it’s no surprise that he’s got a devoted band of eclectic, kindred souls who would do anything for him, and I think him for us. He attends to his friends.” Walker gives this example: One day, Lance noticed Walker’s toes poking out of a ratty pair of shoes. “Next thing I know, I’ve got seven pairs of new Nikes”—in size 17. “Who else does that?”

IT’S ONE THING TO TALK about how Armstrong organizes every inch of his life around winning the Tour. It’s another thing to watch him do it. He hates to gamble, but when he’s keeping pace with the best climbers in the world on some hideous mountain stage and then raises the effort another notch, he may as well be staking everything on 13 black. He admitted this to his teammate George Hincapie after trying to help him win the 2002 Tour of Flanders. “He said a lot of times he puts it all on the line,” says Hincapie, who hesitated to attack in that race and wound up fourth. “He makes his move and takes a big risk. If they caught him, he’d be done.”

Beyond the inner circle, the most important people to Armstrong are the eight guys who ride with him in Europe. As with any cycling team, USPS is built around its leader. They are there solely to block the wind for Armstrong (drafting behind another rider requires 30 percent less energy), chase down cheeky attacks, and otherwise make life as easy as possible for their captain. During the 2002 Tour, the cycling magazine VeloNews calculated that Armstrong spent no more than 14 miles of the race out front, a remarkable testament to the team’s professionalism.

Armstrong is the boss on and off the bike. Thom Weisel’s company, Tailwind Sports, owns the USPS squad, and he has formal authority, but his star rider more or less handpicks his teammates (only Hincapie remains from 1999). It was Armstrong who insisted on keeping the entire 2002 squad for this year. He even chose the coach, Bruyneel, a master tactician who raced for the Spanish cycling team ONCE not that long ago.

Traditionally, to win the Tour a rider must either excel in the time trials and persevere in the mountains, or vice versa. Since 1999, Armstrong has dominated both disciplines. If anything, he is better in the mountains, where he can watch the faces of his competitors. And of all the mountains Armstrong has faced in the Tour—Sestriere, L’Alpe d’Huez, La Mongie, to name but a few soul-crushers—only one has withstood his willpower: 6,273-foot Mont Ventoux.

The stats and history of this limestone slag heap are impressive in their own right. Ventoux rises 5,251 feet in 13 miles, with some stretches graded as steep as 15 percent. A mile from the top sits a stone memorial to British cyclist Tom Simpson, who in 1967 collapsed and died of heatstroke, presumably induced by amphetamines and the half-bottle of cognac he slugged down in a cafĂ© at the base to refresh himself. In 1970, the indomitable Belgian rider Eddy Merckx, another five-time winner, had to be given oxygen at the finish. In 2000, Armstrong led Marco Pantani over the last two miles and then, in a show of respect for one of the Tour’s finest climbers, let the Italian dart across the finish line first. Pantani denied that his victory was a gift, making Armstrong’s graciousness look foolish. Ever since, both Pantani and Ventoux have been high on his shit list.

In 2002, Stage 14 of the 22-day, 2,036-mile race featured Ventoux, looming up out of the vineyards of Provence at the end of a 137-mile shot over windswept plains. It had already hit 90 degrees on July 21 when a group of 11 riders broke away from the pack and built a lead. One of them was Richard Virenque, a Frenchman who had won the Tour’s “King of the Mountains” mantle five times and was back after a suspension for using EPO. When this bunch reached the base of the mountain, Virenque sprang away. He was seven minutes clear of the peloton, which was being towed by the Postal Service boys, frantic to get their man what he wanted.

Armstrong sat in second position, conserving energy as one teammate after another came to the front and redlined it until blowing up and getting spit out the back. Soon he found himself in a group of five, two of whom—Joseba Beloki and JosĂ© Azevedo—were ONCE riders. As they switchbacked across the shady lower flanks of Ventoux, the Spaniards took turns setting the pace, trying to crack Armstrong. Slogging up the steepest section of the climb, Armstrong slipped to the back of the group, perhaps baiting them. Beloki went for it. He downshifted, stood up, and cranked ahead, tacking sharply to one side of the road to keep anyone from catching his slipstream. Armstrong followed his move a split second later, motoring around the others and up behind Beloki as if he were being winched out of a ditch. Beloki never looked back to see if he’d been followed, and as soon as he sat down, Armstrong rocketed around him, hunching low over the handlebars in a fury of blind grace.

Beloki didn’t so much as flinch. His elastic had snapped. He stayed seated, shaking his head in resignation, knowing that his chance to gain time on the race leader had fizzled. The only drama left was the race between Virenque, who was still four miles from the top, and Armstrong, four minutes and 30 seconds behind him. The contrast between their riding styles was stark: Lance sat, shoulders still, lips barely parted, legs spinning like a flywheel; Virenque stood up for much of the climb, laboring as if he were stomping grapes. Armstrong made up 32 seconds a mile over the last four miles, no doubt spurred on by several fans booing him and yelling, “DopĂ©! DopĂ©!” In the end, Virenque took the stage, but Armstrong destroyed the peloton, climbing Ventoux in 58 minutes, the fastest ever in the Tour.

Afterward, he said, “I didn’t come here to win the Mont Ventoux, I came here to win the Tour de France. And I have to remember that, and everyone on the team has to remember that.”

PEOPLE WANT TO BELIEVE it’s the numbers, that Armstrong’s ability to crush competitors like Miller Lite empties is attributable to the various measurements of his physiology. Add them up and the sum explains things, like how he can win without drugs.

The common wisdom goes like this: His heart is a third larger than the average male’s; his VO2 max is double that of most healthy men; his anaerobic threshold, the point at which lactic acid kicks in, is freakishly high; and when he attacks, he pedals at 90 to 120 rpm, a cadence 10 to 20 percent higher (and more efficient) than most cyclists can maintain.

Armstrong’s numbers have been mythologized like no other rider’s. But cycling is not arithmetic. Knaggs, who has logged a lot of saddle time alongside Armstrong, gives what may be the most astute appraisal of his friend’s invincibility. “He was this triathlon wonder child, and for ten years that’s been the story on him—his big engine, blah, blah, blah,” he told me. “But the genetics is just the ante to get you into the room. He knows all these guys have good numbers; they’re all good enough physically. To Lance, it’s a test of wills.”

What underlies his willpower is the knowledge that he has trained as hard as possible. The moment he arrives in Girona each February, he officially goes into monk mode. “I just go from eating and drinking whatever—from having two beers or two glasses of wine with dinner—to absolutely zero,” he says. “The strategy is you have to get on the scale every morning. I’ll start the season at 79 kilos. I need to lose a kilo every month so I can be at 74 at the start of the Tour. A kilo a month isn’t that hard.”

His daily schedule is ascetic: “I eat breakfast between eight and nine, then I train straight through lunch. I leave at 11, get back at five, and try and starve until 6:30 or seven, then have dinner. People think that if you ride six hours, which would be 120 miles in training, that you can eat whatever you want—5,000 calories. You can’t do that. If you just went out and rode easy on flat roads, you’re not burning that much. It might be 300 calories an hour.”

He rides for five to six hours most days. No music. No conversation. “I’ll answer my phone if it rings,” he says of his cell-and-earbud rig. “But I prefer not to talk to anybody.”

It’s a formidable regimen, to be sure. But there are those who think he gets help in not-so-wholesome ways.

Cycling journalists have always gossiped about Armstrong and doping—as they are bound to do with any champion in a sport whose traditions of drug abuse are as rich as its history, particularly when that champion has performed so magically. But most journalists who cover the Tour are loath to ask about doping, either because they don’t want to taint their love of the sport or because they’re simply afraid of getting frozen out by the Armstrong camp. Such reporters are sometimes referred to as FWTs—fans with typewriters. David Walsh, the chief sportswriter for The Sunday Times of London, is no FWT.

On the opening weekend of the 2001 Tour, Walsh published a story in which the bombshell was a detailed account of Armstrong’s visits to an Italian sports doctor named Michele Ferrari. Ferrari specializes in working with pro cyclists and has been vilified for allegedly administering performance-enhancing drugs. (He once reportedly said that EPO—which can thicken the blood and cause heart trouble—was no more harmful than five liters of orange juice.) He is currently on trial in Bologna, charged with providing EPO to professional riders and managing their use. Until Walsh’s article, Armstrong hadn’t acknowledged his relationship with Ferrari.

Walsh never outright accused Armstrong of doping, but he amassed alarming circumstantial evidence—evidence gleaned from the Italian carabinieri detailing whom Ferrari has treated; on-the-record quotes from a former Motorola rider and USPS doctor asserting the teams were pro-dope; and accusations of drug use on the U.S. Cycling team. Asked by Walsh if he’d ever visited Ferrari, Armstrong played coy. “Have I been tested by him, gone there and consulted on certain things? Perhaps,” he said. Walsh then listed details of exactly when and where Armstrong had met with Ferrari.

The article caused a small firestorm, and when Walsh confronted Armstrong about Ferrari at a press conference a few days before the finish of the Tour that year, Armstrong glared at him and said he had never denied his relationship with Ferrari, had never discussed doping with him, and that the doctor was innocent until proven guilty.

The question is, why not take a break from Ferrari if his reputation is under question? Regardless of whether the doctor is a scoundrel or a scapegoat, don’t appearances matter? I asked Armstrong this. “First of all,” he said, “I’ve never heard anybody—a team, a sponsor, anybody who has the power and influence to tell me what to do—say, ‘You need to get away from that guy.’ Never once. Number two, he’s the best there is.” Armstrong now says he works on altitude preparation, nutrition, and power output with Ferrari when he is in Europe.

The thing to remember in the “Does Lance dope?” debate is that Armstrong’s blood and urine are tested more than that of any athlete in the Tour, and he has come up clean. The other thing to remember, however, is that it’s extremely hard to bust someone on EPO. The Tour instituted a conclusive test in 2001, but it only detects EPO that’s been taken within one week. There is no test yet for human growth hormone, which is thought to be the latest scourge of the peloton.

“I don’t know that any cyclist will ever be free of suspicion,” Armstrong says. “And for that matter, I think it’s like a plague that will spread to other sports. So when somebody does anything, from cycling to the long jump to swimming to baseball, they’re going to question it. I’ve been there and I know—it just gets old.

