LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Lindsay Lohan pleaded not guilty on Tuesday to three charges related to a June traffic accident that led a judge to revoke the troubled actress’ probation last month.
Lohan, 26, who did not attend the hearing, was arraigned on misdemeanor charges of reckless driving, lying to police and obstructing police when she said she was not behind the wheel of her sports car, which smashed into a truck in Santa Monica, California.
Lohan’s not guilty plea was entered in a Los Angeles court by her attorney.
The “Liz & Dick” actress is on probation for a 2011 jewelry theft and could be sent to jail if she is found to have violated the terms of her probation.
Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Jane Godfrey, who will also preside over Lohan’s probation hearing, on Tuesday ordered the actress to attend a January 30 pretrial hearing. A date for Lohan’s probation hearing will be set at that time.
Lohan has been in and out of rehab and jail since a 2007 arrest for drunk driving and cocaine possession.
The former “Parent Trap” child star was arrested in New York on a misdemeanor assault charge on the same day that the Santa Monica car crash charges were filed.
The Manhattan district attorney’s office has not filed a criminal complaint in the assault case.
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey, editing by Jill Serjeant and Stacey Joyce)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Of course elite athletes are naturally gifted. And of course they train hard and may have a phalanx of support staff — coaches, nutritionists, psychologists.
But they often have something else that gives them an edge: an insight, or even an epiphany, that vaults them from the middle of the pack to the podium.
I asked several star athletes about the single realization that made the difference for them. While every athlete’s tale is intensely personal, it turns out there are some common themes.
Stay Focused
Like many distance swimmers who spend endless hours in the pool, Natalie Coughlin, 30, used to daydream as she swam laps. She’d been a competitive swimmer for almost her entire life, and this was the way she — and many others — managed the boredom of practice.
But when she was in college, she realized that daydreaming was only a way to get in the miles; it was not allowing her to reach her potential. So she started to concentrate every moment of practice on what she was doing, staying focused and thinking about her technique.
“That’s when I really started improving,” she said. “The more I did it, the more success I had.”
In addition to her many victories, Ms. Coughlin won five medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, including a gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke.
Manage Your ‘Energy Pie’
In 1988, Steve Spence, then a 25-year-old self-coached distance runner, was admitted into the United States Long Distance Runner Olympic Development Program. It meant visiting David Martin, a physiologist at Georgia State University, several times a year for a battery of tests to measure Mr. Spence’s progress and to assess his diet.
During dinner at Dr. Martin’s favorite Chinese restaurant, he gave Mr. Spence some advice.
“There are always going to be runners who are faster than you,” he said. “There will always be runners more talented than you and runners who seem to be training harder than you. The key to beating them is to train harder and to learn how to most efficiently manage your energy pie.”
Energy pie? All the things that take time and energy — a job, hobbies, family, friends, and of course athletic training. “There is only so much room in the pie,” said Mr. Spence.
Dr. Martin’s advice was “a lecture on limiting distractions,” he added. “If I wanted to get to the next level, to be competitive on the world scene, I had to make running a priority.” So he quit graduate school and made running his profession. “I realized this is what I am doing for my job.”
It paid off. He came in third in the 1991 marathon world championships in Tokyo. He made the 1992 Olympic marathon team, coming in 12th in the race. Now he is head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. And he tells his teams to manage their energy pies.
Structure Your Training
Meredith Kessler was a natural athlete. In high school, she played field hockey and lacrosse. She was on the track team and the swimming team. She went to Syracuse University on a field hockey scholarship.
Then she began racing in Ironman triathlons, which require athletes to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and then run a marathon (26.2 miles). Ms. Kessler loved it, but she was not winning any races. The former sports star was now in the middle of the pack.
But she also was working 60 hours a week at a San Francisco investment bank and trying to spend time with her husband and friends. Finally, six years ago, she asked Matt Dixon, a coach, if he could make her a better triathlete.
One thing that turned out to be crucial was to understand the principles of training. When she was coaching herself, Ms. Kessler did whatever she felt like, with no particular plan in mind. Mr. Dixon taught her that every workout has a purpose. One might focus on endurance, another on speed. And others, just as important, are for recovery.
“I had not won an Ironman until he put me on that structure,” said Ms. Kessler, 34. “That’s when I started winning.”
Another crucial change was to quit her job so she could devote herself to training. It took several years — she left banking only in April 2011 — but it made a huge difference. Now a professional athlete, with sponsors, she has won four Ironman championships and three 70.3 mile championships.
Ms. Kessler’s parents were mystified when she quit her job. She reminded them that they had always told her that it did not matter if she won. What mattered was that she did her best. She left the bank, she said, “to do my best.”
Take Risks
Helen Goodroad began competing as a figure skater when she was in fourth grade. Her dream was to be in the Olympics. She was athletic and graceful, but she did not really look like a figure skater. Ms. Goodroad grew to be 5 feet 11 inches.
“I was probably twice the size of any competitor,” she said. “I had to have custom-made skates starting when I was 10 years old.”
