Speed Kings (29 page)

When the ceremony was over and the last medal had been handed out, Count de Baillet-Latour declared the Games closed. And as he spoke, his breath caught in front of him, condensed in the air, hung like smoke. Then snowflakes started to fall, each one illuminated by the bright spotlights shining on the flags. The athletes started to stamp their feet: the slush had begun to freeze. The cold weather was back.

The IOC's regulations allowed the organizers a single day's grace. After the closing ceremony there was a twenty-four-hour window to finish any events that had been left uncompleted. It didn't take the bobsled committee long to make their decision. The race was on. Word soon spread: the next morning, Sunday, February 14, they would run all four heats of the race back to back. Dewey panicked. He was terrified that after all the rain, the run would be nothing but glare ice, too fast to be safe, too dangerous to sell. The last thing he wanted now that the Games were over was another crash, and the ensuing rash of bad publicity for the run. If they were going to race after all, it would be on his terms. The organizing committee sent a party of 150 volunteers out to the mountain that evening. They were up all night working to get the course ready, “searching for snow,” Ed Neil wrote, “as though they were hunting rabbits.” They waded through the woods and shoveled snow into lorries, which drove over to the run. There it was unloaded and packed into the straights.

That night the atmosphere in the Cellar Athletic Club was a little different. A tension was in the air. The good spirits the sledders had shown earlier in the
week were gone. Westbrook Pegler sat down for a drink with Eddie Eagan. For once, the writer wasn't feeling sarcastic. He liked Eddie. Admired him even. And he just couldn't understand what such a man, “a collector of degrees, more or less settled down to practice as a criminal lawyer,” was doing risking his neck in a sport like this. “Young Mr. Eagan has spent years educating himself at Yale, Harvard, and Oxford, he has honors galore, money, a family and position, and yet he has been taking these risks for weeks in practice,” Pegler wrote. “Why?”

The answer, Eddie said, was glory. “Our team is going to win this race. When that race starts, there will be no such thing as caution. We will forget the brake. It won't be touched. We are going to bob together on every turn to drive the sled through. Everything will depend on the steering. But we have confidence in Billy Fiske. If he loses the sled, we all take our chances. People say ‘you might be crippled.' But if we come through we will win that race. That would be worth it.”

“Bobsledding in the Olympic style never will be a sport of the masses anywhere,” Pegler wrote, skewering Dewey's dream in the space of a single sentence (and he was right). “However, the Lake Placid people, with much money invested in their bob run, now deplore the very publicity which drew more attendance to their show than any other single attraction.” It was possible, he continued, to bob conservatively, to run with brakes on, kicking up showers of shaved ice all the way and landing safe at the finish. But Eddie scoffed at that. “Bobbing with brakes?” he said. “I'd just as soon go for a street car ride.” What was going to happen on Mount Van Hoevenberg that Sunday morning was something else altogether. Something more serious, more deadly than the safety-first version Dewey was peddling to the public. The bobsledders, Pegler wrote, would be “slick, fast, and perilous”; they “were supposed to forget everything,” to “forget the brakes and bob their bodies in unison going into curves to make momentum in a race for hundredths of seconds.”

Their conversation was “honeyed with jests,” but neither Pegler nor Eagan were in any doubt about the risks. “What if you are killed?” Eddie said at one point. “You go one way or another.” And at the end of the night, Pegler said, “The bobbers stood up. Nobody got sick. Nobody was called home unexpectedly. Nobody overslept.”

—

N
o one had ever seen anything quite like the scenes at Mount Van Hoevenberg that Sunday morning, not at a bobsled race. There must have been a
thousand cars in the parking lot at the bottom of the mountain. Anyone who came late had to park a mile away and walk the rest, and anyone who couldn't drive or catch a lift came by foot, bus, or carriage. The traffic was so thick that it took two hours to travel the short distance from the town to the mountain. The bobsledding final was the only show in town, and everyone had come to watch. The best estimates reckoned there were twenty-five thousand there, spilling out of the grandstands, crowding onto the hummocks of high ground that overlooked the corners, standing on the road that ran up alongside the course. They were lined five or six deep from the foot of the run right up to the very top. The public address continually had to ask people to stand back from the track so they would be safe from harm.