“If you think about what they’re doing with genetic doping, I mean, if that happens, it’s done,” he adds. “I don’t think they can test for that. And that will be a real shame.”

IF IT’S NOT THE DRUG SNOOPS, then it’s a journalist asking Lance whether he’ll participate in the Tour—given Franco-American political tensions—or some crestfallen fan postulating on the Web about what went down with Kristin. In his eyes, there’s always somebody stirring up trouble. His biggest threat on the roads of France this July will be 1997 Tour champ Jan Ullrich, the German who’s back from sitting out the 2002 race after testing positive for Ecstasy—a bizarre drug suspension even for cycling. None of it should hamper Armstrong; the more competition, the better. He still likes to think of himself as the underdog from Plano. That’s where he thrives: with the odds stacked against him.

“The longer you try to continue a streak, it’s mathematically and historically less and less likely,” Armstrong says. “I don’t think it’s any freakish accident that nobody’s won more than five. The numbers, the variables, the bad luck—you would think they would start to catch up to you.”

The biggest variable in his life right now is his marital status. Though Lance gives no public indication of tears in the exquisitely controlled scrim of his personal life, his separation from Kristin in February has been hard to handle—for both of them. “It wasn’t a big ugly slam, how we got to where we are,” she told me in April, dispelling reports that they’d had a row. “We had a serious conversation. You’ve got a couple that’s been together four and a half years, and we’ve had six homes, three languages, three countries, one cancer comeback, three children, four Tour de France wins, and one rise to celebrity. You’re not supposed to cram such a huge amount of events into such a small period of time.”

Where they are, it seems, is on the verge of patching things up. In late March, after Lance had already decamped to train in Spain, they met in Nice. “We spent time alone,” she said. “We really haven’t had that. When we were together, it was great.” At press time, the plan was for her, the kids, the nanny, and the pets to head to Girona and stay through the Tour. “We’re going to take the month of August and play,” she said. “Spend some time alone. Have some fun. I think it’s going to be OK.”

But none of this has come to pass the last time I see him. It’s a pre-war evening in January, day three of five at a television commercial shoot for Subaru in Northern California. Director Zack Snyder has had Armstrong doing laps all afternoon on a road overlooking the Pacific, on Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais.

As dusk sets in, Snyder needs to set up one last shot, a little dialogue in front of a Subaru Forester in the sepia light. A helicopter sits poised nearby to zip Armstrong back to San Francisco. Per his contract, a full day is exactly six hours, and knowing that the sun would set at 5:11 p.m., he arrived right around 11. Now it’s 5:13 and Stapleton is looking at his Rolex.

Snyder asks Lance to repeat the Subaru tag line—”Driven by what’s inside”—and look happier.

“Happier. OK.” He does it again.

“Yeah, that’s it. Smile,” Snyder says.

Lance does a dozen happier takes—bam, bam, bam—and then Snyder calls it a wrap. Lance and Stapleton bolt for the chopper and I follow. Within a minute we’re up, fast-forwarding over the hills, the Marin Headlands, the bay. We head toward the Golden Gate Bridge.

“Oh, you wouldn’t want to go under it, now would you?” Lance goads the pilot.

We dive. “Uh, guys, we’re going under,” Lance reports as we tuck under the span. “That’s just wrong. Hey, did you hear that Coit Tower is tipping over? You know what they call that? Coitus interruptus.”

We rotor down over Pier 23, where a camera crew is scurrying around a shiny new SUV for a different car commercial.

“Oh, they’re going to hate me for this,” says the pilot, swooping onto the deck and killing their audio in the last moments of light. “Too bad.”

“Looks like they’re shooting a Lincoln commercial,” Stapleton says.

But Armstrong can’t hear him. The moment we touch down, he’s out the side hatch and bounding over to the black Mercedes Series 5 sedan that’s here for him. As the driver comes around to open his door, he reaches out and shakes the man’s hand, doing his best impression of a regular guy, and says, “Hey, I’m Lance.”

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What’s up, dog? Danny Kass, doing his best to keep a low profile slopside in Stratton

“Sometimes I kinda forget where I am,” says Powers.

White light, white heat: A competitor surfs above the halfpipe

Kass meets his public.

The indestructible Lelly Clark

Grenade posse in full effect

Luke Mitrani

Fashion-forward at the open

Does this metal make me look phat? Danny and J.J. (below) get ready for their Wheaties shoot.

THE GAUNTLET IS turning ugly. Two lines of blunt-booted snowboarders stretch along the main slope of the Waterville Valley ski area in New Hampshire, and they are unsatisfied with the performances thus far. They express their displeasure by spewing insults and mouthfuls of beer at riders speeding by on their way to the icy, two-story quarterpipe below.


“You guys suck!”


Psssssphplaaaaaafth!


The drill is to charge downslope at the towering ramp and catapult off the top lip into a McTwist, a Rodeo Flip, or some other contortion. Several riders sail 15 feet above the top, gunning for amplitude. But the gauntlet needs more, so it shovels snow into the approach, improvising a jump to up the ante. When some of the competitors simply bunny-hop it, the gauntlet scatters to gather empty Bud cases for fuel and starts a fire that forces riders to jump higher to avoid the flames. A few swerve wide of the trouble altogether, but such behavior undermines the spirit of the moment, and they are booed and called pussies.


This is the fifth annual World Quarterpipe Championships, sponsored by Snowboarder magazine and Red Bull. Competition started around 11:30 this morning when an emcee boomed over the P.A.: “The name of the game is DRUNK!” The vibe feels like Lord of the Flies meets Animal House. On ice.


A few days ago, over in Vermont, Stratton Mountain Resort hosted the 20th Annual U.S. Open Snowboarding Championships—the sport’s most venerated event. For the last five years, Waterville has served as a sort of anti-contest. “World Quarterpipe Championships” would seem to imply: officially sanctioned, lavishly sponsored, widely covered. The event is none of these. Winning it guarantees neither sponsorship incentives nor a place in the record books. What victors receive is smirking admiration from the brethren. Respect. As with so many aspects of snowboarding, the World Quarters is an elaborate goof—with a slightly serious edge.


For instance, two of the judges are newly minted celebrities: Olympic halfpipe gold medalist Ross Powers, looking haggard today after enduring a month of appearances (Letterman, Today, the Daytona 500) and an all-night beer-fest during his homecoming at the Open, and Danny Kass, the lazy-lidded rebel who took silver in Salt Lake.


The peripheral activities, however, almost overshadow the riding. At the moment, a round-faced Vermonter is busy pumping up the pressure of a plastic weed sprayer strapped to his back and squirting the frothy contents (Red Bull and vodka, a.k.a. “liquid crack”) more or less into people’s mouths. Giacomo Kratter, the 19-year-old Italian who finished fourth at the Olympics, wobbles around in tattered fatigues, carrying an issue of Penthouse and playing ventriloquist to a rubber turkey obsessed with the magazine. (“I am durky hunter!”) Nearby, two capitalist hooligans work in tandem with cans of spray paint, one distracting a member of the gauntlet while the other lacquers a large stencil of a grenade—the symbol of Grenade Gloves, Kass’s company—on the victim’s backside. Everyone has a beer cozied into a glove or mitten and bobs loosely to the drum ‘n’ bass beat, compliments of DJ NC-17, who’s hunkered in a slopeside yurt-cum-bong rigged with a thumping sound system.
Powers and Kass and the other judges stand near the end of the gauntlet, a vantage that allows them to assess the style with which riders handle both the harassment and the quarterpipe. They confer about the technical specifics of a trick performed by Teddy Rauh, a 24-year-old from East Dover, Vermont, who works as a logger in the off-season. “Let’s see what he claims,” says Powers, “then we’ll decide whether he makes the finals.”


Powers explains that Rauh, after executing a brassy Backflip Indy over the fire and then flipping everyone the bird, hit the quarterpipe and purposefully did a Tailfish—”which everyone knows is a gay trick.” It looks similar to a Stalefish, which is cool, but if Rauh claims a Stalefish, he’s gone. “We’re trying to judge it fair, you know?” says Powers, who has big blue eyes and a smile that wants to veer off the side of his face. “You gotta put everything into it.”


“Hey, Ross!” someone shouts. “Is that your board?”


Powers pokes his shaved head into the alley and sees his pro-model Burton 158 teetering atop the bonfire. (His old friend Kass snuck off and put it there.)


“Awww, shit, man,” he mutters. Then, more urgently, “I need those bindings!” Without thinking, he lurches into the lane and scrambles up the gauntlet, holding his beer out to the side so as not to spill. Just as he stoops to pluck his board from the fire, Burton teammate Colin Langlois hits the jump full tilt, sucking his knees into his chest and skimming above Powers’s head.


The gauntlet erupts. Powers jerks upright and looks downslope, not quite aware that he’s just missed being decapitated. It’s the best moment of the day—unscripted, acrobatic, and a bit sketchy. Just like snowboarding.

IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW any better, you might assume the pranksterism on display at Waterville validates a certain stereotype of snowboarders as lawless punks. But thanks to the Salt Lake City Olympics, you do know better—don’t you?


When Kelly Clark won the women’s halfpipe event—the first U.S. gold of the Games—and then, the next day, Powers, Kass, and Jarret “J.J.” Thomas became the first Americans to sweep a Winter Olympics podium since 1956, snowboarding was transformed in the public eye from hoodlums’ hobby to serious sport. The many outsiders among the 21 million people watching NBC prime time last February 11 couldn’t help but get what they saw: ethereal athleticism. “Oh! I just enjoyed it, that halfpipe thing,” raved Gordon Hinckley, the 92-year-old president and prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, in USA Today. “It was crazy, to get down and tip upside down and cavort about.”


A month later, at the U.S. Open, riders could already sense the bizarre 180 in pop culture perceptions. But broad acceptance ushers in a different dynamic. Without a negative stereotype to gleefully buck against, snowboarders may find it more difficult to define themselves. “We’re a little more respected, for sure,” Josh Pekuri told me while standing at the bottom of the halfpipe during a lull in practice. A 23-year-old engineer on leave from Coast Guard duty, he was wearing a leather skullcap, a Stanley Kowalski undershirt, and a studded leather belt to hold up his snowboard pants. Taking a drag from his Camel Light, he frowned. “People used to look at us like we were all drug addicts.”