One day, when Helen was 17, a coach asked her to try a workout on an ergometer, a rowing machine. She was a natural — her power was phenomenal.
“He told me, ‘You could get a rowing scholarship to any school. You could go to the Olympics,’ ” said Ms. Goodroad. But that would mean giving up her dream, abandoning the sport she had devoted her life to and plunging into the unknown.
She decided to take the chance.
It was hard and she was terrified, but she was recruited to row at Brown. In 1993, Ms. Goodroad was invited to train with the junior national team. Three years later, she made the under-23 national team, which won a world championship. (She rowed under her maiden name, Betancourt.)
It is so easy to stay in your comfort zone, Ms. Goodroad said. “But then you can get stale. You don’t go anywhere.” Leaving skating, leaving what she knew and loved, “helped me see that, ‘Wow, I could do a whole lot more than I ever thought I could.’ ”
Until this academic year, when she had a baby, Ms. Goodroad, who is 37, was a rowing coach at Princeton. She still runs to stay fit and plans to return to coaching.
The Other Guy Is Hurting Too
In 2006, when Brian Sell was racing in the United States Half Marathon Championships in Houston, he had a realization.
“I was neck-and-neck with two or three other guys with two miles to go,” he said. He started to doubt himself. What was he doing, struggling to keep up with men whose race times were better than his?
Suddenly, it came to him: Those other guys must be hurting as much as he was, or else they would not be staying with him — they would be pulling away.
“I made up my mind then to hang on, no matter what happened or how I was feeling,” said Mr. Sell. “Sure enough, in about half a mile, one guy dropped out and then another. I went on to win by 15 seconds or so, and every race since then, if a withering surge was thrown in, I made every effort to hang on to the guy surging.”
Mr. Sell made the 2008 Olympic marathon team and competed in the Beijing Olympics, where he came in 22nd. Now 33 years old, he is working as a scientist at Lancaster Laboratories in Pennsylvania.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 16, 2013
An article on Tuesday about training advice from professional athletes misstated the year in which Steve Spence competed in the Olympic marathon, finishing 12th. It was 1992, not 2004. The article also misstated the name of the institution at which he is now a coach. It is Shippensburg University, not Shippensburg College. The article also misstated the circumstances under which Helen Goodroad attended Brown. She was recruited to row at the university, she did not receive a rowing scholarship. And the article misstated the length of some races that Meredith Kessler won. They are 70.3 mile championships, not 70.3 kilometer championships.
THE winner of a contest to encourage creativity in print advertising, with a grand prize of $1 million worth of full-page ad space in USA Today, is a company that, it can be said, is a reason there are contests to encourage creativity in print advertising with prizes like $1 million worth of full-page newspaper ad space.
The contest, the 2012 USA Today Print Advertising Competition, was announced on Oct. 1, in conjunction with a redesign of USA Today timed to coincide with the newspaper’s 30th anniversary. The winner of the contest is the Google Creative Lab unit of Google, which is known for, among other online innovations, Google News, a free aggregator of the content of newspapers like USA Today.
Executives of USA Today, which is owned by Gannett, are to discuss the results of the contest on Wednesday at a breakfast at the newspaper’s New York office.
The Google Creative Lab entry was one of three finalists in the contest, which attracted about 100 entries that were judged by six advertising and media executives. The winning ad promoted the Google Plus Hangout service as an alternative to meetings in person.
One runner-up was the Advertising Council in New York, for an ad from a campaign for Save the Children, which carried the theme “Every beat matters.” The campaign was created by BBDO New York, part of the BBDO Worldwide division of the Omnicom Group.
The other runner-up was Team Detroit, a WPP agency, for an ad for a new toy, Nanoblock, sold by the Ohio Art Company.
There are those who will applaud the outcome of the contest, which asked the entrants to submit print ads — existing or new — that they deemed their most creative. A company like Google, according to such people, ought to hear an “attaboy” or two when creating ads in print rather than online.
“I love the idea of using print to talk about a technology,” one judge, Tiffany Rolfe, said of the winning ad.
“To me, print is still an interesting medium,” said Ms. Rolfe, who is a partner and chief content officer at Co Collective in New York, an agency that works for USA Today. “We have to work harder now to use it effectively.”
However, others who hear how the contest turned out may wonder whether the winner will react — to paraphrase the old joke about dubious victories — by asking whether the second prize was $2 million worth of full-page newspaper ad space.
Larry Kramer, president and publisher at USA Today in McLean, Va., said he could see how people may consider it “hysterical” that Google has won a competition for creative print advertising.
But when Mr. Kramer saw the ad during the preliminary stages of the contest, he recalled, “I said, ‘That’s a winner,’ ” because the creators of the ad “understood the palette” that print offers to marketers and took advantage of the medium’s strengths.
As for the japes about Google as a destroyer of print media rather than a supporter, Mr. Kramer said, “Everything we say about Google, the nice thing is that they have to search something.”
The root of the contest was “a conversation I had with Michael Wolff when we were hiring him,” Mr. Kramer said, referring to the author and editor who became the media columnist for USA Today and also served as a judge of the competition, about how many “great, creative” print ads appeared during the Summer Olympics.