But the run itself was in a sorry state. The ice was worn so thin that the wooden boards were showing through on some of the banks. At Eyrie, a stream of water seeped through the ledge and puddled up on the bottom of the track. The rain had eaten away at the rims of the run, and the ice walls had jagged edges, like the teeth of a saw. And then, in the straights, Dewey's teams of volunteers had packed so much snow into the run the previous night that the sleds almost stopped dead as they passed through them, “as if,” the
New York Times
reported, “the brakeman had applied all his strength to the steel prongs.” In conditions like that, who knew what the perfect racing line was? The run was a fluid thing, and the shape it had taken in this weather was unfamiliar even to Homburger, who knew it better than anyone. The drivers would need to sense all those slow spots on the track, the puddles and piles of snow, and then steer around them. So much for practice. This would be a test of instinct.

Three weeks earlier, thirteen teams had been entered for the event. Since then, six had fallen away. The last withdrawal happened that very morning, when the first Swiss team, led by Donald Unger, pulled out because they simply didn't believe the course was safe to ride. So there were only seven teams left, the survivors “seven reckless, iron-nerved pilots” and their crews. There were the Romanians, led by the stunt pilot Lieutenant Alexei Papan; the Italians, led by Count Rossi; and the Swiss, a late entry, led by Reto Capadrutt, keen to exact revenge for his defeat in the two-man competition. Capadrutt was the only driver in the field who insisted on using a sled steered by rope pulleys rather than a wheel, which meant he was handicapped from the start. Then there was Walther von Mumm's screwball group, only recently recruited to the sport. Most reckoned it would be a miracle if they could just get down without breaking their necks. Finally, the contenders, the three favorites in the betting: Germany's
Hans Kilian and the two American sleds, No. 1 driven by Billy Fiske and No. 2 by Hank Homburger.

From the moment the first sled set off, it was obvious that the times were going to be slow. Capadrutt finished in 2:06. Papan and Rossi were slower still. Mumm, of course, was well back, in 2:11—over twenty seconds slower than the times the top teams had achieved earlier in the week. Then came Kilian, his team bobbing together to try to wring every little drop of extra forward momentum they could from the sled. Even he could make only 2:03.11. Next up, the Red Devils. There were, the
Times
said, “involuntary exclamations of awe from the crowd as Homburger swept past each point.” The Red Devils were kitted out in extraordinary leather helmets, which covered their entire faces. “They looked like automatons rushing down the course.” The times came over the PA as the sled traveled. They were 1:46 coming out of Zig-Zag into the home straight, and then they hit a thick patch of snow. It stripped them of all their speed. When they broke the thread attached to the electronic clock at the bottom of the course, the timer stopped at 2:01.77—the quickest of the day but still slow by Homburger's standards. Billy's team was last to go. They reached Zig-Zag in 1:47—a little slower. But he brought the sled right around the thickest part of the same patch of snow and stopped the clock at 2:00.52. He had the lead.

While Billy was steering, he was charting the course in the back of his mind. It took four runs to win the title, not one, and he knew better than to blow it all out on this first run. He used this first trip for reconnaissance. He made mental notes about the slush puddles and snow piles, plotted a quicker route for his next run. And it showed. On the second run, Kilian got his time down to just under 2:02. Homburger was a little quicker, just outside 2:01. But Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay broke the two-minute barrier. 1:59.16. With two runs to go, they led the Red Devils by a little more than three seconds.

When Billy hit the ramp at the bottom of that second run, there was a gaggle of athletes and officials waiting. He could see right away that something was up, since the first teams should have already been back at the top of the mountain, ready to make their third descent. He climbed off the sled and walked into an almighty row. The Red Devils were in the thick of it, along with officials from the organizing committee and the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation, surrounded on all sides by eager onlookers and journalists with their notebooks out. He could hear shouting. It was Paul Stevens. He had buttonholed Erwin Hachmann, the man in charge of the course that day. “If you insist on making us race in these conditions,” Stevens said, “you'll go on without
us. We're through racing today. It's a travesty on bob-racing. We came down so slow I had time to get off at Shady and fetch myself a drink.”