Leading up to Salt Lake, all you heard was that top halfpipers hardly cared about the Olympics. They were too cool, the thinking went, to rah-rah such a mainstream event. In fact, core snowboarders had reason to be wary: Events at Nagano in 1998 had made them look silly. The uniforms were dorky, the pipe was shoddy, and the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA) mortified them by marketing Animal, the Muppet character, as their mascot. And then, when Canadian Ross Rebagliati tested positive for marijuana, the press wrote off the entire sport as a stoner joke.


The SLC program managed not to embarrass anyone. This time, the best riders were mostly accounted for, the pipe was mint, and the sky was Windex blue. Best of all, the United States dominated. “I was stoked when I figured out that I got the bronze,” says J. J. Thomas, a handsome 21-year-old Coloradan sponsored by Ride Snowboards and Oakley. “But I wasn’t that stoked, because I didn’t have my best run. Then some guy came up to us and told us about the sweep thing—that’s when I got excited.”


But not everyone was stoked. Within the sanctified walls of Burton Snowboards, which puts on the U.S. Open, the posture toward the Olympics remains more bullheaded than bullish. A month to the day after the sweep, the company fired off a sniffy press release that read: “Many people have a false impression, supported by ambiguous communications from the U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association, that America’s snowboarding success is a result of the USSA’s Ă”U.S. Snowboard Team’ efforts. This is not the case. . . . The best athletes train, compete, choose sponsors, and manage their careers as they choose—as individuals. The team system does not work, and is essentially a marketing device for USSA.”
It came across as something of a head scratcher, like a grouchy surfer getting territorial over an epic swell. Why bring everybody down when there’s more than enough booty to go around? Perhaps because with a 30 percent stake in the snowboarding market—which last year amounted to more than $100 million in sales—the 25-year-old company considers itself the feisty ombudsman of snowboarding, bent on protecting the sport’s image.


“The number of opportunities for people to talk about snowboarding and fuck it up is just enormous now,” says David Schriber, 38, who was senior vice-president of marketing at Burton for five years before taking over a sister brand, Gravis footwear, last spring. “The growth is consistent with where we’ve wanted to take things, but you have to be careful. We have the job of growing Burton and making it cooler. But bigger is lamer in snowboarding.”


Jake Burton himself seems unworried about the mainstreaming of the sport. “Obviously, for self-interested business reasons, but also beyond that, I think the more people who snowboard the better,” says the 48-year-old entrepreneur, who owns his company outright and rides more than 100 days a year. “What kids are doing—the rails that they’re hitting and the jumps they’re going off—that’s a completely different sport than what mainstream snowboarders are doing. I mean, does Michael Jordan get pissed off that fat white guys play basketball? I don’t think he’s like, Ă”Damn, that’s the end of my sport.’ And I don’t think core riders feel that way either.”


Probably true. Definitely true: Snowboarders are nothing if not fickle. Now that the mainstream has latched on to snowboarding itself, can the sport keep its cool?

FOR A GOOD BAROMETRIC reading of snowboarding, rewind to the U.S. Open. Today is Thursday, and people have been practicing on Stratton’s slopes since Monday for the contests this weekend. There are three categories of competition this year: quarterpipe, halfpipe, and slopestyle. Compared with what will transpire at the World Quarters next week, the Open seems tame. Used to be that you could spot riders toking up before a run, hear a member of the Wu-Tang Clan lay down an impromptu rap, or maybe get hit in the head with a beer bottle. Now there’s a $180,000 purse, heavy competition, bleachers, grandparents, and a 25-member private security force. The chaos is under control.


Sort of. Luke Mitrani and Tommy Emanuelson huddle behind the vinyl start tent of the slopestyle event, occupied with how to wear their ski-racerish number bibs in any manner but the official one. Earlier, Luke and Tommy told me they were 21-year-old Texans who’d won the Olympics; in fact, I’ll learn, both were born in 1990 and hail from Vermont. Presently, Luke dishes up some MC trash talk: “We’re the cool rappers/And we don’t like snappers…”


All right. What he doesn’t mention is that he and his four-foot-tall friend are sponsored by two of the sport’s largest companies, Burton and Oakley; that they won every U.S.A. Snowboarding Association halfpipe and slopestyle contest in their respective regions this season (Luke rules southern Vermont, Tommy northern); and that 12-year-old Luke just beat out 135 older pros to make the halfpipe quarterfinals.
But they still have to wear these lame red spandex bibs like everyone else. Tommy, whose blond bowl cut frames a set of cheeks still chubby with baby fat, steps his bulky boots through the bib’s arm holes and hikes the hem up high, peering over his fists to see how he might secure it around his scrawny chest. Luke tries to help, but the thing won’t stay up. Older pros mill around, waxing boards and waiting to take a run. As J. J. Thomas sideslips down the start ramp, two guys in the tent who are not yet 20 compare notes on the orthopedic corsets they had to wear after breaking their pelvises last season. Out back, Josh Pekuri yanks against his own bib. “I feel like a Baywatch girl,” he complains.


All Tommy can manage is a sort of sumo diaper. Not cool. Luke, who has faint freckles and coarse curls, suggests they tie the bibs into do-rags. Yeah! They take off their helmets and goggles and try the Axl Rose approach. Too much material to knot. But Luke has a creative breakthrough.


“Tommy!” he shouts. “We don’t even need to tie it—your helmet will hold it on.” Jamming helmets over headwear, they size each other up.


“That looks sick, dude,” Luke chirps, snapping his goggles into place. Then they strap into their bindings, point their boards downslope, and ride.

“YOU JUST PLAY EVERY DAY,” says Norwegian Anne Molin Kongsgaard, laying out the life of a professional snowboarder over some fries in the Stratton cafeteria. The 25-year-old Burton rider switched from two planks to one in 1994 for the independence it affords—mainly, no coaches telling her what to do. Once they score sponsorships, most pros shelve school and hit the contest circuit sans chaperon. And most, like Kongsgaard, relish the lifestyle of riding, seeing the world on someone else’s tab, and hanging out with a tight group of good-looking friends. Still, it takes stamina.


Take a look at Ross Powers. He arrives midday, straight off a red-eye from L.A. Last night he taped a segment of Weakest Link; today he’s just hoping to get in a few runs. Wearing three days’ stubble and bright yellow goggles, the champ wanders along a carnivalesque main street of sponsors’ kiosks, the tail of his board dragging in the slush, as a huckster for Right Guard Xtreme bellows into a too-loud speaker, “Who’s the most EXTREME here!?”


“It seems like every other night I wake up in a different place these days,” Powers mumbles, looking at his feet. He hasn’t ridden in weeks. “Sometimes I kinda forget where I am, and then I realize what I’m there for and it brings the memory back.”


Powers, who is 23, grew up eight miles away, in South Londonderry, and the Open is his homecoming. People around here are proud of him, and they all seem to know his story: that his father left when he was five, and that he and his younger brother, Trevor, were raised in a two-room apartment by their mom, Nancy, who still works at the Bromley Mountain Ski Resort cafeteria. Ross started racing in 1988, when he was nine, nursing used equipment and winning like mad. Burton took note and started outfitting him the next year. By 1993 he’d made enough of a name for himself to get into the tony Stratton Mountain School ski academy on a partial scholarship, washing windows in the summer to offset his share of the balance. (Tuition is currently $17,300 for day students.) The year after he graduated, he took the bronze medal in the halfpipe at Nagano.


“If it wasn’t for my mom and a lot of other people,” he tells me matter-of-factly, “I wouldn’t be where I am today.”


That place is somewhere over the million-dollar rainbow, according to his agent, Peter Carlisle, who, as director of the action sports division of the management firm Octagon, also manages Kelly Clark, the 19-year-old from Vermont who rides for Burton. Powers was doing just fine with Burton and Polo RLX as his sponsors, but since the Olympics he’s added Stratton Mountain and Malibu Boats (he’s into wakeboarding) to his portfolio. “My guess—and it’s an educated guess—is that he’s the best-compensated snowboarder out there,” says Carlisle.


How Powers goes about making his money is a delicate matter. Selling out is a heavy subject in snowboarding—credibility means everything. Humble as his beginnings were, Powers has to be vigilant about the pitfalls of success. “There’s some stuff you just can’t do because it would make you look stupid,” he says. Like? “They wanted Danny and J. J. and me to go and rock out with ‘N Sync while they were at the Olympics. We didn’t do that. It would probably hurt our image more than help us.”


The new Olympians are acutely aware of the fine line they must walk. “Before the Olympics I would pick up on people saying little things about selling out,” says Clark. “But now that I did well, everyone’s like, ‘Oh, no, it’s totally cool!’ Which is, like, maybe a little bit annoying to me? I don’t want to sell out, you know, and I don’t think I will. But I don’t even know what the real definition of it is. I guess what it comes down to is how you’re going to feel having that sticker on your board.”


The sticker that Powers, Kass, and Thomas will be sporting this season is large and reads Nestea cool. Coca-Cola aired a commercial for its new tea last spring showcasing the three Olympians and a snowman using only the word dude to express various sentiments. It bombed in snowboard circles. “Let me see if I can be diplomatic about this,” says Schriber, Burton’s former image maker, who resembles an ornery, bespectacled Alfred E. Neuman. “What I would hope for is that when somebody wants to use snowboarding to sell their product, they contribute rather than detract.”
That’s a tall order. Dudespeak aside, snowboarders judge coolness in widely varying degrees, so for a major corporation to use the medalists’ credibility without simultaneously eroding it would be lucky. Fortunately for sponsors, the medalists all have different images, which broadens their potential demographic appeal. Powers is the Horatio Alger, Kass is the Willy Wonka, Thomas is the Hunk, and Clark is the Role Model (she did 40 public appearances in the ten days following her victory). “It’s like a perfect Venn diagram,” says Schriber, referring to the kind of graph that employs overlapping circles to illustrate logical relationships. “It’s almost too lucky that three totally different guys got medals. They have three different followings in the sport. All three of them now have to give the Olympics themselves some credit.”


Thomas has no problem with that, especially given that he didn’t expect to be in this position. He posted good but not stellar results until last January, when he finally mastered the Cab 900 and the Switch McTwist, taking first and third at Grand Prix events at his home mountain in Breckenridge, Colorado. Then he won the X Games. “It’s been cool—you get a lot of stuff for free,” says Thomas, who is six feet tall, with a tan to match his medal, and still lives at home with his parents. “You go into the local deli and they’re like, ‘Here you go!’ Tom Petty came to Red Rocks, and I just called my friends over at the radio station in Denver and they hooked me up.” As for the Nestea commercial? “If you go out, people will tease you and shit,” he says. “The only people who really harsh you are just, like, haters—they’re just jealous or whatever. I don’t even sweat that, man.”


