by Andy Bull
Billy was a natural. On January 11 he completed a boblet run in 1:47.5, the single fastest time of the season. He loved the sport so much that when Martineau purchased five new bobsleds for the club from a manufacturer in Davos, Billy persuaded his father to buy one for him. He was lucky: “In the gay old days,” Martineau wrote, “few people could afford to buy their own bobs.” Back then the bobs all had their own names. In fact, they would be listed first in the results; the steerer’s name came second, out of courtesy, so it seemed as though it was the bob that won the race. “Every bob thereby acquired a character of its own,” Martineau wrote. “They became personalized. And when it changed hands, one had the impression of a race-horse being bought-and-sold.” Billy called his “Satan.” His good friend Jennison Heaton bought another and named it “Hell.” The names led one Englishman, often beaten by both of them, to wonder how “any one was expected to beat such a diabolical combination as that.”
You would scarcely recognize Satan as a sled today. It looked a little like a camp bed with a steering wheel where the pillow ought to be. It was a long, flat frame spanned by a series of metal bars with two long rails on either side and metal runners underneath. There was a brake at the back, though it was considered a sin to use it during the run, since its metal teeth cut up the ice. And at the front, flat down, parallel to the ground, was the little wheel. Back then they were still bobbing in the ventre à terre style: the pilot got on first and lay along the sled, his feet pointing toward the brake; the second rider lay between the pilot’s legs, his chest overlapping with the pilot’s back; the third was flat on top of the second, a little farther back; and so on, right back to the brake. Only the steerer saw the course; the crew behind him buried their faces in the backs of the person in front and weren’t supposed to glance left or right for even a fraction of a second during the run. They were, in effect, a deadweight, remaining motionless until the steerer called out “Left!” or “Right!”—when they would all lean over to that side. The only exception was the brake, who was allowed to get up on his knees before the corners and bob back and forth to help the sled build up speed. Leaning meant that the sled took the corner without any loss of speed, and made it easier to steer. And good bobbing, that back-and-forth motion, made a real difference to the speed of the sled. Ventre à terre was pretty much foolproof in that while a bad or rookie crew wouldn’t help the sled speed along, they couldn’t cause it to crash so long as they made sure to just stay still. This meant that the onus was entirely on the steerer and, to a much lesser extent, the brakeman.
That first year, the logbook of the St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club singled out two qualities in Billy’s driving: “W. Fiske,” as they called him then, was an “intrepid” and “hard-working” steerer. And here we get the first two clues about what made him such a great driver.
Every bob course in the world is different. Each has its own personality. There aren’t really any hard-and-fast rules about, for instance, how to handle a corner, because each corner on each track is different from every other one. Some demand that you take the sled in low, some that you take it in high, some that you hold the line around the bend, some that you snap out of it before you’ve finished the corner. At the elite level—the level Billy was working at—the driver can control the position of the sled to within a margin of around three inches. And those three inches matter. Because every bob course has a perfect line. Steve Holcomb, the 2010 Olympic gold medalist in the four-man bob and the greatest pilot in the United States today, explains: “You could draw a line on the track. Follow it, and that would be the absolute fastest way down. And if you hit it the entire way, with a good push, you would destroy the track record. The catch is that you are never on that line; you are always changing. You can go into the first corner, the second, the third, maybe even six, seven, and still be on that perfect line. But to hit it the entire way down? That happens once, twice, in your entire career. I can think of runs where I was like, ‘Man, that was it.’ But, always, you can go back over it in your mind and be like, ‘Ah, I missed these little points.’ That perfect line is what everybody strives for.”
The more familiar a pilot is with the course, the better he knows that line. So when Billy is described as “hard-working,” what that means is that he spent a lot of time learning the ins, outs, and twists of the course, calculating, to the nearest inch, where the sled needed to be at any one particular moment on the track. For an amateur, he practiced a lot. And that work ethic and quest for precision would come to characterize his racing. Billy’s friends recalled that later in his life, when he was racing a skeleton sled on the Cresta Run, he had a little party trick that proved how well he knew the course. He would stand, blindfolded, in the bar at the Palace Hotel, with a stopwatch. He would call “Start!” and click the watch, then count off the corners one by one, describing his run down the course yard by yard. And when he called “Finish!” and stopped the watch, the times for his imaginary runs would invariably be within a few tenths of his real ones.
Hard work wasn’t the half of it. The second quality Billy had is captured in that word “intrepid.” Remember, a company of men who rode bobsleds for kicks singled him out for being particularly brave. They had all done the run themselves—all had their own scrapes and crashes. They were all brave. But the best were braver still. As Steve Holcomb explains: “There are a number of drivers who are great drivers, they are passionate, they love the sport, they know what they are doing. But they don’t want to take that risk. They don’t want to push it. I raced with a guy who was a phenomenal driver, but he was more worried about going over the edge than he was about winning. He would rather get down safely and successfully than actually push the speed of the sled. And you really have to push the speed. Because you know that somebody else out there—the guys you are racing against—has the guts to push it hard. So to be the best, you don’t just need the skill to drive the sled; you need to be prepared to take the risks. And that’s tough.” When Holcomb talks about “pushing it,” what he means is having the patience to wait, to let the sled run right up to the top of the bank before you steer it back; to let it veer right over on to its side, to the very point when it could be about to tip over, before you pull it around. All part of that never-ending quest to find the perfect line.
