Speed Kings (24 page)

Homburger was a good pilot. In February 1930, the Intervales run hosted its very first international bobsled race in North America when a team representing the United States took on another from Canada. On that occasion, Homburger was riding in the No. 4 spot, but he soon worked his way up to become a driver. When the Mount Van Hoevenberg course was up and running late in December 1930, he proved himself to be the best in the area. But then, he enjoyed one major advantage over everyone else: he had built the run. Homburger was an engineer by trade, and Dewey had hired him to supervise construction. At first he worked underneath Zentzytzki, but when the architect returned to Germany, Homburger took charge. While work was under way he was up on the mountain every day, and in the evenings he studied Zentzytzki's blueprints. By the time the job was done, he knew that course better than anyone else in the world, even the man who had designed it. He was familiar with every inch of every curve. If anyone knew the “perfect line” down the run, it was Hank Homburger.

Jay O'Brien wasn't impressed with the idea that an engineer who'd had twelve months' practice on a tin-pot slide could provide any real competition for the well-drilled team from St. Moritz. In November 1930, as the work at Mount Van Hoevenberg was being finished, Jay called in at the offices of the Amateur Athletic Union in New York. The AAU was, along with the United States Olympic Committee, in charge of Olympic selection. AAU secretary Dan Ferris told Jay about Dewey's plans. And as Ferris then told Dewey, Jay's response was to say that “he doubts we will be able to develop a team here fast enough to make any showing against foreign competition. He believes it will be necessary to bring over from St. Moritz two steerers and two brakes who have experience in racing.” Dewey bit his lip and replied, tartly, “We know of at least two or three Americans who are planning to train bob teams here this winter in anticipation of the Olympics.” He added, in another note, “we are much less dependant [
sic
] on the St. Moritz group than Jay O'Brien seems to think.”

A month later, Dewey had hardened his attitude. He wrote to Ferris again, to complain once more about O'Brien's position as the American representative at the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation. He reminded Ferris of Jay's “gross discourtesy,” his “deliberate disregard” and “defiance of explicit instructions” given him by Dewey for the International Federation congress in February 1930. He told Ferris to “make it unmistakably clear” to Jay that “if his St. Moritz teams expect to represent the United States in the III Olympic Winter Games, they will have to qualify by showing superiority here on the
Olympic run.” In other words, just because Billy Fiske won the gold in 1928, it didn't mean he would make the team in 1932. Conditions in St. Moritz, Dewey thought, were so “altogether different from the modern type of run” at Mount Van Hoevenberg that past performances there didn't reckon in selection.

He had a point. Mount Van Hoevenberg was different. Zentzytzki had designed a new type of run. The curves had a steeper gradient than the rest of the track, so the sleds were still plummeting downward even as they came round the turns. In Europe until that point, bob runs had been built with flat corners. The change meant that Mount Van Hoevenberg had undoubtedly the quickest bob run that had ever been built.

On February 7, 1931, it was finally ready for its grand opening. The occasion would be the very first North American national bobsled championship. Dewey organized a special train up from New York to carry a posse of forty politicians who had helped him drive the bill appropriating state funds through the legislature. Dewey planned to ride in the two-man competition himself. He still imagined he could make a good pilot. He actually crashed in a practice run, tipping over coming round a corner. He fractured his ankle and spent the rest of the championship hobbling around in a plaster cast. To his credit, he still managed to compete the following week. No doubt he was brave enough; it was just his driving that wasn't up to much. Homburger, though, was an ace. The Red Devils, dressed in blue and scarlet, led through every single one of the four heats. They finished their final run in 1:52. It wasn't just a track record, carving four seconds off a mark they had set earlier that same day; it was a new world speed record. No one, at St. Moritz or anywhere else, had ever traveled as fast in a bobsled as Homburger did down Mount Van Hoevenberg that day. They clocked a top speed of just under 70 mph. The nearest competition was eight and a half seconds back—a long gap in any sport, and an age in bobsledding. Godfrey Dewey had found his hero. Hank Homburger, he decided, would be the face of the Games, the man whose image they put in the booklets and up on the billboards.