Whether the Nestea deal is a first step toward Team Sweep being perceived as sellouts remains to be seen. Kass, for one, entertained other options. According to Bob Klein, his primary agent, he turned down Pepsi’s Mountain Dew, a brand that’s gone after generations X and Y with TV commercials and its sponsorship of the X Games, to sign with Coke’s Nestea Cool.


“When I laid it out to Danny,” says Klein, 38, a Northern Californian who used to be Shaun Palmer’s agent, “I said, ‘Here’s Mountain Dew and here’s Coke. Mountain Dew’s paying about a third more. What do you think?’ He was like, ‘Well, I’m going to do the Coke deal.’ I couldn’t believe it, because I’m thinking Mountain Dew is a no-brainer, the image is already there. Shit, Nestea Cool? C’mon man, there is no image, right? I was like, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘Because I don’t want to Do the Dew—dude.’ That’s all he said. And that’s all it took for me to understand what he was saying. And that, my friend, is what the kids of snowboarding understand.”

DURING OPEN WEEK IN MARCH, Danny Kass is conspicuously absent from the Stratton bars, his usual stomping grounds. “I don’t really have an ID,” he explains when I finally get him on the phone two months later. Of the four medalists, he has been the hardest to nail down. No rider straddles the divide between the underground and the mainstream with as much craftiness as this 20-year-old Jersey kid with the black mop of hair. When asked by a buddy with a video camera at Salt Lake what he was going to do after winning the silver medal, Kass responded, “Dude, I am gonna smoke the fattest…” Then, spotting a Newsweek reporter, he said to his friend: “Dude, nice try! You almost got me, man! Drugs are bad!”


Kass’s credibility is rooted in ability. In the 2000-2001 season, at age 18, the Gnu-sponsored rider won the X Games, the U.S. Open, and three of four USSA Grand Prix events. At the Olympics, where the judging system weighed amplitude more than rotational prowess, Powers won because, in addition to doing some tough tricks, he pulled off what was instantly recognized as the highest flight in halfpipe history—17 to 18 feet of big air. (Riders can go even bigger off a tall quarterpipe, because they have several hundred yards to pick up speed.) Kass, who grew up skateboarding and only started snowboarding at 12, took the other route. He pulled off a Cab 1080 with a Melon Grab (three full rotations midflight, front hand grabbing the heel edge of the board) and landed with enough speed to throw a 900 off the opposite wall—hands down the trickiest sequence that day. The final results had some core riders grousing, because they view Powers as a “pipe robot,” the antithesis of Kass.


“It’s rare to find style like that in snowboarders these days,” says veteran Shaun Palmer, 34, who stormed the circuit with a punk attitude a decade ago. “I mean, people rip—they go 12 feet high—but they don’t look like Danny when they’re doing it.” Then he clarifies: “Danny’s style is style.”


The other reason that adolescent rippers admire Kass has to do with the mystique of Grenade Gloves, the company owned by Danny and his 24-year-old brother, Matt, who both now live in Mammoth Lakes, California. Grenade’s following has almost nothing to do with handwear, and everything to do with the commercial knavery employed by the Kasses and their posse of guerrilla marketeers.


When Grenade logos first cropped up around Mammoth in fall 2000, nobody knew if the company was real. Matt had made the design, a friend hit on the idea of using stencils and spray paint, and the crew started tagging. But there was no product yet. Then, in February 2001, at the Grand Prix in Mammoth, an NBC cameraman was tagged, and a certain giddiness infected the circuit. Kids with no firm affiliation to Grenade bought their own paint and entered the game to see how far they could spread the virus. When the gloves finally did hit shops in November 2001, all 6,500 pairs sold. To date, Grenade has sold roughly 15,000 pairs at $40 to $80 a pop; combined with T-shirts, sweatshirts, and hats, that amounts to just under $1 million in sales in 2002.


“We’re not like your average new company that gets millions of dollars thrown in for advertising,” explains Danny. “We just started spray-painting everything and everybody, instead of buying $20,000 ads in Maxim. We’d spray-paint big posters of Patrick Swayze and use them as signs. It was just cooler, you know? Nothing else gets marketed like that.”


Grenade exudes cool in a way that even Burton can’t replicate—though it’s not above trying. This fall, Burton introduced a board called the Dominant, which has a plain white deck and comes with stencils so you can paint your own design.


“Personally, I think Grenade has helped revitalize the sport of snowboarding,” says Carter Olcott, 27, Burton’s North American team assistant. “They are so not the corporate way that snowboarding has maybe become over the past five years. Once the big money started coming in, [riders] started getting a lot more focused and not going out one or two nights before the contests. One of the coolest things about the Grenade crew is that they went out and partied harder than anyone, and still came in and won. It made me go, ‘Shit, man.’ That shows that you’re an amazing athlete. You don’t necessarily need to drink Gatorade 24 hours a day.”


The suggestion that snowboarders don’t survive on sports drinks alone has caused Kass some consternation. Several weeks after the Olympics, he returned to his hometown of Vernon, New Jersey, for a small contest and a break from the media attention. Journalists dispatched to the scene needed quotes from the silver medalist, but he made himself unavailable. One reporter from Sports Illustrated, Yi-Wyn Yen, pressed for an interview; Kass said no. But the matter did not end there.
“She just kept badgering me,” says Kass. “I was wondering what I could get her to do, so I tried to get her to buy me a keg. I figured she wouldn’t be able to write the article at all—it’d be dicey. Then she went and got all this beer with my friend, and wrote in the article how, like, we went and got all the beer.”


The March 18 article dubbed Kass “snowboarding’s most notorious bad boy” but failed to disclose that it was the reporter who purchased the “nine cases of Bud Light, four cases of Corona, and two cases of Coors Light” for the underage snowboarder. (“We are aware of the situation and it has been handled internally,” said S.I. spokesman Rick McCabe. “It is contrary to our standards for securing interviews and developing relationships with sources.”)


“It was kind of a prank,” Kass tells me. “I thought it would be humorous for a Sports Illustrated person to purchase a bunch of minors alcohol to do an interview with them. But I mean, they loved it, you know? They just made us sound even worse.”

THE HALFPIPE IS NOT something found in nature. Building one requires pushing some 882,000 cubic feet of snow into place and then sculpting it into a 500-foot-long U-shaped gully that measures 56 feet across from lip to lip. Though the pipe at the U.S. Open is only 425 feet long and a degree steeper than the current standard—there wasn’t enough snow—it’s still what’s known as a “superpipe,” thanks to its depth: 18 feet from the lip to the bottom of the trough. (Salt Lake had a superpipe as well, but the Nagano halfpipe measured a comparatively wimpy 12 feet deep.)


When you drop over the lip of a superpipe, crouch low over your board to rip across the belly of the beast, then push against centrifugal force and zip up the opposite wall, you can blast 15 feet or so above the top. Reentry, however, is risky: If you don’t return along the same vertical plane in which you took off, you’ll either land on the deck (just above the lip), or free-fall several stories to the pipe’s flat interior and blow a knee or two.


At the halfpipe finals on Saturday, Luke and Tommy warm up a crowd of 5,000 standing three deep along the decks. On the last trick of his exhibition run, Tommy lofts above the lip, throws an arm back like a bronc rider, and . . . gooses his crotch with his other hand. The crowd lets out a collective war whoop.


At the end of the pipe, goggled and toqued spectators shoot digital video footage, shout the favorites’ names, and pump their arms at big-air tricks. The music—a mix of hip-hop and metal—is stifling, forcing the announcer to shout his observations. Such as: “Tricia Byrnes, folks, won this contest ten years ago! She’s also the publisher of Eastern Edge magazine—and not to mention a college graduate!!”


Ten men and ten women make the finals, and they “jam” together in a kind of utopian antiformat. They take as many runs as they can in one hour, after which they’re ranked on overall “impression.” It’s willfully vague, and ends up looking like a friendly melee.


Giacomo Kratter, the Italian turkey ventriloquist, loses his hat and goggles in a high-flying spin. Fans reach over to high-five him as he trudges back up along the bannered barricades. Then American Keir Dillon pendulums down the pipe, vanishes from view, and explodes above the lip right in front of Kratter’s face. Kratter nods approval—nice one—as Dillon jets overhead, barrel-rolls sideways, and disappears back into the pipe.


Finland’s Markku Koski caps a run by spinning a 1260—or maybe it’s a 1440. Nobody’s sure which, including Koski, who shrugs when the announcer shouts, “Markku, what was that?”


Next, Kelly Clark loops her way down and catches an edge on a backside 540, smacking her chin hard against the snow. She doesn’t move at first, and the announcer lowers the volume when Clark fails to give an acknowledging wave. Tricia Byrnes, hiking back up after her own run, dumps her board and jumps into the pipe like an airline passenger hitting the evacuation slide. Clark starts moving, slowly, and after ski patrollers arrive to check if she’s OK, she heads back up for more. Which isn’t too surprising. Clark has ridden all season with a torn meniscus in her right knee; the day before her Olympic win, she broke her wrist. “It sounds really bad,” she tells me later, “but that’s kind of what I’m known for.” She’ll end up winning the halfpipe contest, and pocket $20,000.


Powers goes pretty big, but he looks rough around the edges. His friends have shown him no mercy since he’s been home; the day he arrived on the red-eye, he was up until 6 a.m. with visitors to his hotel room, and he rode the semifinals with no practice. “I was just happy to qualify,” he says afterward.


Meanwhile, Kass seems to be finding a groove after crashing on his first few runs. He drops in and does a huge, straight air, casually grabbing his board as he floats above the pipe, and slips back in like he’s easing into a velvet sofa. Then he slices—fast—to the other side for an inverted 1080, shoots back across, and jacks himself above the lip for yet another 1080. He finishes with a 720 and a goofy little nose tap, but that’s gravy. He’s just pulled off something he’s never done, not even in practice: back-to-back 1080s. “It was always in the back of my head, but I had never really landed the frontside 1080,” Kass later says of the combination, a half rotation better than his Salt Lake performance. “I tried to play it safe a little bit at the Olympics, but at the Open everyone was stepping it up so much.”