“I was upset that agencies weren’t doing enough print creative and putting their best and brightest people on digital platforms,” Mr. Kramer said. “I’m worried the skill set is atrophying and wanted to do something to remind the world that print creative matters.”
Another judge, Chuck Porter — chairman at Crispin Porter & Bogusky in Miami and chief strategist at MDC Partners, which owns Crispin Porter — said: “It’s not that kids have totally given up on print. That’s kind of baloney. But I think people don’t pay as much attention to the craft of print as they used to.”
The winning ad, which ran in October, was simple. It reprinted a paragraph from a newspaper article reporting that the Dalai Lama had “scrapped plans” to attend the 80th birthday celebration of a fellow Nobel laureate, Desmond M. Tutu of South Africa, because his visa request was not granted.
The ad updated the article by crossing out words like “scrapped plans” and replacing them with “joined” and “via Hangout.”
Robert Wong, chief creative officer at the Google Creative Lab in New York, said he was “happily surprised to hear we’re a finalist.” (He and the other two finalists were interviewed last week, before they learned the winner.)
“Every medium has its strengths,” Mr. Wong said, and for print, they include immediacy, in that “a newspaper is good for news.” He added: “A full-page ad in a newspaper says the ad is important.”
The decision to enter the contest came after positive responses to the ad, which ran in The New York Times. “We were proud of the ad and said let’s send it in,” Mr. Wong said. “A million dollars is nothing to laugh at.”
Mr. Wong said the company would donate the $1 million worth of ad space to “people who need it,” adding, “Right now, the Sandy relief effort could probably use some help.”
The prize, Mr. Kramer of USA Today said, equals “roughly half a dozen pages” in the paper. USA Today may sponsor a similar contest this year, he added.
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is preparing to ferry hundreds of additional French troops to the North African country of Mali, bolstering a rapidly evolving military campaign in the latest conflict with Al Qaeda affiliates.
U.S. officials said they also were making plans to send drones or other surveillance aircraft and provide help with aerial refueling of French fighter jets, which bombed columns of Al Qaeda-allied militants in northern Mali for a fourth straight day Monday.
The Pentagon's moves reflect growing concern in Washington about rebel advances, and a decision by the Obama administration to back France's operation after months of inaction. French officials said they had halted the rebels' advance on Bamako, the capital, but insurgents later overran Malian forces in a town about 200 miles northeast of the capital.
PHOTOS: French troops in Mali
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, speaking to reporters during a trip to Europe, said the U.S. was already providing the French with intelligence help, citing "a responsibility to go after Al Qaeda wherever they are." Defense officials said small numbers of U.S. troops might be sent to Mali and surrounding countries but that they would be limited to a support role.
"We have promised [France] that we will ... provide whatever assistance we can to try to help them," Panetta said.
As the Obama administration winds down the United States' long, costly war in Afghanistan, the focus of Western governments' terrorism concerns has shifted to places such as Yemen, Somalia and northern Nigeria. Once-stable Mali joined the list after Islamist rebels seized the northern half of the country after a military coup in March. According to U.S. officials, the militants set up training camps and increased coordination with militant groups elsewhere in Africa.
The militants imposed harsh Islamic law, including forced amputations and summary executions.
The rebels include hundreds of fighters from Al Qaeda's North African affiliate, Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, which U.S. officials have described as the terrorist network's best-financed branch. Flush with cash from kidnapping and smuggling operations, the fighters gained large stocks of military equipment after the 2011 fall of Moammar Kadafi in Libya. Weapons from Kadafi's regime flowed across the lawless Sahara into Mali.
U.S. officials say the Al Qaeda offshoot has between 800 and 1,200 fighters and that an unknown number also have joined in recent months from other African nations and Europe.
"They've increased in numbers because they're able to operate a little more openly," one U.S. defense official said before the French campaign began. "A lot of folks have seen the success they've had, and that draws in people from the region as well as foreigners who've come in from outside the region."
France, the former colonial power in Mali, has a large North African immigrant population and has long feared that Islamists could use their base in Mali to plot attacks on French soil. Eight French hostages reportedly are being held by Islamists in northern Mali.
U.S. officials until recently didn't regard the threat with great urgency, but the rebel advance last week appeared to force France's hand — and heightened American concern. According to local news reports, one group of fighters attacked the town of Konna and moved toward government-controlled Mopti while a second group advanced to the west, showing a level of coordination that analysts hadn't seen before.
"Until a week ago, I and others were telling people we don't really think that there's much of a threat here, because these [militants] have very parochial interests and we don't think they've got the military capability," said Michael Shurkin, a former CIA analyst who worked on Mali and is now an expert at the Rand Corp. think tank.
"What France saw this last week just scared it. It saw real capability, audacity and capacity," he said.
French President Francois Hollande swiftly sent 550 troops to Mali, mainly to Bamako to secure the airport and, if necessary, evacuate the roughly 6,000 French citizens living there, officials said. France has asked the Pentagon for help in quickly moving another 500 to 600 troops and their equipment into the country, a U.S. defense official said.
