How an around-the-world cycling tour went very, very wrong

Virgil Exener

We've only just begun: Odyssey 2000 riders cry uncle in Costa Rica.

Surfing Wave of the Furture SURFERS HAVE LONG PRAYED to Mother Nature for heavenly waves. Some have even burned boards on sacrificial beach bonfires. But this winter, one SoCal environmental group is placing its hopes in the power of human ingenuity. Back in September, members of the Surfrider Foundation lowered 120 fourteen-ton sandbags off a barge anchored at Dockweiler State Beach near LAX. Their goal: the nation's first artificial reef designed to jack up surfable waves. Nobody knows how well the fake break will work, but the big test is expected in January and February. If the planet does what it's done for the last few eons, powerful northern Pacific storms will crank out stacks of swells that will speed across the ocean and eventually spill over the seven-foot-deep reef as though it were a natural sandbar, hopefully creating perfect A-frame peaks on top. "I don't have a crystal ball," says Pratte's Reef designer David Skelly, a coastal engineer and owner of Skelly Engineering. "But I know it's going to produce a surfable wave." Whether the waves show up or not, a government ruling that helped finance the reef has already made environmental history. In the mid-1980s, the California Coastal Commission, a state regulatory agency, allowed Chevron to build an oil-pipeline jetty off the town of El Segundo, but told the company it would have to make amends if the project diminished local waves. In 1994, the commission decided it had, and the oil company paid Surfrider $300,000. Pratte's Reef is the result. "This means that waves deserve the same protection as redwood trees," says Surfrider executive director Christopher Evans. The group has opted to study Pratte's cultural and environmental impacts before pursuing any additional reef projects. Skelly, however, sees a day when fake breaks dot the globe. Two others, installed last year at Narrowneck on Australia's Gold Coast and in 1999 at Cables Station on Australia's West Coast, are performing with mixed results. But Skelly, an avid surfer, is still stoked. "This takes surfing into the 21st century," he says. "It allows us to consider making surf spots that mimic classic breaks like Pipeline and Malibu. It opens a whole new field of opportunity for the sport." —Jim Benning

THE BROCHURE must have read like grade-A bike-tour porn: 366 days, 20,000 miles, 45 countries. Droool.

But in October, with several thousand miles still to go, the wheels came off Odyssey 2000, and organizer Tim Kneeland, founder of Seattle-based outfitter Tim Kneeland & Associates, declared that the around-the-world jaunt had run out of cash. Citing air-transportation costs, he asked the tour's 247 riders—each of whom had paid up to $36,000 to sign on—to cough up another $3,000 a head to finish the tour.

For many, it was the last straw. In Italy, for example, Kneeland had told riders they'd, uh, have to keep their wet clothes on for another few days because the gear trucks had been temporarily abandoned for lack of insurance. Not counting the multiple broken bones and one amputation (a lower leg, removed following a brush with a semi in Sweden), the low point came when riders arrived in Japan—sans bikes—and spent nine days riding from campsite to campsite in a bus. (Kneeland blames Malaysian Airlines for the snafu). "I could not give him any more money on principle," says Gerry Rolfsen, a 62-year-old retired architect from Nova Scotia, who hopped a flight home. An estimated 60 riders paid the $3,000 transportation surcharge—as allowed for in the contract—but at press time around 190 had opted to cut their losses and bail out.

Many accuse Kneeland of poor planning (the disgruntled have rallied at a Web site, www.odyssey2003.com), but he chalks up the debacle to an unforeseeable increase in air-fuel costs—and more than a few bad attitudes. "For some, it was not as much fun as they expected," he says. "They weren't prepared to rough it. A few seemed to expect five-star hotels." For that you'd presumably have had to pay an arm and a leg. —Michael McCullough

The Second Cold War?

THOSE NUTTY RUSSIANS. Who else would try to jump-start a half-frozen body with a hypo full of EDTA—a white crystalline acid commonly used to treat lead poisoning and known around most households as good old-fashioned sodium ethylenediaminetetraacetate? Kyrill Ivanov, a researcher at St. Petersburg's Pavlov Institute of Physiology, claims he has discovered a method of resuscitating hypothermic subjects without rewarming their bodies. By injecting his patients—thus far, very pissed-off rabbits and rats, chilled in ice water—with EDTA, Ivanov managed to flush the excess calcium that builds up in cold-weakened cells and restart the shivering reflex. But Ken Zafren, a member of the board of the Wilderness Medical Society, is skeptical about EDTA's efficacy with humans. "Whenever you move important electrolytes around the body, it could have unintended consequences," he says. Still, if Ivanov's hoped-for human trials pan out, a syringe of EDTA may one day join that space blanket in your winter survival kit. Or nyet. —Jason Daley