Dillon finishes third and Koski second. At the awards ceremony, Kass is announced as the winner and he meanders through the crowd toting a Grenade poster that reads we must exploit. buy-sell-buy-sell-buy, his army helmet shading his eyes. After the obligatory champagne shower, Kass hops off the stage and shambles over to a fence restraining hundreds of fans. He starts signing autographs.


“Danny, Danny, could you hook me up with your goggles and write your name across them?” shouts one teenager.


“Dude, I’m going to ride with them,” says Kass.


“Let’s go partying and drink some beers, Danny!”


“Yeeeeaaaaaah,” he responds, reaching out for a shirt that needs ink.


“CanIhaveyourhat, Danny? Danny, canIhaveyourhat?”


“Hey, Danny, say a little something for me, go ahead,” says a kid wedged up front, training a digital camcorder on Kass.


“What’s up, dog?” he obliges.


Thick clouds settle overhead, sending a chill through Kass’s slack five-foot-five frame. He wears a sweated-out T-shirt, and his bare arms are splotchy and goose-bumped, his cheeks red. He’s been at it for 20 minutes when a friend behind the clot of kids yells in a Beatlemania soprano, “Hey, DAN-ny!” Kass looks up and an insulated bomber jacket lands over his head. It’s his.


“Dude,” he mutters in thanks. He slips it on and says quietly, “I gotta go over here,” then walks over to a group of younger kids who haven’t been able to get to him. The bad boy of snowboarding stays for another 15 minutes or so, until nearly everyone is gone.

THREE DAYS LATER, over at the World Quarters in Waterville, all the beer’s been drunk and the bonfire’s been put out and Shane Flood, a 23-year-old rider from Rhode Island, has been judged the winner. (Rauh took second.) Powers and one of his oldest friends, Frank Knaack, return to the Best Inn in Plymouth, New Hampshire, which is housing all the riders who have migrated from Stratton to Waterville. As they pull in, they’re greeted by eight police cars parked helter-skelter in front of the motel. The desk clerk is going door to door with a police escort, kicking out anyone who could pass for a snowboarder. “All ah you guys are pissin’ on the walls, pissin’ on people’s caahs, throwin’ beeah cans,” she announces. “I can’t be playin’ favorites; everyone’s gotta go.”


It’s a fitting wrap—and the end of an era. The World Quarterpipe Championships as we know it won’t exist this coming season. The folks at Snowboarder are moving it to a ski area near Boston. “We’re going to sell out,” says senior editor Pat Bridges, a 29-year-old with a husky voice and build who’s fond of aviator sunglasses. “We’re going to do it up, put on a real stadium event.” The plan is to bring in bleachers and bands, and—because they won’t be tucked away in the New Hampshire woods—focus more on competition. There will even be prize money.


“How many years can you keep it real without paying the price?” Bridges asks. “It’s weird, you know. Somebody’s living in a cardboard box in a ski area parking lot, but they’re keeping it real? It’s like, C’mon, man, it’s big business now. We’ve done [the World Quarters at Waterville] five years in a row with no lift tickets, no entry fees, no release forms—and that opens everybody involved up to a lawsuit.”


Thomas hopes to be there. When I speak to him in late August, he tells me he’s been spending time playing golf and rehabilitating from ACL surgery on his right knee, which he blew just before the finals at the U.S. Open. He is excited about his post-Olympic windfall: He scored a character in Activision’s new Shaun Palmer’s Pro Snowboarder 2 video game, his own pro model from Ride (for which athletes receive somewhere between $10 and $20 for each board sold), and a sponsorship deal from Right Guard Xtreme Sport deodorant. “Hey, everybody’s got to wear deodorant,” says his agent, Todd Hahn.


Kass’s stock has risen as well. He’s looking at an economic boost that will take his earnings from $250,000 in 2002 to nearly half a million in 2003. No wonder he whiled away his summer playing video games and riding at Mount Hood, where he was filmed for a new Grenade 16mm release called Full Metal Edges. Clark, ever the go-getter, went surfing in Costa Rica in May, won an ESPY award for action sports athlete of the year in July, and did a lot of training at Hood.


When not traveling for corporate appearances, Powers has been hanging out on Cape Cod with his mother and grandfather and trying to get some work done on his house—an old cob job on 126 acres about half a mile from Stratton that he and his friends gutted and are refurbishing. He’s had offers to subdivide the land, which he bought three years ago for $208,000, but he’s not interested. Better to have your own motocross track. “Snowboarding’s pretty much been my life,” he says, “and now to be able to make a living and be kinda secure in doing something that I love to do—it’s awesome.”


As for the sport’s biggest player, at press time Burton Snowboards was in talks with none other than its old rival, the USSA, about a deal to outfit the U.S. Snowboard Team.


This season, all of the medalists plan to do more slopestyle events, which may open the door for up-and-coming halfpipe riders. “This is going to be a fun year, because there’s no qualifying for the Olympics,” Thomas says. “We weren’t raised to go to the Olympics. We just love snowboarding.”


That holds true regardless of whether the sport’s image gets hijacked by tone-deaf ad men. As with anything that becomes popular in the mass market, snowboarding can—and will—be accused of selling out. It’s an inevitability. Funny thing is, nobody’s trying to stop it. Do you think Powers, Kass, Thomas, and Clark regret their success? Don’t kid yourself.

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UPDATEJuly 1, 2002: Cave Dog Nails Adirondack Peaks Record

Keizer outside Maryville, Washington

IN SEPTEMBER 2000, Ted E. Keizer smashed the record for climbing Colorado’ 14,000-foot peaks, scuttling up and down all 55 in ten days, 20 hours, and 26 minutes. This summer, the unsponsored 30-year-old—a wandering adventurer who goes by the name Cave Dog—hopes to do something similar in New York’s Adirondacks. On June 23, having memorized dozens of routes, run 7,000 vertical feet of stairs countless times, and assembled a 12-person crew to keep him fed and hydrated, he’ll blitz the range’s 46 highest peaks (most around 4,000 feet) to challenge the 1977 record of four days, 18 hours, 18 minutes. Why? Only the Dog can explain.
Q: What’s up with the nickname?
A: Well, when I was in Crested Butte, I had a friend who has the nickname Scurv E. Dawg. One thing led to another, and because I was living in this cave, I became Cave Dog.


Q: Doesn’t blasting over peaks in record time limit your enjoyment of the outdoors?
A: No. When you’re out there running in the mountains, your pulse is up, your blood pressure is up, and your mind works ten times faster. You appreciate a lot more.


Q: You had to deal with high altitude and iced-over routes in Colorado. What are you most worried about this time?
A: Blackflies. They’re legendary in the Adirondacks. They crawl up your nose, in your ears, in your mouth. I’ll be moving, but my support crew could be eaten alive.


Q: Will you sleep?
A: Probably not on this one, because it’s under five days.
Q: You’re a self-described bum. Where do you live?
A: Usually I live out of my car. When I was in Crested Butte, Colorado, in the winter of 1995, I lived in a cave. It was a great cave. It had a nice flat shelf high up, where it was a little warmer. It was regularly bottoming out my thermometer at negative 20.


Q: What sort of work have you done?
A: Oh, I’ve done everything from backing crabs on the docks of Charleston, Oregon, to flying hot-air balloons in the desert outside Phoenix. I’ve driven an ambulance, been a moving man, delivered pizzas, taught ninth-grade geology, guided sea-kayaking tours. The speed climbing is just one more item in my quest to figure out the world.

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Babu Chiri Sherpa the greatest Mount Everest climber of this or any age, reclines on a couch, slurping milk tea, as his sidekick and business partner—whose first name is also Babu, but who goes by Karma—fires up his Pentium PC, checks their e-mail, and downloads a large graphics file. Karma opens the attachment and a bright yellow-and-green design for a promotional ad appears on the screen. “What do you think?” Karma asks. “We’re making a new sticker.”

The obsolete version, one of which is pasted crookedly on the door to their third-floor office in Kathmandu’s Thamel district, is plain white and reads:

BABU CHIRI SHERPA, 9 TIMES EVEREST SUMMITER
NOMAD EXPEDITIONS
HIMALAYAN ADVENTURE TRAVEL SPECIALTIES
TREKKING, EXPEDITIONS, & TOURS

“Looks sharp,” I say of the new design, leaning toward the monitor to check out the text. The words are arranged around a photo of Babu, Nomad’s 34-year-old co-owner and star climbing guide, flashing an arched-brow grin with the peak of Lhotse in the background. “But it’s a little weird to say, “Two unique world records from Nepal.” A world record is unique by definition.”

Karma, a 38-year-old former monk, says something in Sherpa to Babu, who’s sitting under a curtained, glassless window; I can hear pigeons cooing loudly from the concrete ledge outside, along with car and motorcycle horns and the frantic ringing of bicycle rickshaw bells in the two-way street below—a sharply crowned, heavily potholed lane barely fit for one-way traffic. Babu replies in a low, guttural grumble.

Karma turns back to me. “What should we say?”

“I don’t know—maybe drop ‘unique’ because it’s redundant. You know what I mean?”

“Yeah, sure,” he says. “But we need your help because this is your language.”

“Well, I’d skip ‘Nepal.’ And it should say more about Everest, since that’s where he set the records, right?”

Karma nods knowingly and jots down a few notes.

“Yeah,” I continue. “I mean, who else would you rather have take you up Everest?”

Karma shoots me a wide-eyed look. “Here, will you write it?” he says, pushing his paper and pen at me.

We settle on the phrase “Who better to guide you to the top of the world?”—a rhetorical question, really, considering Babu’s track record. He’s climbed Everest ten times, in good weather and bad, from the north and from the south, by himself and chaperoning clients. In May 1999 he spent 21 hours hunkered in a tiny tent at 29,035 feet, by far the longest any human being has stayed at the summit. Last May he sprinted from Base Camp to the top in 16 hours and 56 minutes, the fastest time ever. Except for the final 1,100 feet of his speed climb, Babu has accomplished all of this without the use of supplemental oxygen. And this season he plans to return and summit not once but twice, in the hope of breaking the record of 11 ascents, currently held by his compatriot Apa Sherpa.

