Speed Kings (26 page)

Anger can be a useful fuel in some sports. But not bobsledding. As Steve Holcomb, the 2010 Olympic champion, explains, “At the start the best drivers are just sitting there. They're not stressed, they're not panicked, they're not pacing back and forth. They are calm at the starting line, relaxed, ready.” And then they have to flick a switch. In 1932 they were using sprint starts for the first time at the Olympic Games. Three seconds of fury. Pump the legs, pound the snow, push the sled. Jump in, then switch off again. “You flick that switch right back again,” says Holcomb. “Calm down. Slip right back into that mind-set you had
three seconds ago, be relaxed and passive, because here comes the track.” You don't fight the g-force. You can't. Instead you go with it. The driver lets it pull the sled up, around, and down, all the time making the tiny adjustments to the steering, urging the runners on to that perfect line, not for the corner ahead—it's coming too fast—but the one four, five, six bends down the line.

Zahn was running hot. He had designed the Fram III to cut through snow. But there wasn't any snow on Mount Van Hoevenberg, only ice. The sleds designed by Dewey had long, flat, flexible runners that held contact with the run right along their length. The blades on the Fram III were short and curved in bows; only the middle inches were in contact with the ice. They were quick because there was no traction. Which also meant there was no control. “It was the wildest ride I've ever been on,” Devine said. “I knew from the first moment that the sled was out of control, that we wouldn't make it.”

The Fram III shot along, stopping the split-clocks as it went. The announcer called out the times through a public address over the grandstands. A new record as they sped through Cliffside. A new record as they swept through Shady. They were running at about 75 mph as they came into the wicked chicane at Zig-Zag. The Fram III started to fishtail wildly as it approached the first curve. Its rear end swung from side to side, heaving the riders first one way, then the other. Zahn shot low into the Zag, and the sled traveled on up the wall. “We went straight up,” said Devine, “and straight up and straight up, higher than the treetops, and planed through the air.” The sled flew over a hundred feet. “Remarkably, we all stayed on the sled until the impact,” Devine remembered. And then they hit a tree. The four of them scattered like shrapnel from an explosion. Devine was lucky: he landed flat on top of the No. 2 rider, Heinrich Rossner, who weighed three hundred pounds. “He saved me. His great size cushioned the impact.” Rossner, on the other hand, was battered black and blue. Zahn shattered his left arm.

Ed Neil was a mile away when word reached him. The press had set up office in the high school on Main Street, their typewriters set out on rows of trestle tables in the hall. They had a PA wired up, so they could listen to broadcasts of events happening around the town, and a wire service run by a team of young ladies. When one of them read out a snap line about the crash at Mount Van Hoevenberg, the pack split for the bob track. But Neil picked up his hat and made for Lake Placid General Hospital. He figured he'd find the story there, if anywhere. And he was right. Charles Devine and the brake, Hans Melhorn, had both been discharged that same afternoon, after the doctors had checked them
over, but Zahn was still being treated. Neil sneaked in to see him in his hospital bed. The crash made news across the country, from San Diego to Seattle, Boston to Biloxi, and Ed Neil was the one man who had an interview. He scribbled it down on his pad, put it out on the wires as a first-person account of the crash “dictated exclusively for AP” by “the ace of the European drivers and the most serious foreign threat to the Americans.”

“My sail of 110 feet through the air after cracking up on the Zig-Zag turn was the greatest thrill of my career,” Zahn said. “During my 20 years of bobsledding I have been in five accidents, not a bad average for a sport. But I never before took an airplane ride in my bob. You know we really should have been killed. Take a man and throw him through the air for 110 feet and then drop him 45 feet more into a thicket of trees, stumps, and rocks, and you expect to find him dead. I sometimes feel like a cat with nine lives.” Instead, he had escaped with a broken arm. “The injury is nothing at all, as soon as it gets better I am going to get right back to bobsledding. It is insignificant compared to the fact that our team will be unable to shoulder its responsibility to Germany during the Olympic Games.” Zahn paused. “Every member of my team is keen to get back into the game. I guess that is what this sport does to you. You take hold of it and you can't let it drop—at least until it drops you.”

