SCIENCE ÜBER ALLES – we know this from Team Sky and their talkative spokespeople. But at my most delusional I can’t imagine spending ten times the cost of a stock 1980 racing bike for a pair of wheels. Neither can some kid trying to ride his way off the farm. $300 for those bikes, Italian, full Campagnolo (state-of-art at the time), double-butted Columbus tubes. You can probably find one in a museum.
 
A man named Gruenwedel sent me a note the other day about my chronicle of an early US foray to Italy. What used to be the US Cycling Federation had managed to scrape a few thousand dollars together in 1978 (as I recall) to send a team to Europe, with Mike Neel managing, and starring George Mount, hero of the Montreal Olympics. The Italians loved Neel, which was a very good thing, because the team ran out of money after about ten days. The Italian generosity was unbelievable, and these were not rich people. I was attached to the team to write about it, and was regarded as potentially expendable because the money going for my room and board was another expense. Neel calmed that down.
 
We stayed at the Bar Augusto d’Alme at a reduced rate negotiated by Neel. It rained most of the time, but funny things happened, starting with a foreshadowing of the ’84 Olympic blood doping. When the Polish team arrived, they made jokes about Eddie Borysewicz, whom they said was a junior coach who’d been fired for “chemicals,” an area where the eastern bloc teams were in the vanguard and notorious.

 
Chilly and wet, unhappy middle-class American kids who didn’t speak the language (Neel had ridden there as a pro and was fluent.) Many silly questions at dinner, which Neel would answer twice, and then say “figure it out.” That calculation took a while in some cases. Physically, the team was strong, but the racing confused them at first. Faster tighter gruppo and decisive unexpected moves by riders they couldn’t evaluate. So, no results. After a long-winded excuse for yet another tactical snafu, there was a little silence.
 
“Resultati,” said Neel decisively. He wasn’t a big talker, except with Italians when we needed credit or a favor, which was often. When he asked how much money I could lay hands on, I realized what he was dealing with. The Bergamo skies remained gray and we remained at the Bar Augusto getting no results and waiting for the Settimana Bergamasca, a big local stage race.
 
I will remember that race to the grave, because I learned a lot that week: France has the Tour, the low countries have those nightmare classics and guys who can handle them, but Italy has the love. I saw it every day as they did us favors, loaned us cars, filled their tanks, and discounted everything. They were totally knocked out at having  actual Americans there. American bike racers – who knew? 

The night before the Bergamasca race there was an emergency involving a long-distance drive our team cars just weren’t up to. A local tifosi loaned us his new Lancia. Neel drove the Autostrada all night and I tried to figure out exactly what 160K meant in miles per hour.
 
I covered that race in various vehicles, always with some Italian making sure I got a ride that would let me see the race. The best rides were on motors and in the lead car, a tiny red convertible. A happy vehicle. I was amazed at how cool and relaxed the driver and race chief were. Absolutely no resemblance to punitive tightass US personnel drunk on power.
 
On the best day Mount got away in a break, and just as I was feeling it there was an emergency: One minute we were cruising, the next minute the little red car stopped dead. The driver was under the hood instantly, the race chief under the dash, and they were shouting at each other, still in a great mood, confident, sure the car would start, actually laughing.
 
And the car did start, just as the race was overtaking us, close enough  that I could spot Mount’s red white and blue jersey at the front, taking a pull, strong as a horse. We roared off and life was absolutely perfect, couldn’t be improved.
 
But it was. Ten or twelve minutes later a motorcycle pulled alongside and the driver shouted at me in Italian. I didn’t get it, and he made gestures. Then he reached into a sack hanging over his shoulder and started tossing me tiny bottles of grappa, one each. We opened them and toasted him and/or the cycling gods, and tossed down the grappa. It was totally un-American, never happen here, an experience beyond great. Sublime.

To be followed by the miracle of the wines – Mount and Mark Pringle finishing first and second at Bassano di Grappa, for which we we won an industrial size case of wine, with which Neel paid a very happy Augusto. Followed by more success and more cases of wine, which took up a lot of space in the team car.
 
So while I’m impressed with what science has done to the bicycle and the sport, I recall the Bergamasca and what followed the same way I remember my college girlfriend finally saying yes.
 

Friends ask why did I write about horse racing (my novel Breeders) when I spent years racing bicycles and writing about it?

Mainly because thoroughbred racing is rich and glitzy, full of horse whisperers and dripping with money. Old money, new money, exotic foreign money, all conveniently gathered in colorful venues from Saratoga to Pimlico to Santa Anita. Whereas until recently, cycling was a low profile blue collar sport with one media showpiece, the three week Tour de France. Like the World Sauna Championships, it had a limited audience until scandal struck – death by sauna in one case, Lance Armstrong in the other.

