For the Record

By Todd Balf and Paul Kvinta

Zut Alors! The Plan Was for Me to Win, Not You

When Isabelle Autissier challenged rivals Yves Parlier and Christophe Auguin to a yachting race from New York to San Francisco in January, the French sailing legend thought the competition would inspire her to break the route's record of 62 days, five hours, and 55 minutes, which she and her four-person crew had set in 1994. What she didn't count on was losing. Autissier, 41, was 800 miles behind Parlier when he crossed under the Golden Gate Bridge after just 57 days and three hours at sea. The victorious skipper credits both his performance and his survival — he weathered 60-knot winds and monster waves during a storm off Cape Horn — to his vessel. "There is not another monohull on the planet that can sustain the speeds she can," boasts Parlier, 37, noting that his doughty little boat weighs a full two tons less than that of his distaff rival. As for Autissier, she's too busy preparing for the Around Alone 1998-1999 race this September to be anything but stoic about her defeat. is a bit faster than my boat in every condition," she concedes. "And, also, Yves did navigate nicely."

Lake Inferior
"You're damn right I'd like some of that money!" exclaims Jack Stanford. "I'm ready to march to Washington to get it." Stanford, director of Montana's Flathead Lake Biological Station, is referring to Capitol Hill's latest eco-hustle. For two glorious weeks in March, Lake Champlain held "Great Lake" status after Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy slipped language to that effect into an appropriations bill signed by President Clinton. When midwestern senators denounced "Lake Plain Sham" as a geographic poseur, Leahy agreed to drop the "Great" moniker. His one condition? That Champlain — a product of the same "glacial history" that formed the Great Lakes — be granted access to the $50 million National Sea Grant Program, which funds research in coastal and Great Lake states. Predictably, Stanford and fellow landlocked limnologists are demanding equal dibs on the cash. "What Leahy did was wormy," concedes Stanford. "But maybe now our fine western lakes will get their due."

Beat Me! Beat Me!
"I've done 55 miles per hour on skates, but that's stupid," declares Doug Lucht, 30, who shudders at the idea of trying to set the world in-line speed record on conventional skates. "All you can do is go straight down and hold on for dear life." In an effort to improve his velocity and survival odds, Lucht designed the hybrid StreetSki — ski bindings mounted to in-line skate wheels. Last March, he strapped the device to his feet and careened down a mountain road in Fountain Hills, Arizona, at a record 63 miles per hour. But does this qualify as in-line? Lucht, who began marketing his contraption to elite athletes in 1996, thinks so — but he's still trying to hone his sales pitch to the nation's 30 million recreational skaters: "You can glide over manhole covers at 40 miles per hour and never suffer a scratch. It's high-speed safety for the masses!"

Somewhere in Kentucky, the Colonel's Herbs-and-Spices Team Is Standing By
Judging by recent events in New Zealand, the controversial practice of cloning has now crossed the line from dubious experimentation into mad science. Geneticists there are preparing to resurrect the extinct moa — 12 feet tall, once the largest bird in the world — by extracting DNA from a 500-year-old moa leg bone and injecting it into chicken, emu, and ostrich embryos. Their goal: to concoct a commercially viable moa hybrid. Alas, the project stalled in March when New Zealand's native Maori declared that, because the bird died out the arrival of European colonists, the moa DNA belongs to them. While negotiations with the Maori continue this month, livestock growers are struggling to decide whether they are excited or terrified by the prospect of raising a bird the size of a Buick. "Bigger's always better, I suppose," says Colorado ostrich breeder Joyce Swanson. "But if these are huge dinosaur birds running wild, that's another matter entirely."

Slipped Disk

This month, when the Wham-O Invasion kicks off to commemorate the 40th birthday of America's favorite summer toy, expect to be barraged by Frisbee giveaways and Chuck Berry tunes. But don't expect promoters to hype one minor detail: 1998 is actually the flying disk's 50th anniversary. True, Wham-O released the Frisbee commercially in 1958, but the story actually began a decade earlier, when World War II veterans Fred Morrison and Warren Franscioni held a piece of plastic over a hot water heater and molded it into the Flying Saucer. After the two parted ways in 1952, Morrison made a deal with Wham-O that earned him handsome royalties — 100 million Frisbees have sold to date — while Franscioni, who died in 1973, got zilch. Even his daughter's crusade to write a tell-all book has been met with indifference from, well, everybody. "If the first disk sold in 1948, so be it," yawns Wham-O spokesman Arthur Coddington. "We're celebrating the 40th anniversary of the public-beloved Frisbee."

The Tragic Kingdom

"When you have a big opening like they do, animals get lower priority," says the Humane Society's Richard Farinato. "They're worried instead about the celebrities, the food, the ice sculptures." Farinato is referring to Disney's decision to go ahead with the star-studded debut of its 500-acre Animal Kingdom on April 22, despite the demise of more than a dozen creatures. Since Outside last examined the park ("Please Don't Oil the Animatronic Warthog," May), 18 of its more than 1,000 animals have died, including four cheetah cubs poisoned by ethylene glycol and two cranes run over by a safari bus. While the USDA is conducting an investigation, the results of which should be in this month, critics are wondering if Disney is up to the task of running a responsible zoo. "If they can't be doing better than this," says Farinato, "perhaps they should be asking themselves whether they should be doing this at all." Illustration by Noah Woods; Photograph by UPI/Corbis-Bettmann