Back at the mountain, the bobsledding hadn't stopped. Two hours after Zahn's disaster the run was open again, though by now it was blowing a blizzard. Hank Homburger and Hubert Stevens took runs from the top. Despite being local men well used to the track, both had trouble making it down. They told the race officials that they “nearly went over the embankments on several occasions” and that “the course was too fast for the prevailing conditions.” There were more protests. Jay O'Brien, for one, was convinced that the Lake Placid teams were trying to screw their opposition, and even their American teammates, out of the chance to practice. He argued that if the organizers didn't let the athletes run now, they could find themselves “racing for the first time over a strange course” come the Olympic competition. The officials relented, reluctantly. They allowed each team to take a single run from the top, with the proviso that they “had to brake all the way,” which was only a little better than nothing.

As soon as the teams were done, the officials had workmen shovel fresh snow into the run, to slow it down and “minimize the chances of an accident.” A fat lot of good it did too. The next morning, the first day of February, the bobsledders had company on the mountain. The press were out in force, eager
for more, as Neil put it, of this “spectacular ballyhoo.” And they got it. The Austrian two-man team toppled over at Shady, spilling the two riders out onto the track. The driver was fine, save for the cuts and grazes he suffered as he skidded along the ice. His brake, Count Baptist Gudenus, twisted his leg underneath the sled. It wasn't the only close scrape. The Swiss four-man bob, driven by the dashing Reto Capadrutt, snapped an axle midway down the run. It was, Daley wrote, “miraculous” that Capadrutt still managed to steer his team down the mountain. “By a freak of fate the two parted ends caught in the supporting structure underneath the sled and it was not until the bottom was reached that the break was discovered. Veteran bobsleighers paled at the sight of the broken part and could not conceive how the Swiss managed to go the full distance without being upset and hurt.”

Dewey was faced with a dilemma. He had promised the crowds that bobsledding would provide them with “the thrills of a lifetime.” And no doubt the run had delivered in that regard. But at the same time, he was determined to establish bobsledding as a mass-participation sport. He was planning to start running competitions for schoolchildren and novices as soon as the Olympics were over. He even encouraged his own daughter, Katharine, to take up the sport.

While “the promise of contusions and abrasions or worse has appealed strongly to the buzzard instinct” in the spectators, as Westbrook Pegler put it, the crashes had received so much publicity “that the businessmen of Lake Placid, who are businessmen after all, with investments at stake, were afraid the bob run would receive a bad name with prospective customers who might wish to recapture the spirit of childhood's happy hours by sliding down hill on sleds.” Dewey had no great sympathy for the injured athletes. He felt the drivers themselves were “chiefly responsible for these accidents, for they would accept advice from no one, either as regards the bobs or the run itself.” But he decided to pile more snow on the run to slow it down.

He also came up with the odd idea of strapping four sandbags to a sled and sending it down the mountain, to demonstrate the safety of the run to the press. He wanted them to understand that it was the drivers who were at fault rather than the run. The sandbags, Pegler wrote, were named “Eenie, Meenie, Minie, and Moe,” although, he added in his inimitably acid style, “the head of the Lake Placid sports objected to the name of the last sandbag and suggested it be rechristened some Nordic name.” The sandbag team, Pegler continued, made easy work of the run. “This was all very embarrassing to the Olympic bobbers, as it
seemed to indicate that a staff of sandbags presented just the correct degree of skill and intelligence for bob-bob-bob-bobbing downhill on a sled.”

Insulted, the bobsledders broke out in open revolt. That simmering spat between Jay O'Brien and Godfrey Dewey finally boiled over. Jay spoke out against the “high-handed” running of the track in the press. He and the other competitors drew up a list of demands, which Jay then presented to Dewey. The bobsledders asked that the running of the course should be handed over to two officials from the International Federation and that each team should be allowed to take a minimum of two runs each morning. Faced with the threat of a full strike, Dewey gave way. The bobsledders were given their head. And so the run didn't get any safer, or any slower.