Cycling is complicated. All sports are more complicated than they look, but road racing is extra complicated.

It also takes time. We’re the instant gratification nation, and think a two hour marathon is long. That’s less than half a typical road race, and the Grand Tours last longer than a grand slam tennis tournament. They’re like symphonies – three movements, a week apiece, five or six hours a day. Europe loves symphonies, but we go metal, pop or indie.

Sports are complicated in different ways. Road racing is a team sport, but it’s unpredictable and stuff happens. Sometimes it’s comic. In the 2013 World Championships, two top Spanish riders got away with Portuguese Rui Costa. When he took off, the Spaniards couldn’t work together and soon Portugal had its first World Road Champion. A few years ago Sky’s Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome got into a celebrated Tour de France kerfuffle when Wiggins was leading and looked like he was running out of gas. Froome, a talented young serf in his service, decided to go for it on his own. He was brought up short, but did eventually take over the team. But the move defined him as a talkative and controversial diva, addicted to cameras and microphones.

These team explosions can be historic. Back in the day, playboy Fausto Coppi decided to let team leader Gino Bartali (known as The Pious, loved by the peasants) untangle himself from a crash on his own, and went for it himself, successfully. Big stink team meeting. But the well-named Fausto was on his way, a fearless secular guy who invited his married girlfriend to dine with the team, scandalizing Italy and creating his own more modern fan base. And back in the eighties, the legendary Bernard Hinault double-crossed Greg LeMond in the 1985 Tour. LeMond went on to clean his celebrated French clock the following year in the race Hinault thought he owned. Young Alberto Contador laughing off teammate Armstrong’s comeback in 2007 was along the same lines. Europeans laughed with him – Armstrong was an open secret, hated in the peloton.

So – a team sport that can get loose under stress. And confusing. Just to begin with there are all those teams, as many as twenty in a big race. It’s not mano-a-mano like boxing or tennis (though it often comes down to that toward the end), and it’s not one team against another like soccer or football. It’s a bunch of competing outfits jostling each other like nations or corporations.

Further to confuse casual viewers, there are the many Grand Tour prizes. Overall winner (aka GC) is the one in the headlines, but an individual stage win is huge. A stage win by a lesser or younger rider is a career changer – headlines, interviews, instant respect and a better contract for the next year, because riders bargain individually with teams, and a Tour (or Giro d’Italia or Vuelta a España) stage win is a trump card.

It goes on. There are winners jerseys for the best sprinter, best neophyte, and King of the Mountains, all valuable in contract negotiation. With all these teams and prizes, cycling  begins to resemble real life. And just like in real life, favors are exchanged. Quick chats on the road: “I will not attack your candidate for GC victory if you let me have this stage win,” or “I won’t fight you for the King of the Mountains if you don’t attack me in tomorrow’s stage.” And so forth. Is it dirty? Well, on a rainy day you’re covered with mud and freezing and you’ve got road rash from going down. Tomorrow you’re climbing the Pyrenees guzzling water in heat that melts the road tar.

It’s not cricket for sure, but it may be the most perfect reflection of real life to be found in sports. I loved it. I loved racing and working with teams and following the Grand Tours and writing about them. I made just enough to live on, and usually wrote for a small group of people who often understood it better than I did. As in real life, journalists are always a step behind.

I wrote about horse racing because it was so American, and because I had a smattering of knowledge about it, and because people understand it, or think they do. Most races are about two minutes of very exciting seriously dangerous half-calculated life-threatening insanity. Being super-white, it was also the perfect platform for an indirect dialog on race, which no one reading the book seemed to notice, because the hero wasn’t a rich punk rapper or celeb.

Most of all though, it was that money. Thoroughbred racing is saturated with money, which is universally loved and understood. Lance Armstrong was the first big-money guy in bike racing, and he’s nothing compared with any old oil Sheikh who can spend half a million on the possibilities of some fragile inbred creature that may break down in the first month of training.

Bike racing is low profile, low rent, tough as nails, and patient. Zero glitz, and so complicated that I’d have needed footnotes just to explain, say, why Guido let Ian go on up the road and waited for Mike and Pyotr. You can’t do footnotes in a novel.

If you watch TV, you know that there have been more than a few teenage football deaths this year. Eight and counting. One kid collapsed after scoring a touchdown, two died of heatstroke in practice. Some parents seem to accept the game as a sacred rite of passage, and one fatalistic coach guessed football was still safer than high school drivers.  But this much is for sure – across the nation, for white and black people, football has totemic status. And of course there’s huge money involved. When those black Missouri players revolted against repeated racial slurs by going on strike, they got the president of the University fired. Quick. The next game was worth  a million dollars, give or take.