Stevens was on strike. He had had enough of Dewey's meddling. Control of the track had been handed over to the European members of the International Federation, but they were just as keen as Dewey to keep the track running slow, since it suited the European drivers. They'd done their work so well that the American riders considered the slowness of the course an insult to the sport. Soon, Henry McLemore wrote, it was a mutiny. The rest of the Red Devils joined in with Stevens, and then Hans Kilian declared that he, too, was going to pull out of the race unless something was done to speed the course up. “The snow had slowed the course to a sluggish descent that would hardly baffle a kid,” Neil wrote. “The crowd of 25,000 was starting to wonder who started those stories about the thrills of bobsledding as they watched sleds plow through several inches of snow, slowing down almost to stopping at some points.”

As for Billy and Jay, they kept their thoughts to themselves. They were in first place, after all. But when it became clear which way the weight of opinion was falling, they, too, nodded their assent to the strike. There would be little satisfaction to be had, Billy realized, in beating the Red Devils if they had a ready-made excuse. All right then. He'd beaten them twice on a slow track, he could beat them twice more on a quick track. Whichever way they wanted it.

“The officials stomped their feet in rage,” McLemore wrote. “The officials coaxed and teased. The officials threatened all manner of dire things. But the bobsledders stood firm.” Eventually, after an hour's argument, the officials caved in. They called the races off for the day, even though that meant they would now take place after the IOC's twenty-four-hour window had shut. They didn't like it. But they didn't have any choice. That night, the volunteer workforce was out again, undoing all the work they'd done the night before. They raked away all the snow they'd shoveled onto the course a day earlier and sprayed it with water until it glistened in the moonlight. At last the sledders had gotten the kind of track they'd wanted all along. “This,” wrote Neil, “is now a course for Americans, with American speed.”

The Suicide Club met for the final time early on the morning of Monday the 15th. The Olympics had been over for two days already, but twenty-eight athletes had business to settle on the mountain. The crowds had already split up and quit town, even Billy's own family. There were only around seven thousand fans left. The grandstands weren't even full. It was a bitterly cold morning. And the run, Neil wrote, was “a huge open conduit of twisted, burned silver,” one
long ribbon of ice winding down the mountain. It looked quick. And it was. Capadrutt and Papan both cut their times down to a shade over two minutes flat. Kilian broke the barrier, finishing in 1:58.19, which was quicker even than Homburger, who clocked 1:58.56. And then there was Billy Fiske. Fastest again. As he had been in all three rounds. His time was 1:57.41. That meant he had a lead of 4.33 seconds going into the final run. But Homburger, at his quickest, had done the run in 1:47, ten seconds faster than the time Billy had just set. Homburger was sure he could find four or five seconds in a single run if he needed to. And he needed to now.

There is a second line that all bobsledders have to keep in mind. The first, we know, is the fastest path down the mountain, the racing route, high into one corner, low out of another, high into the next. The second line is in the mind. It's the one that marks that outer limit. Cross it, and you crash. Because when you reach the far side, that's when the sled flips over and you wind up unconscious on the track like René Fonjallaz, or the sled flies off track and you finish up in hospital with a broken arm, back, or skull, like Zahn, Grau, and Brehme. “The best drivers in the world,” says Steve Holcomb, “are the drivers who know exactly where that edge is.” They can push their sled right up to it, to the point where the runners are shrieking, and voices inside the riders' minds are screaming, and then they hold it there. Right on the line. “You go over that edge, and you will crash,” says Holcomb. “And if you hang back from it, you will lose. Because every single guy out on that track is pushing it as far and as hard as they can. Right to the edge. So that's where you have to take it. And that's where you have to hold it.” And that was the line Billy hit on his fourth and final run.