Adventures: The Uncommon Men

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Some men satisfy their sporting instincts by chasing golf balls around fairways. Others like to lose themselves in a game of checkers or a televised football match. Then there are the thrill seekers, a wild and often winning lot who delight in doing what has never been done.

Bruce Tulloh, the former British Olympic distance runner, is panting across the plains of Oklahoma in an attempt to run from Los Angeles to New York in a record 66 days. Four of his countrymen are pushing their dog sleds toward Spitsbergen, Norway, in the last days of a 16-month, 2,000-mile trek across the Arctic. This summer, eight men from East Africa will try to follow up their successful ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro (elevation: 19,340 ft.) by climbing Mount Everest (29,028 ft.); all are blind. Stunt Man Evel Knievel plans to race a jet-powered motorcycle down a ramp at 280 m.p.h. and—God and the authorities willing—jump across the Grand Canyon. Last week Henry Carr, Detroit Lions defensive back and former Olympic 200-meter-dash champion, raced a pacer over a 110-yd. course and won by 10 yds. "I never beat the horses at the betting window," he said, "so I wanted to see if I could beat them on the track."

Walk on Water. At sea, the two remaining contestants in the first singlehanded, nonstop sailboat race around the world are trying to better the record of 312 days set last month by Britain's Robin Kriox-Johnston. A onetime big-game hunter and whisky smuggler named John Fairfax is rowing a 22-ft. boat 3,300 miles from the Canary Islands to Florida. Honors for freakish firsts, though, must go to Aleksander Wozniak, a Polish exile and former R.A.F. fighter pilot, who fashioned a pair of 3-ft.-long, canoe-shaped shoes out of wood and walked 33 miles down the Thames from Marlow to Westminster Bridge.

Daring or daffy as these ventures may be, none has attracted a more mixed assortment of self-styled adventurers than last week's transatlantic air race, a circulation-building stunt sponsored by the London Daily Mail. Held in commemoration of the first nonstop crossing of the Atlantic, by two British pilots in a Vickers Vimy biplane in 1919, the race had 390 entrants from ten countries competing for $144,000 in prizes in such bizarre categories as the best performances by a Swiss or a resident of New York State. The contestants included onetime Racing Car Champion Stirling Moss and a chimp named Tina, who was vying for honors as "most meritorious performance by a Commonwealth citizen." For all of them, the hardest part was not the flying but getting to and from the check-in stations atop the Empire State Building in New York and the General Post Office in London. Royal Navy Pilot Peter Goddard, who won $14,400 for the fastest performance (with a time of 5 hr. 11 min. 22 sec.), confessed that things went so smoothly in his F-4K Phantom jet that he got bored and started reading.