I loved football. I was a slow, overweight, interior lineman and benchwarmer, but my proudest high school moment was bursting into the opposing backfield and running head-on into the other team’s halfback, a big guy with a full head of steam. I didn’t know spit from Shinola after that play and was taken out, probably cross-eyed, but everyone was real pleased with me. Their halfback stayed in but he wasn’t himself, and it was noted.  Respect at last, and boy, did I crave it.

Sport is primal species behavior, hugely cross cultural. It ignores all kinds of boundaries because it’s rooted deep in our instincts. We think about ancient Greece as the cradle of democracy and European culture – great playwrights, brilliant science, source of modern philosophy, Homer, unforgettable sculpture, etc. But those brilliant precursors of western thought were frosting on the cake of Greek culture. A greater hero was Phidippides dropping dead after his twenty-six mile run to tell of victory over the Persian hordes. REJOICE, WE CONQUER!

Sport (and war) was at the very center of Greek culture, and the Olympics were an apotheosis. As important as football is to us, the Games were more important to the Greeks, religious events, recognized as such. We love the idea of those Olympics without knowing much about them: no-slaves-allowed, gender chauvinism, you-name-it sexuality, and near-absolute brutality. Strangling, choking and finger-breaking were part of wrestling, and boxing could go to the death if a guy wouldn’t quit. The champions were revered more than Tom Brady and Larry Bird in Boston. Olympic victors had ultimate status and respect, beyond Sophocles, Socrates, Aristotle and anyone else. Win your event and retire – live on the state, do as you will, young boys, whatever. You’d never find Joe Louis working as a casino greeter.  

One big difference: the Greeks didn’t have today’s big-money sports, and what comes with them. Any serious teen athlete knows what’s going on. PEDs trickled down to college, and then to high school. Teen athletes know all about them, and where to get them. And because they feel incomplete without victory, quite a few kids will die from drugs – slowly from long-term effects, and suddenly, as with these eight dead boys. Because training and drugs change everything big time. When I ran head-on into that flying halfback at sixteen, I was a slow, overweight and untrained, a true amateur. That same collision between drugged-up kids who work out every day is way faster and harder and much more dangerous.

I don’t have to think about it anymore, but if I did, I’d discourage my son from playing football. Getting my head knocked half off and saving a touchdown is a great memory, but if it happened enough times I might not have much memory at all, just an ongoing depressed suicidal bad mood that would poison my life and the lives of those close to me.

In the classic 1960s movie, a captured American soldier is programmed by commies to kill, and released into U.S .politics to do the job.

The odds for Dr. Ben Carson being a Manchurian Candidate sent to destroy his party are better than those for POTUS being a closet Muslim with a forged birth certificate. Obama is all too predictable, but Carson is startling and hypnotic, as unique in his Christian humility as Trump is with those snide one liners. In their quiet mealy-mouthed way, Carson's statements are amazing and disquieting.

Liberals are howling like coyotes, and staunch Republican Morning Joe Scarborough bluntly told him to stop embarrassing himself. It’s not stopping: the Wall Street Journal has unearthed more questionable tales, one about saving white students from black rage after the King assassination, another about getting his picture in the paper at Yale for his remarkable honesty in connection with a psychology test.

There may be legitimate confusion about Carson’s imaginary scholarship to West Point and the chat with General William Westmoreland that could not have happened, and it’s very arguable that marijuana can do bad things to the immature brain.

But even Ben Carson’s “science” is off the wall.

Evolution is anathema to the party base, a potent rallying cry to the religious right that we expect to see from, say, Mike Huckabee. But not an educated man with a scientific background, because evolution is part of basic medical training, and that’s widely known fact.  

And that granary kerfuffle. The notion of the pyramids being granaries is so uninformed, so totally at odds with widely known fact, that his statement is troubling. Smart junior high kids know better. And it goes on: the notion of tithing has appeal to his base, but it’s silly enough to make those other dodgy tax "plans" look reasonable. On this serious and complicated issue, Carson showed no sign of having done any research at all. When challenged he started throwing numbers around off the top of his head, as if a trillion here or there was nothing to get excited about. He doesn’t get excited. Except about his mysterious youth. CNN's investigation of his tale of childhood violence and attempted murder was done professionally. Not definitive, but pretty clear, and it wasn’t Swiftboating – they talked to people who’d known him, not political enemies or bought-and-paid for witnesses. It was a routine obligatory procedure, reasonable journalism.

