Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  This, then, was the kind of company the Fiskes were keeping. Even Dillon seemed a little overwhelmed by their high living. Billy’s father was entirely at ease in their company. The Polish government rewarded him with a medal, the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta, “for furthering good relations between Poland and the United States.” He was in his element.

  While his father was swanning about Europe, and his mother was making a home in Paris, Billy was packed off to boarding school in England. He was thirteen when he arrived in the village of Sutton Courtenay, just outside Oxford, to study at what he called “a somewhat unorthodox school.” The boys were allowed to keep pets, and he got himself a little Welsh terrier. Billy wasn’t there long, but these teenage years shaped him. At Sutton Courtenay, he began to grow into a man with the kind of independent mind that his father had always encouraged him to have. Billy came to settle down there, saying, “Altogether my roots are almost stronger here than any place I know.” He thought of it as home, perhaps because it was during the school holidays that he first started to travel on his own.

  When Billy turned fifteen, his father arranged for him to go to South America to spend a summer working on a sheep farm in the countryside outside Buenos Aires. He sailed in May, with a chaperone, and spent the summer with family friends his father had made through his work in the region with Dillon, Read & Co. “My first real trip by myself was when I went to South America,” Billy later said. “And I have commuted between continents ever since.” He did it, he explained, “just to see what it was like.” He didn’t seem to learn much about sheep farming, but he did feel the first stirrings of the wanderlust that would later lead him to travel around the world. He came back from Argentina through Rio, a city that made such an impression on him that he was idolizing it a decade later. When he first saw Sydney, he wrote that the harbor there “vies with Rio de Janeiro for the honor of being the most beautiful in the world. Any Australian will tell you Sydney is by far the winner whether he has seen Rio or not. But in spite of this I think Rio comes in a fairly easy first. Sydney Harbor seems to have more little ‘high-ways’ and ‘by-ways’ than Rio, but it has not got the marvelous sugar-loaf mountain or the background of high mountains. Its promontories and islands seem too well-covered by cheap houses, and somehow flat and squalid by comparison. After all I had heard about the beauties of Sydney Harbor I was just a bit disappointed. But perhaps I had been spoiled by seeing Rio first.”

  Billy was blessed with the means to indulge his appetite for adventure and to satisfy his inquiring mind. Later, he would write in his journal a couple of lines that served as a personal creed: “The two great characteristics to develop in any child are courage and justice. Broadly speaking, with these well-developed a person can face the world and be successful.” He came, over time, to be irritated by his father’s conservative streak and the way he put his banking work before his family, but he would never forget the pains his father had taken to teach him those very qualities, courage and justice. And whatever measures of them he possessed, he owed to his father. And, while he never would have said it about himself, everyone who knew him agreed that Billy had plenty of both. Years later, when Billy’s name was on the front pages of the papers and the tongues of American high society, “a young San Francisco society matron,” who had known him when she was a little girl in the south of France, told one reporter that “when he was 14 years old, Billy saved a man’s life at Biarritz—a drowning swimmer. The surf was too rough for the rescue boats, but not for Billy. He went out and got him.” There’s no way of knowing now whether her scanty story, like that of Billy racing in the Le Mans 24, is one of the many myths that grew up around him as the years went by. Whether the details are correct or not, the spirit of it is in keeping with what we know. Billy, just back from his travels in South America, was a brave young man in a hurry to “face the world.” And if he didn’t have any idea where he was heading in the long run, he at least knew where he was going to make his first stop: Switzerland, and St. Moritz.

  Billy Fiske and crew on the run, St. Moritz, 1928.

  CHAPTER 2

  A NEW SPORT

  To understand why St. Moritz came to hold such a fix on Billy Fiske’s mind, we need to turn back the best part of a century. The town, high in the Engadine valley, was once a sleepy sort of place. Tourists came for its mineral springs, which had been famous since the early sixteenth century, when Pope Leo X promised to grant absolution to anyone who took the waters. As late as the 1850s there were only two hundred year-round residents, their ranks swollen each summer by the tourists who came to soak their bones in the waters. The locals were perplexed that so few of their visitors stayed on once the summer was gone, since the sunshine carried on right through the winter, and were vexed by the fact that their trade fluctuated so wildly from one season to the next.

  Johannes Badrutt, the son of a local craftsman, bought a hotel in St. Moritz, the Pension Faller, in 1856. And like everyone else in the town, he soon found himself despairing about the seasonal slump in business. So, in the summer of 1864, he decided to make a wager with four of his British guests. They were deeply skeptical about the idea that the town would be a pleasant place to stay in the winter. He told them that if they returned to St. Moritz later that year and found that the weather wasn’t better than what they got in London—a low bar, that—then he would pay all the expenses for their trip. They took him up on it, and they arrived by horse-drawn sleigh that December “perspiring and nearly blinded by the sun.” Badrutt met them on the terrace of his hotel, in his shirtsleeves. He was so delighted to have won his bet that he paid their expenses anyway.