U.S. military planners were devising options for using Air Force cargo planes to move the forces from France to staging areas outside Mali, possibly including the neighboring countries of Niger and Burkina Faso, the official said.
"We're going to do it," the official said. "We just don't know what platforms yet," referring to the types of aircraft.
The United States for several years conducted training operations with Mali's armed forces but was legally required to suspend all assistance to the Malian government after the March coup. A U.S. official said that restriction was delaying assistance to the French operation, but Obama administration lawyers were looking at ways around the prohibition.
Last month the United Nations signed off on a West African-led plan to send 3,300 regional troops to help Malian forces retake the north. France is putting pressure on the West African bloc to speed the deployment of its soldiers.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Apple‘s stock slipped below $ 500 for the first time in 11 months on Monday as investors reacted to reports signaling the company’s latest iPhone is falling further behind a slew of sleek alternatives running Google’s Android software.
The latest indication that Apple, the world’s most valuable company, is seeing sluggish demand for its iPhone 5 emerged in separate stories published Monday in the Japanese newspaper Nikkei and The Wall Street Journal. Both publications cited unnamed people familiar with the situation saying Apple has dramatically reduced its orders for the parts needed to build the newest iPhone because the device isn’t selling as well as the company hoped.
The adjustment means Apple will buy about half as many display screens for the iPhone as management originally planned for the opening three months of the year, according to the newspapers.
Apple Inc., which is based in Cupertino, Calif., declined to comment Monday. Spokeswoman Natalie Kerris said Apple executives would share their views on market conditions Jan. 23 when the company is scheduled to release its financial results for the final three months of 2011. The period covers the first full quarter that the iPhone 5 was on sale.
Although Apple hailed the iPhone 5 as the best version yet of a product that has revolutionized the telecommunications and computing industry, the company’s stock has wilted since the device hit the market.
After peaking at $ 705.07 on the day of the iPhone 5′s Sept. 21 release, Apple’s stock has plunged nearly 30 percent. The shares fell $ 18.55, or 3.6 percent, to close Monday’s regular trading at $ 501.75, dragging the company’s market value nearly $ 190 billion below where it stood in late September. The stock traded at $ 498.51 earlier in the day, its lowest price since February.
The stock’s decline hasn’t been entirely caused by concerns about the iPhone 5′s sales performance. Industry analysts are also worried about the recent introduction of a smaller, less expensive iPad cutting into the company’s profits.
But the biggest fears hover around the iPhone because it has become Apple’s most valuable product since the company’s late CEO, Steve Jobs, unveiled the first model in 2007. Apple has sold more than 271 million of the devices since then, and in the company’s last fiscal year ending in September, the iPhone generated $ 80 billion in sales to account for more than half of the company’s total revenue.
But Apple’s upgrades of the iPhone in the past two years have disappointed gadget lovers who have been clamoring for Apple to do more to stay in front of device makers relying on the free Android software made by Google Inc. For instance, there were high hopes for a larger iPhone screen with the release of the 2011 model, but Apple waited until last September to take that leap. And when Apple moved to a larger display screen with the iPhone 5, it didn’t include a special chip to enable users to make mobile payments by tapping the handset on another device at the checkout stand. Such a mobile payment feature is available on some Android phones.
Finally, Apple has insisted that wireless carriers subsidize so much of the iPhone’s cost in exchange for customers’ two-year commitments on data plans that the carriers make little or no money by selling the devices. That has prompted more wireless carriers to tout less expensive Android phones in their stores, undercutting the demand for iPhones, said Darren Hayes, who has been studying the shifting market conditions as chairman of the computing systems program at Pace University in New York.
Through the third quarter of last year, Android devices represented 75 percent of smartphone shipments worldwide according to the research firm International Data Corp. That was up from 58 percent at the same point 2011. Meanwhile, Apple’s share of worldwide smartphone shipments has fallen from a peak of 23 percent in the fourth quarter of 2011 to 15 percent in the third quarter of last year.
Samsung Electronics, in particular, has been benefiting from the growing popularity of its Android-powered phones, led by its Galaxy S line. The company said Monday that it sold more than 100 million Galaxy S phones in less than three years. It took the iPhone nearly four years to reach that milestone.
“This is a real wake-up call for Apple,” Hayes said. “They need to be more flexible in how they do things.” Among other things, Hayes thinks Apple may have to reduce the financial burden on wireless carriers selling the iPhone and spend more money advertising the devices, especially with the recent wave of phones running on Microsoft Corp.’s Windows software. Apple’s efforts to sell more iPhones to companies also could be short-circuited if Research in Motion Ltd.’s upcoming release of a revamped BlackBerry proves to be a hit. The BlackBerry is due out Jan. 30.
In an attempt to regain its competitive edge, Apple already is considering the release of a less expensive version of the iPhone made of cheaper parts to boost sales in less affluent countries, according to a report last week in The Wall Street Journal. The company so far hasn’t commented on that speculation, either. The least expensive iPhone 5 without a wireless contract sells for $ 649. With the subsidy included with a two-year wireless service contract, the iPhone 5 sells for as little as $ 199.