Dr. Carson went bonkers and attacked CNN at length, because none of his childhood acquaintances could remember anything but a shy kid with glasses. Then he said those acquaintances  weren’t around at the time, which they were. It was embarrassing: Carson fantasized and CNN did their homework. But attacking the media is always safe, so that’s what he did.  Carson's presentation of strange views and tales in his uniquely calm manner is more disturbing than Trump’s calculated showbiz ranting. He is not the normal political liar at all, and has the unnerving rock-solid assurance of someone for whom personal and unlikely opinions are articles of faith. Trump is a shrewd and calculating manipulator who knows what he can get away with and makes sense in those terms. In Carson we have a man who presents himself as reasonable but who rejects the basic rules of sane dialog for a different and much more dangerous reason. Stop Making Sense was a hit song. Carson is using it as a methodology in his revivalist campaign. It’s the Know Nothing Party born again.

There’s a bottom line here: it’s possible to be overwhelmingly expert in a discipline  — playing the violin, applying the calculus, painting portraits  — and be a fool about almost everything else.

Carson’s information and judgment on non-medical matters borders on childish. He is by general consent an expert brain surgeon, but that qualifies him as a doctor, and only that. His homey little solutions to real-world problems may not quite be crazy, but letting him be the Republican nominee would be all of that.

How dumb is CIA Director John Brennan? About average for an Obama appointee. The best presidents have a certain fearlessness about hiring smart, dangerous people. Lincoln’s cabinet was not a friendly collection, it was the best people he could find. Stanton, his Secretary of War, a serious political rival. FDR’s appointed Republican Henry Stimson who got things done and could be trusted. Kennedy hired his brother against much advice, and admitted the jealous and hawkish Dean Acheson the inner circle during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Also called his bluff and ignored him.

Obama seems to prefer a supportive yes to risky exchanges, and he likes bureaucrats who behave themselves, like Brennan. With the exception of Mrs. Clinton, sponsor of Secretary Nuland and the Ukraine fubar, his cabinet has been politically correct, obedient and mediocre. There have been screw-up’s naturally, like the bargain-basement Canadian-built website for Obamacare. Getting rid of Secretary Sebelius would have sent an important message, but that didn’t happen.

Brennan – whose agency is hugely tech-driven – is another technically challenged bureaucrat living in the last century, qualified on paper to be in charge of the CIA but confused in this one. He’s not just non-tech, he lacks common sense. Trey Gowdy rages at Mrs. Clinton, but there’s no interest in Brennan’s truly mindless use of e-mail.

Brennan also ignored the obvious: any information about him, personal or professional, should be secret. Any spook knows this. Personal information reveals connections, concerns, motives, location, likely events, and when they may happen. Added to other information, it offers a useful picture to our enemies. Why is this man exposing anything at all on blatantly insecure commercial email? My son would say WTF?! with justification. Brennan seems to feel so secure that it doesn’t even occur to him what a juicy target he would be. Secure enough to publicly scold his teen-age hacker.

Lack of self-awareness is the giveaway add-on – a mindless hissy fit when it became known that a high school kid had hacked in his personal account, not once but repeatedly. Repeatedly means that Mr. Brennan has that special ability to deny a problem and move it up from snafu to fubar. As a total non-tech, even I knew something was wrong the second time my email got weird. I also knew that having an outraged hissy-fit would only reveal my limitations, as Brennan revealed his. Running a tech-driven agency where a tech named Ed Snowden revealed countless embarrassing tech facts about US intelligence tech, Brennan doesn’t get it about email. He doesn’t even know enough to have someone close by to make sure he doesn’t step in it.

Who is John Brennan? He came into view with his 2012 claim regarding drones – that US counter-terrorism operations had not resulted in "a single collateral death" because of the "precision of the capabilities that we’ve been able to develop." Walking that back, he then claimed we lacked information about civilian deaths.

“Lying SOB” may be fighting words in your neighborhood bar, but not in Brennan’s world, where they qualify you to move from post to post as an administrator, away from the hands-on worlds of espionage and email. Brennan was once a station chief, but rose to be an intelligence briefer for Bill Clinton, Chief of Staff to CIA Head George Tenet, and director of the Terrorist Threat Integration Center which compiled information for President Bush's intelligence briefings.

During this period came a controversy about intelligence he delivered to Bush regarding an Orange Terror Alert in 2003 that served the political end of  whipping up paranoia and patriotism and justifying our Iraq invasion. Brennan subsequently left the government, and after a period in the private sector, he emerged as an Obama favorite in various roles: counterterrorism and foreign policy expert, Deputy National Security Advisor, and then CIA director. Despite his acceptance of waterboarding, an Obama no-no.

Brennan’s email gaffe is the shiny tip of an enormous iceberg, and his splenetic public response to this embarrassment tells the rest of the story. The man is out of touch with everything that matters except his career. As with Secretaries Clinton and Sebelius, the last option was admitting he had his head stuck in that notoriously dark place.

Privileged is Privileged. Brennan is a member of the inner circle, and these heads do not roll easily. Washington, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, Eisenhower and Kennedy didn’t hire people like this. They weren’t afraid of smart.