“Other Sherpas don’t do this kind of stuff, and it says a lot about Babu’s ambitions,” says Elizabeth Hawley, the 77-year-old doyenne of the mountaineering community in Kathmandu, who has been keeping records of Himalayan climbs since 1963. “Babu has ambitions that go beyond the job.”

For starters, he has six daughters to put through elite private schools in Kathmandu. He’s trying to get a primary school up and running in a remote valley near Everest so local kids have a shot at clawing their way out of Nepal’s dismal status quo (45 percent of the kingdom’s 22 million citizens live below the poverty line; more than half are malnourished). And when he finally retires, he doesn’t want to end up like the vast majority of climbing Sherpas before him, scratching potatoes out of a patch of dirt and herding yaks, thank you very much.

Where those ambitions will ultimately take him is the subject of some spirited speculation. , a tent designer at Mountain Hardwear, Babu’s sponsor (Zemitis designed the shelter Babu used on top of Everest and calls Babu “Mr. Happy”), predicts that Babu will help to “put a new face on how people view Sherpas.” Jon Tinker, a British mountaineer who has climbed with Babu many times, declares that his friend is a “world-class quarterback” who is helping to push “the seismic shifts going on in Sherpa culture,” in part because he “scores goals, gets results, and has a Monty Pythonish sense of humor.” Tashi Jangbu Sherpa, president of the Nepal Mountaineering Association in Kathmandu, offers up what is perhaps the most unusual theory of all. “Other Sherpas, sometimes they get a tent, or a jacket, or an ice ax or something, but nobody has sponsorship like Babu,” he says “Babu has become an American.”

Like the other 110,400 Sherpas who live in Nepal, an officially Hindu kingdom, Babu is a Buddhist, and both his religion and his culture tend to place more value on humility than swagger. As a Sherpa who works in the Himalayas, he’s supposed to be a dutiful servant: a strong and gracious helper who schlepps the loads, cooks the meals, puts in the routes, and, when necessary, saves the lives of the foreign climbers who pay outfitters up to $65,000 to be guided up the tallest mountain in the world. And he’s supposed to do it all with a cherubic smile.

But Babu sees more in life than the praise, gratitude, and $7-a-day wages that have sufficed for more traditional Sherpas. He is charting a new course for Sherpa business opportunities, Sherpa cultural aspirations, Sherpa community responsibility. He is going global.

[quote]Babu’s ambitions go beyond his job: putting six children through elite schools, founding a primary school of his own, and making sure his retirement won’t be spent scratching potatoes out of dusty dirt. Oh, and becoming the most decorated climber in Everest history.[/quote]

“I want to change things,” Babu says. “A lot of Sherpas go to the mountain with fear, but that’s no way to climb. They have to go, because it’s a job and they’re being paid well for it. If they don’t have any education, they don’t have a choice. I want Sherpa kids to have options. If we can be more famous or more rich and we get that opportunity, we’ll take it.”

Still, despite all this, the enormity of his brand potential is just dawning on Babu and Karma. “Should we change the name,” asks Karma, “to Babu Chiri Sherpa Expeditions?”

But I’m no longer thinking about Babu’s marketing challenges. I’m pondering the days ahead. Babu and I are about to depart Kathmandu for a three-week trek to Everest Base Camp—a Sherpa-style tour of Babu’s native territory and stomping grounds—and I’m becoming preoccupied by a rather unseemly notion: that this short, stumpy icon of Himalayan mountaineering doesn’t appear to be much of an athlete. Looking at Babu’s taut potbelly, which gives him the outline of a miniature Buddha, I begin to imagine myself handily outstriding him over high passes and along dusty yak trails.

Then the thought grabs hold: I can take this guy.

While trenching through waste-deep snow below Everest’s North Col on the afternoon of June 7, 1922, a teammate of George Mallory, who was leading the first attempt to climb Everest, triggered an avalanche that flushed nine Sherpas over an ice cliff and into a crevasse. Frantically clawing at the frozen debris, the British climbers and other Sherpas managed to free two of the men, one of whom was still alive after having been buried for 40 minutes. The other seven perished. Mallory later lamented, in a letter to his wife, “There is no obligation I have so much wanted to honor as that of taking care of those men.” (Expedition photographer John Noel, expressing a more imperial point of view, later wrote that the surviving Sherpas “had completely lost their nerve and were crying and shaking like babies.”) Those seven were the first climbers to die on Everest. Of the 167 climbers who’ve been killed on the mountain,Ěý47 have been Sherpas—double the number of any other ethnic group or nationality.

Sherpas have lived in the Himalayas for nearly five centuries. They are an ethnic group whose nomadic ancestors migrated in the 16th century 1,250 miles from Kham, a province in eastern Tibet, via an 18,753-foot pass called Nangpa La, and moved into the Solu and Khumbu Valleys in northeastern Nepal. (“Sherpa” derives from the Tibetan word for “easterner.”) No one knows why they left Kham—Tibetan genealogies are their only historical records—but their tradition teaches that Guru Rimpoche, the eighth-century founder of Tibetan Buddhism, designated the Khumbu as a sanctuary to be used in a time of unrest; they were said to have been following magical descriptions in religious texts when they found the valley.

These high-altitude pioneers settled between 8,000 and 14,000 feet in the Solu-Khumbu region; people often refer to the two valleys as one, because together they’re the cultural heart of Sherpa country, and because they’re linked by the Dudh Koshi River, whose waters flow from Everest. They built houses of stone, tended yaks, and carved narrow terraced plots to grow meager crops of buckwheat and barley. “Sherpas have always lived on the edge,” says Frances Klatzel, a Canadian scholar who has lived in Nepal on and off for 20 years. “They were never able to grow enough food to last the year, and as the population grew, they traveled to trade.”

In the mid-19th century, hundreds of young Sherpa men left the Kingdom of Nepal to seek better work and higher wages as coolies on the tea plantations and road-building projects of the British Raj. Many flocked to the Indian hill station of Darjeeling. From there, after the turn of the century, British adventurers began staging their first surveys of the region around Everest. In the competition for work, Sherpas vied with virtually every hill tribe in the Himalayas—Tibetans, Rai, Limbu, Bhutanese, and others—and, as Babu is doing now, aggressively advertised and strived to demonstrate a superior tolerance for cold and high altitude. By the time Mallory’s 1922 expedition assembled for its monthlong trek north across the Tibetan plateau to Everest, the Sherpas had established a unionlike foothold that they’ve been building on ever since.

Over the next three decades, Sherpas distinguished themselves as high-altitude specialists—hiring mules or Tibetans to carry loads to the mountain—who would happily risk their lives for their sahibs. But they also fought for greater respect. John Hunt, leader of the 1953 British expedition to Everest that put Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary on the summit, learned this the hard way. As described in Sherry Ortner’s 1999 book, , upon assembling the expedition in Kathmandu, Hunt quartered his men inside the British Embassy and stuck the Sherpas in the garage. Furious, the Sherpas registered their outrage and solved a practical problem—the garage had no bathrooms—by urinating in the road outside the embassy the next morning.

[quote]Sherpas distinguished themselves asĚýhigh-altitude specialistsĚýwho would happily risk their lives for their sahibs. But they also fought for greater respect.[/quote]

On that expedition, more than 350 porters were required to haul the team’s supplies and equipment. One of the laborers hired on was a 15-year-old boy named Lhakpa Sherpa—Babu Chiri’s father.

Together with theĚýphotographer Teru Kuwayama, we hop a twin-prop 20-seater from Kathmandu to the Solu village of Phaplu, plunking down on a canted gravel airstrip that could pass for a runaway truck ramp. Here we are joined by Nima Sherpa, a porter Babu has hired to help carry Teru’s camera gear for the trek. After a four-hour ramble on foot through deep gorges, past monasteries, and up steep, forested hillsides, we arrive in Chhulemu, Babu’s home village. We’re detouring from the main trekking route to visit Babu’s parents—Lhakpa is now 63, and Babu’s mother, Pasi, is 61. At the moment we are sitting in their one-room stone house. And they’re laughing at me.

I’m probing, with limited success, for details about Lhakpa’s life—namely, whether he’s ever worked as an expedition porter. Chongba Sherpa, 44, a friend from a nearby village, has been recruited as an interpreter. (In addition to Sherpa, Babu himself speaks—and to a limited extent, reads and writes—Nepali, but his English is rudimentary.)

“Yes,” Lhakpa says. He has worked as a porter. And that’s all he offers.Ěý
“How many times?”
“Once.”
“When was that?”
“Long time ago.”
“Can you be more specific?”
There is much rapid-fire discussion in Sherpa. Then, an answer:
“1953.”
“For the Hillary expedition!”
“Yes.”
“Wow. OK.” I’m at a loss for words. “How heavy was your load?” I finally ask.
“30 kilos.” Sixty-six pounds.
“He says you asking many hard questions,” interjects Babu. “Nobody ever asking these things in his life.”

But as Babu’s stout mother speed-shuffles around the room with her thermos, topping off teacups, I persist. It turns out that Lhakpa earned five rupees a day carrying a load from Traksindo to Tengboche for the Hunt expedition and has never bothered to mention this fact to his son Babu, the Everest mountaineer. Babu is unfazed by the revelation, obviously unaware that he could now use the word “dynasty” in his company’s marketing campaign. Neither father nor son can understand why anyone would care to learn such things about an anonymous, shriveled-up herder sporting a nice pair of Gore-Tex boots and a toothless smile.

The 45-mile-long Solu-Khumbu Valley has no paved roads and no wheeled vehicles, not even wheelbarrows. (Babu’s parents have no electricity or running water.) Almost everything—food, cases of beer, timber, propane tanks—is transported by yak or on people’s backs. Though 80 percent of the Khumbu’s 3,500 Sherpas earn a living by catering to the 24,000 trekkers and climbers who tromp through the region every year, many below the Khumbu still get by as herders and farmers, just as they always have.

It’s the only existence Babu knew for the first 16 years of his life. Lhakpa and Pasi built their house 22 years ago, but Babu didn’t exactly grow up in it. The family grazed their cattle at higher elevations in summer, lower in winter, and thus spent much of the year sleeping with the livestock in temporary three-sided shelters woven of bamboo. Babu, the fourth of eight children—four boys and four girls—was born in such a “cow house,” as he puts it, in 1966.