  Badrutt’s gamble worked. Word spread, and by the 1870s winter tourism was beginning to grow in St. Moritz. Badrutt, certainly, was doing well enough to find several thousand Swiss francs to spend on a rudimentary electric lighting system that he spotted at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878. By that Christmas, the grand dining room of his hotel was illuminated by electric lights, the first of their kind in Switzerland. They burned for only ninety minutes, and once they were on, you couldn’t turn them off again, but Badrutt wagered that the novelty and glamor of it would bring in extra customers. And he was right. The trouble was that once his guests had admired the lights, the lavish views, and had a long dinner or two, there wasn’t much else for them to do. A lot of his guests were invalids who came because they had been told the dry mountain air would be good for their tuberculosis. But, as one observer put it at the time, “the real disease that the people suffered from in St. Moritz was boredom.”

  With so much time on their hands, and so little to do, Badrutt’s British guests took to racing each other on little toboggans around the winding streets of the town. This was the start of the famous Cresta Run, a course that involved a headfirst trip downhill on a one-man sled, known today as a skeleton. The Cresta would become the most iconic winter sports venue in the world, but in its early years it infuriated the locals, who took to calling the riders the “English devils”—or at least so the Brits liked to think. It seems just as likely that they were saying “to hell with the English” and something got lost in the translation. The British riders set about organizing this new sport. They developed sleds with metal runners to increase the speed, and primitive steering mechanisms so they could exert at least a measure of control. Still, though, there were so many complaints from the imperiled locals that Badrutt felt compelled to have his staff carve out a couple of toboggan tracks down the slope that ran from the front of the Kulm Hotel, just to keep his guests off the roads. And it was there, in December 1888, that an Englishman named Wilson Smith found the best cure yet for the St. Moritz ennui. Smith had the lunatic idea of lashing together two of the toboggans and a plank of wood. He invited three of his friends to hop on with him, and they all took a run down the mountain together. Just like that, he invented the sport of bobsledding. The name comes from the way the riders had to rock back and fort
h to build up their momentum, just as a child rocks to gain height on a swing. Once going, the new bobsleds were by far the fastest thing on the slopes.

  Or so the story goes. Like many origin myths, this one is likely to have gained a little and lost a lot in the telling. The sleds certainly existed before Wilson Smith came along. In Canada and New England, bobsledding dates back to at least the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1887 the New York Times reported that the playwright Denman Thompson included a bobsledding scene in a production of his play The Old Homestead. When the producer suggested they use a toboggan instead, Thompson told him, “New Englanders don’t use toboggans, they use bobsleds.” So there was already a tradition of bobsledding in parts of North America. Earlier in that same decade, the sport had started to spread across to Europe. In February 1881, the British weekly newspaper the Graphic had run a story about “a new and most enjoyable pastime, namely, riding on a bob-sleigh” being practiced at Harrow School. “The fun consists in seven or eight people going downhill on a sleigh at a rate of 35 to 40 miles per hour.” The bob itself was made of “two cutters, or small sleighs, and between these a plank is laid about nine feet long, and fastened to the hind cutter by two bolts, thus rendering it stationary, and to the front one by one bolt, which enables this one to turn around on a pivot.” The pilot steered the sled by holding the front runners and pulling them to the left or right. “Though new to England,” the Graphic noted, “this ‘coasting’ is one of the favorite winter amusements in Canada, where it is alike popular with ladies and gentlemen, young and old.” This, then, seems to have been exactly the kind of contraption Smith was riding in St. Moritz nearly eight years later. And so the Wilson Smith story can be consigned to the “good if it’s true” pile, along with that of Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, and William Webb Ellis creating rugby by picking up the ball during a school soccer match.

  It is clear that in the early years there were two separate schools of bobsledding: one in Canada and the United States, where it was seen as a hobby; and another in Switzerland and St. Moritz, where it soon become a sport. One early historian of the sport described it as “a pastime characterized by perfect liberty and constant variety of incident and scene.” You simply “gathered your crew, set out in any direction you wished, and returned when Providence of the weather or good pleasure decreed.” You just made sure to “avoid the precipices, if you could, and trust to luck to meet no other vehicles in the darkness.” A far more perilous business, this, then he makes it sound. In the United States, the bobsledding craze led to a spate of deaths. Between 1892 and 1906 the New York Times alone carried reports of twelve deaths in bobbing accidents, as sleds, sometimes laden with as many as sixteen riders, hurtled around busy streets, weaving in between—or as often as not colliding with—cars, trains, trams, horses, milk wagons, and pedestrians. The casualty list in that period ran into the hundreds. It’s one long litany of broken arms, smashed legs, fractured skulls, twisted ankles, crushed hands, gouged eyes, and gashed scalps. In the winter of 1908 there were so many crashes in the small town of Montclair, New Jersey, that the police banned bobsledding. “Public sentiment,” the Times reported after the latest smash-up between a bob and a trolley car, “will probably lead to an ordinance being adopted by the town council which will permanently abolish coasting on the streets of Montclair.”