Even as it loses ground to Android products, the iPhone remains a solid seller. Some analysts believe Apple sold more than 50 million iPhones in its last quarter ending in December, which would be far the most units that the company has ever shipped during any previous three-month period.
What’s more, the iPhone 5 got off to a torrid start in China, where Apple expects to eventually sell more devices than it does in the U.S. Apple said it sold more than two million iPhone 5s in the three days after its debut in China last month.
Wireless News Headlines – Yahoo! News
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – Actress Natalie Wood had bruising on her arms and wrists and scratches on her neck when her body was pulled from the Pacific Ocean in 1981, suggesting she was injured before she hit the water, according to a report released by Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office on Monday.
But the report, written in June 2012, said there was not enough evidence to say that her death was definitively “non accidental.”
The body of the “West Side Story” star, 43, was found floating in a Santa Catalina Island cove off the coast of Southern California in 1981 after she had spent a night of dining and drinking on the island and on a yacht with her husband, television star Robert Wagner, and actor Christopher Walken.
The case has been surrounded by mystery and suspicion for decades and Los Angeles homicide detectives reopened the investigation into Wood’s death in 2011.
In June 2012, authorities changed Wood’s death certificate to “drowning and other undetermined factors” from the original finding of accidental drowning, but did not explain why.
The change was based on a 10-page document, drawn up as an addendum to the original autopsy report, that said Wood died shortly after she entered the water.
“The location of the bruises, the multiplicity of the bruises, lack of head trauma, or facial bruising, support bruising having occurred prior to the entry into the water,” the supplemental coroner’s report states.
“This medical examiner is unable to exclude non-volitional, unplanned entry into the water … Since there are many unanswered questions and limited additional evidence available for evaluation, it is opined by this medical examiner that the manner of death should be left as undetermined,” it adds.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said on Monday the case was still open but declined to discuss any new evidence that may have been discovered.
The Sheriff’s Department has said that neither Wagner, now 82, nor Walken are suspects.
Wood starred opposite James Dean in the classic 1955 film “Rebel Without a Cause,” and later in musical “West Side Story” and “Splendor in the Grass.”
(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Mohammad Zargham)
Celebrity News Headlines – Yahoo! News
Of course elite athletes are naturally gifted. And of course they train hard and may have a phalanx of support staff — coaches, nutritionists, psychologists.
But they often have something else that gives them an edge: an insight, or even an epiphany, that vaults them from the middle of the pack to the podium.
I asked several star athletes about the single realization that made the difference for them. While every athlete’s tale is intensely personal, it turns out there are some common themes.
Stay Focused
Like many distance swimmers who spend endless hours in the pool, Natalie Coughlin, 30, used to daydream as she swam laps. She’d been a competitive swimmer for almost her entire life, and this was the way she — and many others — managed the boredom of practice.
But when she was in college, she realized that daydreaming was only a way to get in the miles; it was not allowing her to reach her potential. So she started to concentrate every moment of practice on what she was doing, staying focused and thinking about her technique.
“That’s when I really started improving,” she said. “The more I did it, the more success I had.”
In addition to her many victories, Ms. Coughlin won five medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, including a gold medal in the 100-meter backstroke.
Manage Your ‘Energy Pie’
In 1988, Steve Spence, then a 25-year-old self-coached distance runner, was admitted into the United States Long Distance Runner Olympic Development Program. It meant visiting David Martin, a physiologist at Georgia State University, several times a year for a battery of tests to measure Mr. Spence’s progress and to assess his diet.
During dinner at Dr. Martin’s favorite Chinese restaurant, he gave Mr. Spence some advice.
“There are always going to be runners who are faster than you,” he said. “There will always be runners more talented than you and runners who seem to be training harder than you. The key to beating them is to train harder and to learn how to most efficiently manage your energy pie.”
Energy pie? All the things that take time and energy — a job, hobbies, family, friends, and of course athletic training. “There is only so much room in the pie,” said Mr. Spence.
Dr. Martin’s advice was “a lecture on limiting distractions,” he added. “If I wanted to get to the next level, to be competitive on the world scene, I had to make running a priority.” So he quit graduate school and made running his profession. “I realized this is what I am doing for my job.”
It paid off. He came in third in the 1991 marathon world championships in Tokyo. He made the 1992 Olympic marathon team, coming in 12th in the race. Now he is head cross-country coach and assistant track coach at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania. And he tells his teams to manage their energy pies.
Structure Your Training
Meredith Kessler was a natural athlete. In high school, she played field hockey and lacrosse. She was on the track team and the swimming team. She went to Syracuse University on a field hockey scholarship.
Then she began racing in Ironman triathlons, which require athletes to swim 2.4 miles, cycle 112 miles and then run a marathon (26.2 miles). Ms. Kessler loved it, but she was not winning any races. The former sports star was now in the middle of the pack.