When Babu was 16, his parents arranged for him to marry Puti Sherpa, a woman from a nearby village who is three years older than Babu. The bridegroom was already scheming to run away to Kathmandu to earn money. (Two of his brothers had previously slipped off to the capital in search of work.) The trekking business in Nepal had started to boom in the early 1980s, and Babu found a job carrying a 66-pound load on a trek for about 17 cents a day. Having spent all his meager pay from that first assignment on food and bus tickets, he arrived home broke and in tears.

[quote]A lot of Sherpas go to the mountain with fear, but that’s no way to climb. They have to go, because it’s a job, and if they don’t have any education, they don’t have a choice. I want Sherpa kids to have options. If we can be more famous or more rich and we get that opportunity, we’ll take it.[/quote]

Two years later, Babu returned to Kathmandu and got a job as a trekking “cook boy.” Though only a slight promotion from porter, it meant a huge step up, because he no longer had to pay for his meals. Puti, who ran a tiny teahouse they’d started, soon gave birth to their first daughter, Yangdi.

Over the next seven years Babu spent each spring and fall as many Sherpa men do, hustling as much trekking work as he could, picking up snippets of English from clients, and hauling back cash and supplies for the teahouse and his extended family. And like many Sherpas, he had a higher goal: to land a position as a climbing Sherpa on an expedition to one of the 7,000- or 8,000-meter peaks—by far the best-paying and most coveted job in the Solu-Khumbu Valley. Getting hired on usually meant befriending or bribing (or both) the expedition’s sirdar, the Sherpa in charge of logistics and support.

In the spring of 1989 Babu got his first big break: He hitched onto a Soviet expedition that was planning to do the first traverse of 28,208-foot Kanchenjunga, the world’s third-tallest peak. The Soviets spent more than 100 days on the mountain, during which time Babu completed a crash course in alpinism and made an important discovery about his physiology. “When we reach Camp IV, a lot of Sherpas get sick,” he recalls. “I don’t have any kind of problem at altitude. I give help to other Sherpas and climbers; when I get to camp, I prepare some tea and soup.” After ten climbers completed the traverse, two of them, along with one Sherpa—Babu—climbed Kanchenjunga’s main summit. And unlike the Soviets, Babu got there without taking oxygen (or “English air,” as Sherpas on the Mallory expedition called it).

“It’s pretty much settled that Tibetans have an advantage at altitude,” says Lorna G. Moore, a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in Denver, who has studied high-altitude physiology for 30 years. (Genetically, Tibetans and Sherpas are virtually the same.) “But motivation, cultural factors, nutrition, training, gear, smarts, and a lot of other considerations apply.” Though Sherpas tend to have large lungs, blood vessels that don’t constrict in thin air, and a to pulmonary edema, individual Sherpas can succumb to the devastating effects of high altitude just like anybody else.

“It was like big exam, and they tell me I very strong,” Babu says of his prowess on Kanchenjunga. “I very happy.” He had punched his ticket as a climbing Sherpa, but the next challenge was to make his mark on Everest.

Bushwacking 2,300 feetĚýdown a steeply terraced hillside to the pearlescent Dudh Koshi River, hopscotching from one greening barley field to the next, we start our trek in earnest.

We make poor progress the first day because every 75 yards we’re hailed by another one of the neighbors, each of whom plies us with cups of hot tea and platters of boiled potatoes; you peel a spud, dip it in chili sauce, and eat it like an apple. The first dozen are tasty. At about the third stop, I take the risk of offending my host and refuse. Babu takes an entire platter.

Back on the trail, it’s finally time to challenge the master on his own turf. “How much do you weigh, anyhow?” I start in.

“Eighty-two kilos,” he replies. 180 pounds. He’s five-foot-five.

“Ever wonder whether you could’ve done the speed record faster if you weighed less?”

“Not possible,” he says. “I try. My wife too good cook.”

Climbing up from the river, I make my move, striding urgently uphill with my 45-pound pack, opening up an early lead. Babu is carrying 25 pounds. Teru wears a knapsack and a belt slung with cameras. Nima has everything the rest of us don’t want to haul, maybe 70 pounds of crap, loaded into a full-size backpack with a duffel bag strapped on.

“What’s the matter, Babu?” I call down at one point. “All those potatoes weighing you down?”

He stops, lets out a throaty chortle, and starts trucking straight uphill, cutting the switchbacks. “I’m catching you!” he yells.

“Cheater!” I shout.

On the downhill stretches Babu runs full-tilt, taking the lead and skirting meandering yak trains, dollar-a-day porters carrying 120-pound loads, and the occasional horrified Euro-trekker (we aren’t exactly soaking up the scenery). Nima, clad in flimsy Chinese army-surplus canvas sneakers—Asia’s answer to Chuck Taylors—stays right on Babu’s tail. I try to keep pace without blowing a knee. On the uphills, however, I regain my lead. Grinning devilishly as I pass him, Babu warns me that things will be different once we’re above 10,000 feet.

I’m still ahead by the time we get to the town of Lukla, where we spend the night. The next day we continue our yo-yoing on the five-hour walk to Namche Bazaar, a town of 1,647 people chiseled into a steep-walled cirque at 11,286 feet. We’ve arrived in the high country, the official opening to the Khumbu Valley.

Namche serves as the commercial center of the region, drawing people from several days away on foot to buy and sell goods every Saturday. Thanks to a nearby hydropower project, it boasts electricity, two Internet cafés, three bakeries, and a number of rooftops sporting enormous satellite TV dishes.

[quote]Climbing up from the river, I make my move, striding urgently uphill with my 45-pound pack. Grinning devilishly as I pass him, Babu warns me that things will be different once we’re above 10,000 feet.[/quote]

Babu checks us into the Panorama Lodge, where many Everest mountaineers stay, in part because a flat stretch of land behind the lodge is a perfect staging ground for the yak trains that supply Base Camp. The owner is Sherap Jangbu Sherpa, 46, a member of the growing class of wealthy, educated Sherpa businessmen who have taken advantage of the ever-growing tourist boom. In addition to running his successful lodge, Sherap Jangbu leads luxury treks for outfits like Butterfield & Robinson; he also provides a dramatic measure of how far Sherpas have come in just a few generations. “My grandfather was a farmer, my father was a trader, I’m a guide and hotel owner, and my son is going to be a software developer,” he told me. Babu is trying to make the leap from Third World field hand to First World franchise in one generation.

He has been passing this way for over a decade, ever since he first got the opportunity to work on Everest in 1990. That year he signed on with an expedition led by Marc Batard, a Frenchman who a few years earlier had climbed from Base Camp to the summit in less than 24 hours. During Babu’s first season on the mountain, Batard planned to attempt his next stunt: spending eight hours atop Everest and then immediately climbing neighboring Lhotse from Camp IV. Batard reached the summit and lasted two hours before fear of frostbite forced him to descend, abandoning his sleeping bag and a stove on the summit. Babu, stationed at the South Col, asked Batard if he could take a crack at the summit and got a thumbs-up. He dashed up alone, gathered Batard’s stash, and hauled this proof that he had summited down to Base Camp. It was a formative experience in more ways than one: With Batard as a role model, Babu began to veer off the typical path for Sherpas.

The Panorama Lodge is also popular with trekkers, and here I meet the Seashols: Mike, Suzanne, and their sons, Matt, 28, and Pete, 24. The family takes one or two adventure-travel vacations a year. Mike is a software entrepreneur who has run 30 marathons, Suzanne is a preternaturally cheery and energetic trooper, Matt spent the last year traveling the world (42 countries, including Nepal), and Pete is a big-wall climber.

[quote]Though Sherpas tend to have large lungs, blood vessels that don’t constrict in thin air, and a built-in resistance to pulmonary edema, individual Sherpas can succumb to the devastating effects of high altitude just like anybody else—everyone but Babu.[/quote]

The Seashols love Sherpas. “I’ve never seen people with such an incredible strength-to-weight ratio,” Mike tells me. “They’re so strong! And humble. And gracious.” Suzanne chimes in: “The best part about being with these people is that they are so gracious about sharing their culture. They’re wonderful people. Every question I ask, they answer.”

The Seashols register only one complaint. “It’s been so hard to find people wearing traditional dress,” says Matt over breakfast one morning. Just then I notice Babu entering the dining room wearing a red Mountain Hardwear WindStopper Flex jacket, a pair of khaki Mountain Hardwear Supplex Pack Pants, and a purple Mountain Hardwear WindStopper Nut Beret.

Twenty minutesĚýout of Namche we get our first view of Everest. The dark, humpy peak sneaks in and out of view over the next couple of days as we climb higher into the valley. Pines and rhododendrons give way to scrub brush, until eventually, at around 14,000 feet, there is nothing but moraine. Tablets and boulders carved with Buddhist prayers in Tibetan serve as cairns to lead the way through the drab foothills. Several hours beyond Periche, the last permanent settlement on the trek to Base Camp, we reach 16,000 feet. I’d like to be able to report that I’m holding my own against the great Snow Bear—as Babu’s Sherpa admirers call him—but he only seems to grow more robust as I start to bog down in the thinning air.

He is waiting for me over a rise. Up ahead, silhouetted against the backdrop of a barren, dun-colored ridge, hundreds of neatly stacked rock towers are scattered helter-skelter across a low knoll. They’re monuments to dead climbers—not gravestones per se but carefully constructed shrines. Babu and I wander into the sanctuary, looking at chest-high tablets inscribed with epitaphs for both Sherpa and foreign climbers. One stone is dated 1957. Babu pauses in front of a particularly imposing shrine set off by itself. “He was a very good climber,” he says. “It was a waste. He shouldn’t have died.” The stone is dedicated to Scott Fischer, one of the two guides who died in the 1996 disaster on Everest.

Another few hours ahead, set off the trail, is a cremation site for Sherpa climbers called Chukpo Lare (“Rich Man’s Yak Corral”). When the body of a dead climbing Sherpa is recovered, it is brought here, burned to ashes, and ceremonially placed inside a small shrine of stacked rocks. Because Buddhists believe that humans lose their individuality after death, there are no names on these shrines. For Sherpas, there is no more powerful reminder of their mortality in the face of the surrounding peaks than this place. “The whole category of gods who inhabit mountains tend to be irritable,” says Sherry Ortner, the scholar of Sherpa history. “They’re powerful beings who will protect you if you treat them right and who will really give you some bad trouble if you don’t.”