The Germans, having lost almost half their team before the Olympics even started, received special permission to recruit a new crew at late notice. And so the Suicide Club gained a new member, the “Champagne King,” Baron Walther von Mumm. He was perhaps the most remarkable of the lot. He had four scars on his chest, one for each of the bullets that had hit him in his life: The first two were a parting gift from his mistress, who shot him when he told her he was breaking off their affair; another he suffered while fighting on the Eastern Front. And the last was so fresh it had only just begun to heal. Mumm's friends liked to say that he had one scar for each of the four fortunes he had lost. The first went when the French confiscated his family's vineyards in the war; the second when the collapse of the German economy crippled his investments there; the third when prohibition ruined his attempts to launch the Mumm brand in the United States; and the fourth when he lost the little he had left in the Wall Street crash. By 1930 he was living in a boardinghouse, paying ten dollars in rent a month, and working in a brokerage. He was so depressed by his situation that he tried to shoot himself in the heart. He missed. That was in October 1931, just four months before the Olympics. He came up to Lake Placid to recuperate.

Mumm was a pilot, really, rather than a bobber. He used to race balloons. But he had done a little bobsledding, and when his country called, he was happy to join the squad. He roped in three extras, none of them with a scrap of bobsledding experience. One was a baron, another a Bismarck. The other was Georg Gyssling, the German consul in New York and a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. He wasn't the only one in the Suicide Club. The Swiss driver René Fonjallaz became one of the Nazi Party's leading propagandists in Switzerland.

Fonjallaz was the next to crash. He was riding a two-man sled with his
cousin Gustav when they wiped out at Whiteface. René was left unconscious for five minutes, flat on his back at the bottom of the bank. Capadrutt crashed at the top of Shady, knocking a ten-foot-long slab of ice off the wall at the top of the bank. It was beginning to feel like Dewey had built a $227,000 death trap. And the upshot was, as Neil wrote, that “the bobsledders have stolen the show from a couple of hundred serious-minded competitors in other sports because of those breathtaking smashes on the most dangerous curves in all of bobsled-dom. If the thrills and terrors of the bobsledders continue through the Olympic Games, there seems little chance of getting it out of the limelight. Bob running, almost unknown until a few weeks ago, is king, the breath-taker of all the Olympic sports.”

The Olympics started on February 4. Franklin Roosevelt arrived in town, ready to give a speech at the opening ceremony; President Herbert Hoover had declined the invitation. Roosevelt called in at the general hospital to visit Zahn.

“Mr. Roosevelt,” Zahn said, “I'll race even with a broken arm.”

Roosevelt told the press, “Bravo, this Zahn is a brave fellow.”

Roosevelt was less impressed with his wife, Eleanor, who decided that she wanted to ride on the track “that had put so many contestants in the hospital.” Dewey gladly fixed it for her, thinking it would be good PR. He had Hank Homburger drive her down the final half mile of the course, with the brakes on all the way as a concession to her husband's “evident anxiety.”

The day before the opening ceremony, in his grand eve-of-Olympics preview, Neil laid it out like this: “Almost every team of the 21 two-man combinations and the 15 four-man teams that have practiced here have been in one accident or another on the slide. Only the American ace, Harry Homburger, Saranac Lake, and his rivals, Hubert and Curtis Stevens, seem immune through knowledge of the course.”

As for Billy Fiske, well, no one gave him much of a chance. He was on the team, most reckoned, only because the chairman of the committee happened to be doubling up as his brakeman. And for all his feats four years before in St. Moritz, he had shown nothing on the track in Lake Placid that suggested he could get anywhere close to winning the gold. With the world champion Werner Zahn out of the running, everyone agreed that the title should be Homburger's for the taking.

The Olympic program owned by Billy Fiske's young cousin, Newell. Lake Placid, 1932.