But she also was working 60 hours a week at a San Francisco investment bank and trying to spend time with her husband and friends. Finally, six years ago, she asked Matt Dixon, a coach, if he could make her a better triathlete.
One thing that turned out to be crucial was to understand the principles of training. When she was coaching herself, Ms. Kessler did whatever she felt like, with no particular plan in mind. Mr. Dixon taught her that every workout has a purpose. One might focus on endurance, another on speed. And others, just as important, are for recovery.
“I had not won an Ironman until he put me on that structure,” said Ms. Kessler, 34. “That’s when I started winning.”
Another crucial change was to quit her job so she could devote herself to training. It took several years — she left banking only in April 2011 — but it made a huge difference. Now a professional athlete, with sponsors, she has won four Ironman championships and three 70.3 kilometer championships.
Ms. Kessler’s parents were mystified when she quit her job. She reminded them that they had always told her that it did not matter if she won. What mattered was that she did her best. She left the bank, she said, “to do my best.”
Take Risks
Helen Goodroad began competing as a figure skater when she was in fourth grade. Her dream was to be in the Olympics. She was athletic and graceful, but she did not really look like a figure skater. Ms. Goodroad grew to be 5 feet 11 inches.
“I was probably twice the size of any competitor,” she said. “I had to have custom-made skates starting when I was 10 years old.”
One day, when Helen was 17, a coach asked her to try a workout on an ergometer, a rowing machine. She was a natural — her power was phenomenal.
“He told me, ‘You could get a rowing scholarship to any school. You could go to the Olympics,’ ” said Ms. Goodroad. But that would mean giving up her dream, abandoning the sport she had devoted her life to and plunging into the unknown.
She decided to take the chance.
It was hard and she was terrified, but she got a rowing scholarship to Brown. In 1993, Ms. Goodroad was invited to train with the junior national team. Three years later, she made the under-23 national team, which won a world championship. (She rowed under her maiden name, Betancourt.)
It is so easy to stay in your comfort zone, Ms. Goodroad said. “But then you can get stale. You don’t go anywhere.” Leaving skating, leaving what she knew and loved, “helped me see that, ‘Wow, I could do a whole lot more than I ever thought I could.’ ”
Until this academic year, when she had a baby, Ms. Goodroad, who is 37, was a rowing coach at Princeton. She still runs to stay fit and plans to return to coaching.
The Other Guy Is Hurting Too
In 2006, when Brian Sell was racing in the United States Half Marathon Championships in Houston, he had a realization.
“I was neck-and-neck with two or three other guys with two miles to go,” he said. He started to doubt himself. What was he doing, struggling to keep up with men whose race times were better than his?
Suddenly, it came to him: Those other guys must be hurting as much as he was, or else they would not be staying with him — they would be pulling away.
“I made up my mind then to hang on, no matter what happened or how I was feeling,” said Mr. Sell. “Sure enough, in about half a mile, one guy dropped out and then another. I went on to win by 15 seconds or so, and every race since then, if a withering surge was thrown in, I made every effort to hang on to the guy surging.”
Mr. Sell made the 2008 Olympic marathon team and competed in the Beijing Olympics, where he came in 22nd. Now 33 years old, he is working as a scientist at Lancaster Laboratories in Pennsylvania.
This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 15, 2013
An earlier version of this post misstated the year in which Steve Spence competed in the Olympic marathon, finishing 12th. It was 1992, not 2004. It also misidentified the institution at which he is a coach. It is Shippensburg University, not Shippensburg College.
When Lance Armstrong’s interview with Oprah Winfrey about his suspected use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs is broadcast on Thursday, an investment banker will most likely be watching it very carefully (and nervously): Thomas Weisel.
Mr. Weisel is a legend in finance and Silicon Valley. He was the banker behind Yahoo’s public offering and some of the biggest deals during the dot-com bubble. He famously sold the firm he ran, Montgomery Securities, for $1.2 billion in 1997. And he sold his next firm, Thomas Weisel Partners, for $300 million to Stifel Financial in 2010.
But it is Mr. Weisel’s extracurricular activity that connects him to the news of the moment: he was Mr. Armstrong’s biggest financial backer and the single individual most responsible for the money machine that propelled Mr. Armstrong’s career.
Depending on what Mr. Armstrong says in the interview about his purported doping, Mr. Weisel, who was a co-owner of the United States Postal Service Pro Cycling Team through a cycling management firm that he helped found called Tailwind Sports, could be subject along with his partners to lawsuits from corporate sponsors seeking millions of dollars. Already, there is a False Claims Act case contending that Mr. Armstrong and the team defrauded the Postal Service.
Perhaps more anxiety-producing is what Mr. Weisel may have known, or should have known, about a team that for years ran “the most sophisticated, professionalized and successful doping program that sport has ever seen,” according to the United States Anti-Doping Agency.
Its report last year did not name Mr. Weisel, but did say that Mr. Armstrong was assisted by a “small army of enablers, including doping doctors, drug smugglers, and others within and outside the sport and on his team.”
Mr. Armstrong is expected to admit to doping in an effort to persuade officials to lift his lifetime ban from Olympic sports. To do so, however, he would probably need to lay out in explicit detail how the program worked and implicate those who were part of it.
