Men's Journal

Grab the latest issue of Men’s Journal to find out what really separates Lance Armstrong the man from machine; to explore the 20 best beaches in the country; to read whether extreme sports have gone too far with the death of Shane McConkey; and to travel to Russia with journalist Otto Pohl as he hunts down the man who shot him years earlier.

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From Jason Gay’s profile Lance Strikes Back:

It is nearly seven months since 37-year-old Armstrong announced his ground-rattling comeback to pro cycling. Since then, things have been about as placid as a Friday night with Amy Winehouse. So far, Armstrong has experienced the good (solid performances in early-season races like Australia’s Tour Down Under and the Tour of California), the commendable (using his race appearances to raise awareness for cancer research), and the miserable (a crash in Spain, which broke his collarbone in four pieces). When we meet, his wacky Kazakh cycling team is on the verge of collapse, and there’s also, predictably, a petite guerre: France’s antidoping agency, AFLD, says it’s considering barring Armstrong from the Tour de France for a stand off with one of its drug testers. Though the agency will later clear him, a mistrustful Armstrong believes there are forces that are deeply opposed to his returning to the Tour. “Sponsors want it, TV wants it,” he says ruefully. “But there are people who say, ‘Over my dead body.’ ”

For a perfectionist who prided himself on meticulous organization in winning seven straight Tour de Frances, it’s been a rocky reentry. But today Armstrong is upbeat. He’s spent the past week in Aspen, the posh Colorado skiing resort he fell in love with last year while training for the high-altitude Leadville Trail 100 mountain bike race. Temporarily disconnected from his very public life, he’s grown a scraggly beard. He’s also reed thin, a contrast from his races in Australia and California, where a gym-buff Armstrong resembled Jean-Claude Van Damme amid the Lohanesque peloton. “Skipping lunch, drinking shakes,” he says of the weight loss. “Manorexia.”
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From Bill Gifford’s Dying to Fly:

It was fitting that Shane McConkey went out with his ski boots on. Whether or not it was inevitable is subject to debate. A once-in-a-generation athlete, McConkey had not only influenced the way people skied; he actually altered the skis themselves, first by jump-starting the fat-ski revolution in the mid-1990s, and then by inventing pontoon-style powder skis, based on water skis, that are fast becoming standard for soft snow.

In a sport where 60-foot cliff-hucks are now common ski-movie fare, McConkey was still pushing at the boundaries. Year after year, in film after film, nobody went bigger than Shane and JT. They were already the acknowledged masters of ski-BASEing, having skied off the world’s most spectacular cliffs, from the north face of the Eiger to Norway’s Trollstigen Wall. It was there that they filmed a shot-for-shot re-creation of the opening scene of The Spy Who Loved Me, with McConkey as Bond leaping off the 3,000-foot precipice, pursued by Holmes.
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From Otto Pohl’s Hunting Down the Man Who Shot Me:

I could hear the moans and shouts of the wounded. I noticed a twitching boot near my face. Following the leg, I saw it was a man in camouflage, lying facedown. I could hear him groan, but I had no way of helping him without risking my own life. Fresh waves of shooting raked the square, and soon the boot lay still.

After about an hour of sporadic gunfire I looked up and saw motion among the piles of dead and wounded: a man in blue jeans, white sneakers, and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap walking, upright, across the field of fire. He was dragging out the wounded. Before long he crawled along the row of planters until his face — fresh, brown-eyed, and square-jawed — was only a few feet from mine.

“Are you okay?” he asked with a perfect American accent.

“I’m fine.”

“You’re American too?!” he said, his cocktail-party enthusiasm out of place. There we lay, trapped in an adventure that had metastasized beyond our worst nightmares, but he seemed unfazed. “I guess this is what we came to Moscow for, isn’t it?”

It was about then that a bullet grazed the back of my skull, just above my spine. I screamed, and as I reached up to check the wound, another bullet pierced my side. I gasped for breath and blood gurgled through a hole in my chest. There is no present tense to being shot. One moment I was fine, whole, and the next it felt like a hot poker had been stabbed through my rib cage.

The guy in the Braves cap — I’d later learn he was Mike Duncan, a 26-year-old American attorney — looked at me in horror.

“Don’t pass out on me,” he said. “I’ll get you out.”