  Back in Europe, the British were also looking to impose some kind of order on the fledgling sport. In 1897 the St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club was formed; the cost of subscription was ten Swiss francs per person per season, worth around two U.S. dollars at the time. At first the preferred run was down the Cresta Road, along the very same route used by the tobogganers, not to mention all the other traffic through the town. Rule six in the SMBC’s book stated that “as far as is possible traffic will be directed to give each bob a clear course, but no allowance can be made for the fact that a bob has been delayed by meeting a sleigh.” The SMBC soon realized that it needed to build a dedicated bobsled run.

  By now St. Moritz had become a busy place. Business had been so good for the Badrutt family that in 1892 they’d purchased a second hotel in the town, the Beau Rivage. Johannes’s son, Caspar, ran it. He traveled to Zurich to hire the leading Swiss architectural firm of Chiodera & Tschudy to convert it into the Palace Hotel. It took a team of five hundred Italian workmen four years to finish it. When they were done, the Badrutts were the owners of two of the very finest hotels in Europe.

  With so many idle rich around town each winter, the SMBC soon found a few wealthy sportsmen willing to stump up 20,000 Swiss francs to help pay for the construction of a dedicated bobsled track, the world’s first. The backers were a cosmopolitan and aristocratic bunch. There were 200 francs from a German prince, 500 from a fellow count. An Irish marquess and an English army captain provided another 500 each. Finally, Count Larisch contributed 650 francs. His wife, Countess Marie Larisch, was a niece and confidante of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. Later Marie Larisch’s descriptions of sledding in the Alps so enchanted the poet T. S. Eliot that he used them as inspiration for these apt lines from The Waste Land:

  And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,

  My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,

  And I was frightened. He said, Marie,

  Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

  In the mountains, there you feel free.

  The new course opened in 1902. It started at the top of the hill, in what was now known as Badrutt’s Park, up by the Kulm Hotel. From there it wound down through avenues of pine trees into the valley below, until it made a sudden turn to dip down beneath an arch of the railway bridge, and then ran onto the finish by Cresta village. Now that St. Moritz had a specialist bob track, it meant that most of the people who crashed—and plenty did—were unlikely to suffer anything much worse than “a sudden nose-rubbing in the snow,” as one observer put it. Crowds gathered around the key corners, named Devil’s Dyke, Sunny, and Horseshoe, where the bob would swing round in about twice its own length, hoping to catch a glimpse of a crash so they could enjoy a “Roman holiday,” their schadenfreude made all the sweeter by the fact that the sled’s occupants “would usually be seen within a few seconds completing their journey with great cheerfulness.”

  The development of a dedicated course and a few rudimentary safety measures meant that the sport was a lot less dangerous than the ad hoc version they were practicing in the United States at this time. In St. Moritz, during this brief period after the move off public roads and before it became too fast for anyone but the brave to try, bobsledding was a sport that almost anyone could have a go at. And almost everyone did. The Cresta Run, which used single-seater toboggans, may have been more thrilling, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was more fun. Bobsledding was altogether more sociable. In fact, it was a perfect sport for flirts. In the early days, the SMBC had a rule stipulating that every bob should contain at least one woman. “She is not permitted to steer or brake, man-made law debarring her from her natural functions,” reported an especially wry “Special Correspondent” in the Times in 1909, “but in an early Victorian way she adds to the amenities of the bobbing life. The sleighs which pull the bobs back hold only two, and it is hers to decide which of the crew shall drive with her up the hill. She attends to the crew’s apparel, and decorates it further with the badge of the bob. Further she likes bobbing, and the bobbers like her; as the heroine of ‘Josephine vendue par ses soeurs’ said to her sister when suggesting that she should marry the guardian of the hareem, ‘There is not much to do, and after all it is a position.’” A turn on Badrutt’s bobsleigh run was now the key attraction in the burgeoning winter resort of St. Moritz. “The track is the meeting place of the whole population, regardless of age, rank, or nationality,” the Times reported. There, the tourists would often wager with one another on the races.

  Some felt that the specialist course was a step too far, a perversion, almost, of the am
ateur spirit of the sport. “The fact is,” ran a 1904 editorial in the Alpine-Post, “that the expert, record-breaking, almost professional element has laid its hands on bobsleighing.” The Times agreed: “There can be little doubt that the true sport of bobbing is best enjoyed on a road, but there can be none that a public road is the most unsuitable place for a bob race.” It bemoaned, too, “the almost excessive number of cups and prizes to be won” since, while “it is an easy matter for well-to-do people taking a holiday in Switzerland to offer some prize, and it is a form of spending that offers obvious attractions,” it “engendered a spirit of pot-hunting,” which the paper considered altogether too vulgar. Bobsledding, only a few years old, was already starting to become a serious sport. The British press began to carry regular reports on the races in St. Moritz. A timing mechanism was introduced. Threads were strung across the start and finish lines. When the sled broke the first, the clock started, and when it snapped the second, the clock stopped.