Mr. Weisel is currently not talking. When I called Mr. Weisel seeking a comment, his assistant told me: “He’s not commenting. And he’s not returning any calls.”
For a glimpse of the way Mr. Weisel thinks about performance-enhancing drugs in cycling, here’s what he had to say about the matter four years ago: “Handle the problem below the surface and keep the image of the sport clean,” he told The Wall Street Journal. “In the U.S. sports — baseball, basketball, football — most fans couldn’t care less.” For Mr. Weisel, the team and Mr. Armstrong were an all-consuming passion. He would go every year to the Tour de France and at times travel in the team’s pacer car, occasionally yelling instructions to Mr. Armstrong over the radio system. He rode the team’s bus, ate meals with them and ultimately celebrated each year’s victory.
On the wall of his office in San Francisco, he displayed Mr. Armstrong’s yellow jerseys.
Always the consummate banker, Mr. Weisel even tried to help Mr. Armstrong raise funds to buy the Tour de France itself. (The effort never went anywhere.)
Mr. Weisel’s name has occasionally come up in connection with accusations of doping on the team.
The wife of the famed cyclist Greg LeMond, Kathy, reportedly testified under oath in a deposition in 2006 that she had been told by one of Mr. Armstrong’s mechanics that Mr. Weisel, along with Nike, paid $500,000 though a Swiss bank account to the honorary president of the International Cycling Union to silence a drug test Mr. Armstrong purportedly failed in 1999.
Nike has vehemently denied the contention. So far, Mr. Weisel has not commented publicly. When Floyd Landis, one of Mr. Armstrong’s former teammates, tested positive in 2006, he denied using performance-enhancing drugs under pressure from Mr. Armstrong. Soon after, Mr. Weisel set up the Floyd Fairness Fund with some of Tailwind’s co-owners to help pay his legal bills. Mr. Landis later confessed to doping in 2010.
Mr. Weisel, a longtime athlete who was a champion speed skater as a teenager, became a cycling enthusiast in the 1980s and took up racing himself. Sports dominated his life: he often said that he liked to hire athletes to work for him at the bank because of their competitive instincts. He was also the chairman of the United States Ski Team Foundation. In 1987, while still working as a banker, he started Montgomery Sports, to begin his first cycling team. In the early 1990s the team was called Subaru-Montgomery; it later became Montgomery-Bell (Bell Sports was a client that he took public) and then was renamed for the Postal Service. (Yahoo, another client, was also a sponsor of the team.)
According to a biography of Mr. Weisel, “Capital Instincts: Life as an Entrepreneur, Financier and Athlete,” he invested more than $5 million in the early teams and lost money on the investment. Mr. Armstrong was one of Mr. Weisel’s early riders for the Subaru-Montgomery team. He later left the team to join the Motorola team. After his bout with cancer, Mr. Armstrong joined what was the Postal Service team in 1998.
Tyler Hamilton, another former teammate of Mr. Armstrong, told “60 Minutes” that the team was pushing performance-enhancing drugs on its cyclists long before Mr. Armstrong battled cancer and then in 1998 rejoined the team.
“I remember seeing some of the stronger guys in the team getting handed these white lunch bags,” Mr. Hamilton said on “60 minutes” about when he joined the team in 1995. “So finally I, you know, started puttin’ two and two together and you know, basically there were doping products in those white lunch bags.”
Given how widespread the doping now appears to have been on the Postal Service team based on testimony of 11 teammates, and charges against the team’s director and several of its doctors, you wonder how much due diligence its founding banker did on the most prominent deal of his career.
Maverick filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was a surprise screenplay winner for “Django Unchained,” his controversial spaghetti Western set during the slavery era, beating out such favorites as the writers of “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Lincoln,” “Argo,” and “Silver Linings Playbook.”
“Wow, I wasn’t expecting this,” said an effusive Tarantino. “I'm happy to be surprised.”
Tarantino’s win meant one more loss for Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” which had gone into the ceremony leading with seven nominations. So far, the historical epic has been shut out.
PHOTOS: Nominees & winners | Red carpet
Meanwhile, Anne Hathaway sang her way to a Golden Globe for supporting actress in a movie as the tragic Fantine in the musical “Les Miserables.”
With her pixie haircut and tasteful white gown, Hathaway was reminiscent of a young Audrey Hepburn, charming viewers as she thanked her co-stars, family and friends — and had a special thanks for Sally Field, nominated in the same category for “Lincoln.” She noted that Field forged a career that resisted typecasting — something Hathaway has struggled with as well. Field had played the Flying Nun on TV but went on to play Norma Rae and, more recently, Mary Todd Lincoln
PHOTOS: Golden Globes 2013 red carpet
"Thank you for this lovely blunt object," Hathaway told the Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. “I'll forever use it as a weapon against self-doubt.”
Earlier in the evening, the movers and shakers of Hollywood leaped to their feet Sunday night to welcome former U.S. President Bill Clinton on stage at the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards as he introduced the clip for the best dramatic picture nominee “Lincoln.”