Indeed, climbing Sherpas and their families live with fear just as all climbers and their families do, which is why some end up making the choice of 34-year-old Ang Temba Sherpa, an accomplished climber and businessman at whose lodge we stayed in Pangboche. He first summited Everest in 1991 with the Sherpa Expedition, an endeavor designed to showcase Sherpas’ technical climbing skills and to demonstrate that they’re more than barrel-chested workhorses. After Ang Temba descended, his wife, Yangjing, congratulated him on his accomplishment—and then informed her husband that one Everest summit was enough. But six years later he accepted an invitation to join another Everest expedition, knowing that his wife would never agree to let him go. “So I made a lie to her,” he told me. He convinced Yangjing that he was going to visit some friends in Canada and then hooked up with the expedition in Kathmandu. Yangjing got word of his subterfuge, and gave him a tongue-lashing when he returned from the unsuccessful attempt from the north side. “I don’t need money—I need you,” she told Ang Temba. When Babu spent 21 hours atop Everest, his wife back in Kathmandu became so worried that she stopped eating and fell ill. It makes little difference to these women that the Nepalese and Chinese governments require each Everest expedition to insure every climbing Sherpa’s life for $3,500.

Unlike Americans or Europeans, Himalayan Sherpas consider high-altitude climbing to be decidedly unglamorous, dangerous, dirty work. In 1983 Tenzing Norgay’s second son, Jamling, asked his father’s permission to join an Indian expedition to Everest. Tenzing refused, saying he wanted his son to finish high school and go to college. In Jamling’s memoir, , which will be published in April, he recalls his father’s words: “I climbed Everest so that you wouldn’t have to…. You can’t see the entire world from the top of Everest, Jamling. The view from there only reminds you how big the world is and how much more there is to see and learn.” Tenzing died in 1986, and Jamling eventually summited in 1996.

Climbing Everest isĚýformidable enough, but in January 1999, Babu set in motion an even more daunting plan.

“It was hilarious,” says Martin Zemitis, the Mountain Hardwear tent designer. “This five-foot-something guy comes in, hardly speaking any English, and says it’s his dream to spend the night on Everest. I go, OK, we get nuts all the time—we were based in Berkeley then—but this was off the scale. Above 26,000 feet, technically, you’re dying, right? Here’s this guy wanting to stay up there, and nobody really knew if it was possible.”

Once Zemitis learned that Babu had been up Everest eight times without supplemental oxygen, he started taking him seriously. Four days later, Zemitis says, he handed Babu a 2.5-pound shelter the size of a doghouse that was “stronger than snot.”

He also informed the marketing department that Mountain Hardwear was sponsoring Babu Chiri Sherpa. “I was a little miffed at first,” says Jennifer Slaboda, the company’s marketing director. “I thought, Wait, this is going to be a liability issue—what if he dies up there? But now that I know Babu, he’s great to work with.”

Nearly two years later, Babu, Teru, and I arrive at Everest Base Camp, elevation 17,500 feet. Standing amid the December silence—nobody’s here but us—it’s almost impossible to picture the transformation that occurs every April. Last season there were more than 500 people here, milling about among huge dome tents, webs of billowing prayer flags, and stone shelters that crumbled after the season with the heaving of the glacier.

This is Babu’s home away from home. He points to where the Khumbu Icefall peters out into the moraine, the very best site at Base Camp because it offers the cleanest water and up-to-date information on route conditions from descending climbers. Babu snagged the spot last year by dispatching a friend to stake it out two months before the season even started. “The last camp before the icefall is a critical spot if you want people to know what you’re doing,” says Jim Litch, an American climber and physician who has provided medical care on a few of Babu’s expeditions. “Babu sets the stage, which is what any good performer does.”

It is difficult to get Babu to offer reasons beyond the mundane to explain why he decided to do the phenomenal things he did in 1999 and 2000. For example: “Just climbing the mountain isn’t good enough. I want to give something back.” He also cites the need to educate his six daughters. He acknowledges the influence of Batard. But the most succinct reason he offers for his feats is this: “It gives me power.”

In 1999 Babu planned to summit with two Swedish clients. The winds at the South Col were so ferocious, however, that his clients couldn’t get beyond the Balcony at 28,700 feet. On May 5, Babu pushed on to the top with his older brother, Dawa, and another Sherpa, Nima Dorje, who helped him dig out a platform for the tent and anchor it to the mountain. Babu crawled inside his 20-below down sleeping bag wearing a 20-below down suit, and commenced waiting.

Doctors had warned him that if he fell asleep he would never wake up. He was supposed to report in via radio every two hours or so, but “nobody could reach him on the radio that night for seven or eight hours,” says Heidi Howkins, an American climber who was at Camp II at the time. “His teammates were panicked about it, crying. They were doing frantic updates on their Web site, absolutely convinced that something had happened to him. It turned out that Babu had been talking all night long with some guys on the Tibet side, making crank calls on his radio. He was calling other base camps and waking them up.” After his 21-hour slumber party, he was greeted by a tsunami of publicity and a parade in Kathmandu.

For an encore, Babu decided he’d climb Everest faster than anyone else. The record was held by Kaji Sherpa, who made the trip in 20 hours in 1998. (Starting from Base Camp, an acclimatized mountaineer usually takes four days to summit.)

On May 20, 2000, Babu left Base Camp at 5 p.m. wearing light hiking boots. He took 40 minutes to eat and change clothes at Camp II and 35 minutes to do the same at Camp IV, which he reached at 2:35 a.m. The wind was blowing at more than 58 miles per hour at the South Summit. Babu proceeded to dash upslope when the wind died down, hitting the deck when it picked back up. He made it in under 17 hours.

[quote]It is difficult to get Babu to offer reasons beyond the mundane to explain why he decided to do the phenomenal things he did.ĚýBut the most succinct reason he offers for his feats is this: ‘It gives me power.'[/quote]

With nothing to do and no one to talk to, we spend less than an hour at Base Camp. Up here, I’ve been lurching along like a wooden marionette whose master hasn’t yet mastered his art. As we prepare to go, I turn around and discover the undisputed champion of Everest standing on his head.

“Babu!” I blurt. “What the hell?”

The upside-down climber chuckles. “This is my Base Camp yoga.”

Ang Rita SherpaĚýlives in the village of Thamo, two hours up the trail from Namche on the ancient trade route to Tibet. Like Babu, he is a national hero in Nepal, but his glory days are over. Now in his mid-fifties—he’s not certain what year he was born—he was the biggest Sherpa mountaineering star for the better part of a decade in the late eighties and nineties.

He retired three years ago, not because he could afford to stop working, but because he has serious health problems. “It’s my liver and my lungs,” he says, attributing his chronic illnesses to climbing without oxygen. When he’s not convalescing, he herds a few yaks and sits in his not-quite-finished guest lodge drinking chang, Nepal’s sour-tasting, grain-mash home brew, and offering up reminiscences about accomplishments that have already been eclipsed by the two Sherpas sitting in the room with him.

Joining Babu and me for our visit is Apa Sherpa, 41, who is as slim as Babu is stout. His presence makes this a minor historic occasion: Sitting around Ang Rita’s dining room are the only three men ever to have climbed Everest at least ten times. (Ang Rita and Babu have ten ascents each; Apa has 11.)

At one point I ask Apa if he knows that Babu intends to climb Everest twice this season, to get 12 ascents, which would leave them tied for the record if Apa summits once, as he intends to. “No, I didn’t know that,” he says quietly, offering a wan smile.

“Well, what do you think?”

“It’s no problem,” he says, with a nearly imperceptible shrug. “I don’t do climbing for myself, or for records—only for clients.”

Babu does compete with the records of these men, and he has far outstripped them in the realm of self-promotion. Apa, who speaks proficient English—crucial to sponsors—runs a lodge an hour up the trail in Thame but has so far been unable to leverage his résumé the way Babu has.

There are three ways for Sherpas to make money on the mountain. First, there’s salary. In return for humping loads, fixing lines, setting up camps, and carrying extra oxygen bottles for clients, a Sherpa earns between $7 and $10 a day. Second, when he signs on to an expedition he receives an “equipment allowance” of between $1,500 and $2,000; since many Sherpas already own a full complement of climbing gear, this often goes straight into the pocket. Third, Sherpas can earn bonuses for shuttling loads between camps and sometimes for helping clients summit. Add it all up, and a Sherpa might walk off with $4,000 for a couple of months’ work. An American guide, on the other hand, can make $20,000 to $30,000 leading clients on Everest.

Thus the perennial, seesawing quarrel among mountaineers over what’s fair pay for Sherpas. “Babu is risking his life to get people up there and not getting paid shit, really,” says Jared Ogden, an American climber who has twice hired Nomad Expeditions as his outfitter. “He’s not making what Western guides are making, and that’s grossly unfair.” The per capita income in Nepal is $210, goes the other side. “These guys are my friends, and I pay them well,” says veteran American climber and guide Eric Simonson. “I don’t buy in to the idea that Sherpas are poor and downtrodden. Some of them get paid top dollar.”

Either way you look at it, Babu is starting to chip away at the disparity in income, and I have never heard him complain about it. His real breakthrough was in striking a sponsorship deal with Mountain Hardwear for cash as well as gear. According to his current contract, he receives more equipment than he could ever use, plus $5,000 a year. And that’s not all.

[quote]A sherpa can make money three ways: salary, equipment allowance, and bonuses. They might make $4,000 for a couple months’ work, while an American guide can walk away with $30,000.[/quote]

Babu spent two months last summer doing entirely different work for his sponsor. In an extended guest appearance that thrilled both his supervisor and Babu, he earned $15 an hour working in Mountain Hardwear’s distribution center in Richmond, California, as a common laborer, stocking shelves, breaking down cardboard boxes, and cleaning up.

“I liken him to the Tiger Woods of mountaineering,” says Joe Stadum, Babu’s boss at the warehouse. “But you’d never know it, because he’s so quiet and calm. Most of the guys don’t have a great interest in climbing, but he was on the cover of our catalog, and they liked asking for his autograph.” According to Stadum, he showed up early every day and had to be asked to go home at night.

To Babu, there’s no irony here. “That’s good money,” he told me. “I don’t think because I’m famous I can’t do manual labor. I don’t see the connection.

“I make more than I do on Everest.”

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