The Wire

By Martha Corcoran and Lolly Merrell

She Gets Boulder

While 17-year-old climbing phenom Katie Brown was snapping up her third X Games crown this past spring, Lynn Hill, 37, set out on a worldwide quest of first ascents. Her most notable came in May, when she free-climbed Midnight Lightning in Yosemite, a boulder previously scaled only by men. "It's a problem that requires a lot of gymnastics," Hill explains, noting that she had failed in at least 50 previous attempts to climb the 30-foot rock, which is textured with overhangs and slippery, odd-shaped holds, one of which resembles a lightning bolt. Hill also chalked up her second 5.14 climb Oregon's Smith Rock (in 1990 she became the first woman to nail a 5.14 route, on France's Masse Critique) and last summer she made several 5.13 ascents in Italy and France. "I'm thinking about southwestern Chile in November," she says, noting its abundance of granite walls — and scarcity of routes that have been explored. "There's so much rock all over the world, there's just never a shortage of ideas."

Schuss v. Schuss
With the list one-upped every year for the past five, the thrill of holding the world record for vertical descent on snowboard or skis rarely lasts long, as snowboarder Tammy McMinn and skier Jennifer Hughes quickly learned. On April 20, in Atlin, British Columbia, they carved out 232.3 miles of Canadian downhill, averaging 40 mph for almost 15 hours, to jointly snatch the all-time marks for vertical heli-skiing descent, vertical descent by a woman, and vertical descent by a snowboarder. But before the Bay Area twosome had much chance to gloat, a team of four Canadian and Swiss skiers, all male, bested their mark by more than 48,000 feet — a mere nine days later. McMinn explains that since she and Hughes still hold the women's record, they have no plans to trump the guys. "Unless my snowboard record gets broken," she says. "Then I'll have to get back out there."

Equal Opportunity Skies
At June's U.S. Fila Sky Marathon outside Aspen, Colorado, 26-year-old Danelle Ballengee, three-time defending women's national champion, crossed the finish line for a fourth win, looked back at forbidding, talus-choked Castle Peak and panted, "I should have taken up something less risky — like auto racing." And then the unsung queen of the world's highest marathons thought about the low cash prize ($3,000) and added, "No, I should have chosen golf." Indeed sky running, a Fila-sponsored circuit of marathons in the foothills of such locales as Mount Everest and the Matterhorn, has its share of hazards. The 26.2-mile races all take place above 13,000 feet, with 10-mile stretches across glacier fields and occasional requests for bottled oxygen at the finish. But there has been a breakthrough in the air ceiling: This year's Aspen race was the first in which male and female winners received equal prize money. "The officials have finally recognized that we train, run, and work as hard as the men," says Ballengee, a Coloradan and the first American to finish the Sky Running World Championship in Italy this July. "There's still prejudice, some Italian machismo and all, but we're getting somewhere."

Call Me Hopeful
Last spring, Frenchwoman Peggy Bouchet almost drowned in an east-to-west effort to row solo across the Atlantic — generally a four-month voyage — when her boat capsized only days from the U.S. finish. But dodgy precedent in that direction didn't deter Tori Murden, a Kentuckian who left the port of Oregon's Inlet, North Carolina, in her 23-foot plywood-and-aluminum rowboat in June, bound for Brest, France. In fact, Bouchet's thwarted journey allows Murden the chance to become the first woman to officially complete a cross-ocean row — if she makes it to the finish line, as she anticipates, in September. Yet the 35-year-old, already the first female American to ski to the South Pole, concedes the transatlantic title to Bouchet. "Anyone who comes within days of the finish has done it," says Murden. "As far as I'm concerned, she's got the title." Equipped with 700 pounds of gear — two desalinators, electronic equipment, and a pile of "horribly abridged" audio books (including Moby Dick) — Murden isn't daunted by Coast Guard warnings of La Ni˜a-spawned hurricanes and 15-foot swells. "I'm expecting an average of five capsizes," she says, "It's a dice game, but then, the surprises are what you look forward to."

The Straight Dope
In the first criminal case involving performance-enhancing-drug consumption by athletes, four coaches and two doctors have been on trial in Berlin since March. If convicted on assault charges, the six could face several years in prison for their alleged roles in prescribing and providing Oral-Turinabol to 19 female East German swimmers, most of whom were minors, from 1974 to 1989. The athletes, many now in their thirties, still suffer homrmonal imbalances from the anabolic steroid, and two star swimmers — Christiane Knacke-Sommer, a bronze medalist in the 100-meter butterfly at the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and Carola Nitschke-Beraktschjan, who set the 100-meter breaststroke world record in 1976 — have reportedly asked that their performances be stricen from the records.