34th and Madison

If you check my blog regularly, you may have noticed that those SportsCenter commercials have nothing on what really goes on in our mag offices during a given week. (Sorry, Wieden+Kennedy. It’s true.)

On Wednesday, surf god Laird Hamilton dropped by the office to pimp his new clothing line for Steve & Barry’s (Hawaiian shirts for under $10!) and spent some time with espnthemag.com editor Max Klinger. For those of you who don’t know who Laird is, he’s something of a cross between Paul Bunyon, Fabio, James Bond and Eddie Aikau. Never one to let a body of water go to waste, the next day, he took a boat out to Ellis Island and paddle surfed around the Statue of Liberty. Like I said: James Bond.

In even buzzier news around the office: This morning, the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) overturned a ban on double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius of South Africa, allowing him to compete against able-bodied athletes at all International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) sanctioned events. In plain terms, that means if he runs a qualifying time (he hasn’t yet), then he can compete at the Olympics this August. This is groundbreaking. This is a moment. And it comes on the heels of our cover story on bionic athletes, written by my friend Eric Adelson. As Eric said in the piece … “Let them play.”

Well, now they can.

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