Clinton, whose appearance was a well-kept secret, noted the challenges the 16th president faced as he toiled to end the Civil War and slavery. “We’re all here tonight because he did it,” Clinton said.
GLOBES 2013: Full coverage | Red Carpet | Ballot | Nominees | Snubs
“Wow,” exclaimed co-host Amy Poehler as Clinton left the stage. “That was Hillary Clinton’s husband! That was exciting!”
On the TV side, Showtime’s “Homeland” and HBO’s “Game Change” continued its winning ways.
“Homeland,” the political thriller that counts President Obama as one of its biggest fans, won its second consecutive award for drama series Sunday night at the 70th annual Golden Globe Awards. Claire Danes won her second consecutive Globe for the series, and co-star Damian Lewis also took home the lead-actor trophy. The series had dominated the Emmy Awards last September.
“Game Change,” the drama about Sarah Palin’s history-making run for the vice presidency of the United States in 2008, had also performed well at the Emmys. And it was more of the same Sunday. It snapped up three awards, including miniseries or TV movie, supporting actor for Ed Harris, and lead actress in a miniseries or TV movie for Julianne Moore for her uncanny channeling of Palin.
Lena Dunham won best actress in a comedy series for HBO's "Girls" while Don Cheadle won lead actor in a TV comedy series for Showtime’s “House of Lies.” Kevin Costner won lead actor in a miniseries or TV movie for “Hatfields & McCoys.” Maggie Smith, who was not present, also won for supporting actress in a TV series, miniseries or movie for playing the acerbic dowager in PBS' "Downton Abbey.”
In other film honors, Jennifer Lawrence won lead actress in a comedy or musical for “Silver Linings Playbook” for her performance as a widow in the quirky romantic comedy.
Golden Globes 2013: Live updates | List | Red Carpet | Winners | Ballot | Full coverage
“I beat Meryl!” Lawrence joked as she accepted the trophy. (Meryl Streep was nominated in the same category, for “Hope Springs.”) Among Lawrence’s thank-yous: “Thank you, Harvey Weinstein, for killing whoever you had to kill to get me up here.”
Austria’s “Amour” won foreign language film. "Brave" won for best animated film. Mychael Danna won for writing the score for Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi.” Original song went to pop singer Adele and Paul Epworth for “Skyfall,” the title tune for the latest James Bond installment.
Christoph Waltz also won for supporting actor in a film for playing a bounty hunter in Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained.” Tarantino is the Austrian actor’s good-luck charm. Waltz won in the same category for Tarantino’s “Inglourious Basterds” three years ago. “My indebtedness to you and my gratitude knows no words,” he told the filmmaker as he accepted the award.
Hosts Poehler and Tina Fey were bringing the funny as the ceremony was being telecast live on NBC from the Beverly Hilton Hotel’s International Ballroom. The pair began by poking fun of pill-popping Hollywood and “rat-faced” TV types and joked about the controversy surrounding Kathryn Bigelow's “Zero Dark Thirty.”
Cracked Poehler: “When it comes to torture, I trust the woman who spent three years married to James Cameron.”
Perhaps the evening will help end the longstanding debate about whether women are funny -- an issue tackled by Fey on "30 Rock."
But a bigger question is looming: Will the Golden Globes bring clarity to this topsy-turvy awards season?
The awards season has been wildly unpredictable, with plenty of outstanding movies to choose from -- but few clear-cut front-runners.
The Directors Guild of America, for example, nominated Bigelow and Ben Affleck for “Argo” and the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards named “Argo” as best film and Affleck as best director. Yet neither Affleck nor Bigelow earned a directing nod from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences when the nominations were announced last week.
The historical epic “Lincoln” goes into the Globes with a record seven nominations, followed by the spaghetti Western “Django Unchained” and “Argo” with five. Affleck and Bigelow are also in contention for best director.
Other races to watch are the musical “Les Miserables” and romantic comedy “Silver Linings Playbook,” vying for best film in a comedy or musical.
Don’t look for “Beasts of the Southern Wild” Sunday night. The magical indie drama earned four Oscar nominations, including best film, director and actress, but was snubbed by the Globes.
The Hollywood Foreign Press Assn. also presents Golden Globes in several television categories with HBO’s political drama “Game Change” leading the pack of nominations with five, followed by PBS’ beloved British drama “Downton Abbey” with four.
After a controversial three-year stint as host, Ricky Gervais turned over the emcee duties to Globe nominees Poehler (“Parks & Recreation”) and Fey (“30 Rock”). And it seems like the Globe’s show party-like atmosphere will continue with these comic actresses.
During a recent interview, the “Saturday Night Live” alums outlined the rules for a Golden Globes drinking / meatball sub-eating game: Drink any time an actress cries during her speech, and eat a meatball sub any time someone thanks film mogul Harvey Weinstein.
VOTE: Play-at-home Globes ballot
PHOTOS: Red carpet fashion at the Golden Globes
susan.king@latimes.com and rene.lynch@latimes.com
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