—

T
hat December, two months out from the start of the Olympics, Billy Fiske booked his ticket to travel over on the SS
Europa
. He was coming with his old friend Jack Heaton. Jay had even arranged for their bobsleds to be sent up from St. Moritz so that Billy and Jack could bring them over in the hold. Many of the competitors decided, as Billy and the current world champion Werner Zahn both did, to bring their own sleds with them, despite the fact that Dewey
had promised they could use the new sleds specially designed for the Mount Van Hoevenberg course. A couple of years earlier, he had arranged to have Zahn send over several sleds from Germany, which Dewey tested on the run at Intervales. He found that they kept breaking because they couldn't handle the steep drops on the corners. So he drew up plans for a “fundamentally different” bob, one that, he said, “clings to the run more closely, steers with a minimum of skidding, and rides and controls much more smoothly than any bob I have ever driven.” Zahn was distinctly unimpressed. The sleds, he said, didn't matter so much; it was the drivers who won the races.

When Dewey learned that Billy and Jack Heaton were on their way, he sent another round of letters to the AAU's Olympic bobsled committee. Jay O'Brien, of course, was chairman of that committee. He was the one member Dewey didn't write to. The others—Gustavus Kirby, Dan Ferris, and Major Philip Fleming—all heard from him. “I have no doubt that O'Brien has virtually promist them both places on the American team, regardless of their showing in the try-outs,” Dewey wrote. “If so, this will have to be handled somewhat tactfully. Don't lose sight of the fact that while three teams may be chosen, only two teams may actually compete.”

Jay came to Lake Placid in early January 1932. The Olympic publicity department welcomed him with a press release announcing the arrival of the “internationally known polo player and sportsman.” Godfrey Dewey sent out yet another round of letters. This time he targeted Gus Kirby, who had been the United States Olympic Committee's delegate at St. Moritz in 1928; he was on the bobsled committee for 1932 too. “It appears,” Dewey wrote, “that Jay O'Brien is to be himself a member of one of the bob teams competing for the American Olympic team . . . Naturally, and I think properly, this situation is vigorously questioned by the other contenders. It seems to me a decided danger and impropriety, even if the chairman in question were more suitable.” Again, he had a point. Jay would be both picking the team and competing on it. But then, he had been in the same position in St. Moritz in 1928, when he had managed the squad that won both the gold and the silver. And Dewey had often done the same thing during the National Championship competitions at Mount Van Hoevenberg. Still, he suggested that Kirby should arrange to have Jay replaced as chairman of the selection committee to “guarantee for greater fairness.” Jay's conflict of interests was, Dewey said, “an urgent and serious situation for both the quality and still more the morale of one of the most important American Olympic teams.”

Kirby's reply can be condensed into two words: nothing doing. But Dewey had already won one battle: selection for the US Olympic squad would be based on results in a series of pre-Olympics trial races on the Mount Van Hoevenberg run. After all the fuss, Olympic qualification would be a simple business. Anyone who wanted to make the team would need to finish in the top two in the tryouts, which were due to be held on January 15 and 16. That meant the odds were already stacked in favor of the local riders, especially Homburger. They may have had only a year or two of experience, but almost all of it was on that one track. Billy, Jay, and the outsiders, on the other hand, had never even seen the run before, let alone ridden it. And Billy himself hadn't been able to practice much in recent months: he had broken his ankle in the autumn and only just come off crutches. The injury meant he had couldn't compete in the 1931 World Championship in St. Moritz, which had been won, in his absence, by Werner Zahn. In fact, Billy hadn't ridden a sled in almost a year. He was so rusty that when he set off on his very first run down Mount Van Hoevenberg, riding a two-man sled with Jay working the brake, he didn't even make it round the first corner. The sled slipped into a skid as it climbed the bank and toppled over onto its side, spilling Billy and Jay out onto the ice. “So this,” Homburger thought, “is the great Billy Fiske.”

