When the Discovery Channel Pro Cycling team “turned green,” its website, The Paceline, did also. It was a pleasure to edit and publish this bicycling advocacy presentation, originally a speech presented by Trek president John Burke.

Trek’s John Burke: Advocacy Is the Future

The world keeps spinning and with it obesity is on the rise, traffic congestion keeps getting worse and the number of megacities (population 10 million or more) has exploded.

Trek Bicycle Corporation’s president John Burke believes the bicycle is the solution—if leaders in his industry are willing to shift their focus toward advocacy.

In April [2007], John told industry leaders attending a Taiwan conference that the bike truly can be a solution for these vexing issues, as well as pollution and rising energy costs.

Among John’s major points:

• The world is getting fatter. The 1960 average weight of an American child between ages 6 and 11 was 63 pounds; today it’s 74 pounds. Over the same span, both US men and women’s averages have gained the same amount: 24 pounds.
• Traffic: This global scourge continues to dump fuel, pollute our skies and cut productivity. In 2003, traffic congestion delayed people world wide for 7 billion hours and wasted 5 billion gallons of fuel.
• Urbanization: For the first time in human history, more people are living in cities than in the rural areas, and the rate of urbanization is increasing. In 1950, the world had just 2 “megacities” with populations in excess of 10 million. Today, there are at least 20. There are over 200 cities in China with a population over one million. The United Nations estimates that about 180,000 people are added to the urban population every day. By 2050, an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas.

The bicycle can contribute – and in places like the Netherlands, London, Boulder, Colo. and Portland, Ore., already is serving — to solving these problems.

• Fitness/Health: Calories burned per hour: Bicycling = 500-700; Driving = 5-20.
• Environment: Percent share of urban air pollution: The car =60-70; The bicycle = 0
• Congestion: Half of all car trips taken are less than 2 miles long; commuting by bike in a major city like London can drop travel time by nearly 50 percent

While a bike-friendly environment exists in the aforementioned markets (and others), the US lags behind much of the world in bicycle commuter percentage.

John Burke views this as his industry greatest opportunity. His message to his peers: It’s our responsibility to promote these important issues – a long-term effort requiring planning and resources. Success-story examples are out there and countless urban programs are already underway in small towns and major megacities.

Creating a bicycle friendly world, John believes, is within everyone’s grasp. But we must all do more.

With my stellar AMD teammates, I managed the organization’s first microsites [sadly, all now defunct] promoting the company’s technology partnerships in F1, cycling, and NASCAR. Springbox designed and co-wrote these superb sites.

Technology can tilt the playing field, even in a sport most people dismiss as low-tech. One of my personal favorite projects was this corporate feature regarding the role of AMD technology in Trek’s design process. 

Read article PDF

Here’s the dilemma: You are a Major League Baseball team’s general manager, and you have $50 million to spend on 25 baseball players. Your rival, however, has $150 million.

How do you compete?

In “Moneyball,” Michael Lewis zeroes in on the answer, as well as the harebrained economics of baseball, through the eyes of 41-year-old Oakland Athletics GM Billy Beane.

“Moneyball” is a welcome about-face for the broadly talented Lewis, a business culture narc whose two most recent outings, “The New New Thing” (1999) and “Next: The Future Just Happened” (2001), suffered by association with a mirage known as the New Economy. It’s tough enough to make a generic business success story sexy just by adding “high-tech” to the mix. Perhaps through no fault of Lewis’, “New New” and “Next” seemed dated minutes after their arrival.

Thank goodness that isn’t the case with “Moneyball.”

Over the past decade and a half, as Lewis reports, a Darwinian shift has altered how baseball teams are assembled and maintained.

Going, going, gone are the old-guard GMs — horse-trading ex-ballplayers who cultivated long relationships with their similarly tenured peers and also built large networks of scouts and instructors. Taking over the sport right now are a new generation of younger, statistics-minded executives who rely on tendencies and theories, many of which originate with one man: author and baseball-stats guru Bill James. (James, who never played the game, was recently hired by the Boston Red Sox along with another nonplayer, GM Theo Epstein, a 28-year-old Yale graduate.)

This evolution has paralleled an ever-widening financial gap brought on by soaring player contracts, yet without the aid of league-wide revenue sharing practiced successfully in the NFL and NBA.

From the New York Yankees’ $150 million payroll, the sport’s highest, down to the lowly Tampa Bay Devil Rays’ $20 million thrift-shop lineup, in this imbalanced business environment, the rich get richer. Thus, it behooves baseball’s not-quite-as-rich to stick to a buy-low, sell-high mentality.

Enter Beane, chief wire-puller of the mid-tier A’s ($50 million in player salaries). In Beane, Lewis has found an ideal subject on which to hang “Moneyball’s” larger study of the tenuous economics of a national pastime.

That’s because Beane, who relies on numbers more than scouts, stands at the crossroads between the old guard and the new. In the closed fraternity of baseball general managers, you’re only as good as your scouts and staff. Curiously, Beane shows little respect for tradition.

This doesn’t necessarily make the A’s GM an iconoclast, as Lewis would have the reader believe. Despite the game’s evolution into specialization and the dilution of the talent pool via expansion, today’s baseball players are faster, stronger and better-trained than ever.

But the bigger questions remain: Is Beane a genius? After all, his three star pitchers, Barry Zito, Tim Hudson and Mark Mulder, are draftees of his former scouting director. They, along with budding superstar hitter Miguel Tejeda, will likely be sold by the team before they’re ever re-signed.

Or is he just lucky? Beane’s clearly a frugal early-adapter of a by-the-numbers talent-evaluation trend which a number of other franchises already practice. They just don’t have the likes of Lewis writing books about them.

Yet the teams in Oakland’s division, the best in baseball last season, finished in inverse order to their payrolls. So if the only baseball statistic that truly matters is return-on-investment — or ROI instead of RBI — then one could argue that Billy Beane’s Oakland A’s are the sport’s true champs. With 103 wins and a trip to the playoffs, they achieved the most success with the thinnest wallet.

Like Tom Wolfe, Michael Lewis is gifted at explaining complex topics. As Lewis writes in his most entertaining book in seven years, Billy Beane is keenly aware that luck evens out over time, leaving skill as the difference-maker.

Baseball needs the Beanes, if only to provide the Davids to the big-money franchises’ Goliaths. Sadly, eventually he still has to sell — a depressing reality in a sport whose economics remain skewed.

Stuart Wade is a freelance writer in Austin

SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Sunday, June 1, 2003