For the next fortnight, Billy and Jay found themselves bound up in bureaucratic red tape. It was impossible then, and now, to prove that this was Dewey's doing. But it certainly suited his purposes. On January 11 the referee for the Olympic trials, George W. Martin, who happened to be the sporting director of the Lake Placid Club, announced that he had decided to limit practice on the run to “properly entered teams and contestants who have been entered in writing.” Jay didn't have his paperwork in order, so his team couldn't get back on the run until he did. It cost them precious practice time. But he and Billy got lucky. When the weekend of the trials came around, the weather was too warm for the track to be used. So the trials were postponed. It was decided that the National Championship, due to be held on January 28 and 29, would double up as the Olympic tryouts. Billy and his team would have two badly needed weeks in which to practice—if, that was, the race officials would let them on the track. Jay and his committee would need to pick a squad of fifteen men before the National Championship, as the date for final entries was January 21; the trials would be used to decide which eight of those fifteen actually got to race in the Games and which men would be left in the reserves.

It was then that Dewey declared his hand—though he had kept it at best
only half hidden—in a five-page letter to Gustavus Kirby. He had, he said, “conferred with all the best bob drivers” and found “a surprising and encouraging unanimity in their judgments.” Billy, Jay, Clifford, and Eddie, he said, should not be selected for the team. “In the absolutely unanimous judgment of every driver who has watcht their preliminary work on the run, they have not the slightest chances of qualifying for the final team.” In fact, Dewey continued, one of the local drivers—he wouldn't say who—had easily raised five thousand dollars to bet that Billy and his team wouldn't finish in the top three at the trials. It is a large-enough sum today; back then it was six months' earnings for the average American household. “I fully recognize the impracticability of eliminating without trial the men who are identified in the public mind with the brilliant St. Moritz victory,” Dewey continued, but he didn't recognize it enough to stop him from suggesting that they do exactly that. “Billy Fiske drove the winning sled at St. Moritz, and deserves utmost credit for a brilliant win against keen competition, altho not so keen as will be shown here. The conditions, however, were entirely different.” And so they were. At St. Moritz, the teams had been five-strong rather than four. At St. Moritz, they had raced ventre à terre; here they would be sitting up. At St. Moritz, they had used old European-style sleds rather than the new ones Dewey had designed. And then there were the runs themselves, which were, as Dewey noted, incomparable in both their speed and their difficulty. “With the best of good will, not one of the experienst drivers here concedes them an outside chance in any event this year.”

Dewey said that he, personally, would select Hank Homburger, since his “world record calls for no comment,” and Hubert Stevens to lead two teams of local drivers. Stevens, he pointed out, had “built to order this year a personal bob including all the distinctive features of our Olympic design with a few slight further refinements which quite possibly make it the fastest bob in the world today.”

To press his point, Dewey argued that it wasn't only the bobsledding medals that were at stake, but the United States' overall position in the final medal table. “I feel keenly that the American chance of winning the III OWG . . . stands or falls with securing the bob sports points to offset the inevitable leadership of the Scandinavians in skiing.”

The bobsled committee decided to meet on the morning of January 21—the latest date possible—to make its final selections. They planned to wire the teams over to Lake Placid as soon as they had finished talking. Godfrey Dewey made one final attack. He objected again to Jay's “dual position” as both a contender
for a team and the chairman of the selection committee, as well as to Jay's position as a delegate of the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation, even going so far as to dig into the small print of “rule 2, section 3,” which stated, “Contestants are ineligible for any official function.” He trashed Billy on the grounds that he insisted on racing with his own crew of Jay, Clifford, and Eddie, whereas other drivers were happier for the selectors to pick and mix teams from across the squad. “If Fiske would show the same sportsmanship which has been displayed by all the rest of the drivers,” Dewey complained, “the way would be open to pick the strongest possible American representation.”

By now, Kirby, Ferris, and the rest were thoroughly sick of Dewey's meddling. At noon on January 21 they sent a telegram to Lake Placid listing the fifteen men they had selected for the Olympic squad. Homburger was on it, along with all three of his Red Devils and the other three Stevens brothers. So were Billy, Jay, Clifford, and Eddie. Dewey had lost his battle. But he still had plans for the war.