Of course Billy wasn’t the only talented pilot in town. There were the Heaton brothers, for a start, especially the younger pair, his good friends Jack and Jennison. The three of them would run around town together, along with Billy’s sister, Peggy. She and Jennison were falling in love. Then there were the British, the best of them Martineau’s young son Henry, and Cecil Pim, a captain in the Scots Guards. The Belgian Ernest Casimir-Lambert, whom everyone called “Henri,” was so brave they thought him a fool. “He was always a source of tremendous danger to the other riders,” remembered Martineau. He recalled the day when Lambert arrived, “late as usual,” for a competition on the Cresta Run sled track. The organizer, Frank Curzon, was so angry that as Lambert set off on his run, he shouted out, “You ought to go down on your knees!” Lambert didn’t realize it was a figure of speech and set off crouching on his sled. “Frank was in a terrible state,” Martineau wrote. “He was calling out, ‘He’s going to kill himself! He’s going to kill himself!’” And then there was the “hot-blooded Argentine” Arturo Gramajo, the man who had unmasked Mademoiselle Krasnowski at that SMBC prize ceremony. “[He was] one of a number of Argentinians who frequented Paris and St. Moritz during those years,” said Martineau. “They were all good sportsmen, as well as having the necessary cash; consequently they were popular wherever they went.”
The blue riband race of the season, the one they all wanted to win, was the Bobsleigh Derby Cup. The prize was a silver cup that had been presented to the club by John Jacob Astor back in 1899—a gift from one of the richest men in the world, thirteen years before he went down with the Titanic. It went to whoever could put together the four fastest runs over two days
of competition. Few gave Billy, the new boy, much of a chance. But he was confident. He had five yellow polo-neck sweaters made up for his team, each with “Satan” stitched across the front. His father had faith too. The club used to run what they called a “Calcutta auction,” with bidders competing to buy the rights to the racers in a sweepstake. Billy’s father paid 550 francs to get his son’s ticket for the derby.
And he collected on it. Billy didn’t just win the Derby Cup; he took another prize, too, the Olavegoya Cup, for the single fastest run over the course of the two days. And two days later he won more silverware, the St. Leger Trophy. So in his very first few weeks as a bobsledder, the fifteen-year-old Billy Fiske won three trophies, one of them the single most prestigious pot on offer in St. Moritz.
Billy’s victories barely made the papers in either Britain or the United States, which seems surprising: you’d think that even by the more reserved standards of the day, a fifteen-year-old winning the biggest bobsled race of the season in St. Moritz might have merited more than a passing mention. But Billy didn’t make much of a fuss about his age. In fact, few of his fellow racers knew just how young he was. And besides, by then St. Moritz was only one of a series of Swiss bobsled tracks, and while the races there may have been more prestigious than some of the others simply by dint of their history, the papers now took reports from the rival runs at Davos and Interlaken. The SMBC was particularly worried about the development of a run in nearby Celerina, “which, as far as one can see, will sound the death knell of the SMBC.” Martineau considered it “an ominous black cloud in the sky which, if it bursts, will mean the flooding and disappearance of the SMBC run.” The St. Moritz run was aging, and seemed a little slow and decrepit in comparison with some of these newer courses at rival resorts, which were thought to provide better sport. St. Moritz needed a major event, a race that would fix the world’s focus on the town, give the SMBC the opportunity to reestablish its course as the premier bob run in Switzerland and its sledders the opportunity to prove themselves the best in the world.
“And then,” noted the club log at the end of 1927, “floating out of the sky, came the Winter Olympics.”
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If it seems odd that the club and its community could be caught short by an event the size of the Winter Olympics, understand that in the 1920s it was a far smaller and less significant competition than the one we know today. Baron Pierre de Coubertin, the founder of the International Olympic Committee, was never keen on the idea of the Winter Olympics. Figure skating had been included in the summer Olympic program in 1908, and again in 1920, when it was joined by ice hockey, but de Coubertin was skeptical about whether winter sports were worth including. “Modern industry has managed to create artificial ice,” he wrote in 1909, “but it is hardly reasonable to expect that the time will come when a perfected form of chemistry will be able to place durable, long-lasting snow on hillsides. Thus skating is the only one of the three great winter sports that might be included within the Olympic enclosure if necessary. It would be better to adopt a solution in which these special sports are grouped together in winter, under the title ‘Northern Games.’” Which is what had happened: the Nordic Games for winter sports were founded in 1901. Though nominally international, the Nordic Games were always hosted in Stockholm, with the exception of a single edition in Oslo, and were contested largely by Scandinavian athletes. The upshot was that Norway, Sweden, and Finland, three of the leading winter sports nations, were, like de Coubertin, never keen on the idea of a Winter Olympics, since they felt it would be trespassing on their turf.
Despite de Coubertin’s objections, the IOC did decide to stage a winter sports week in 1924 at Chamonix, in France. The proposal had been made by the Marquis de Polignac, a French IOC member; he was supported by the Swiss, Italian, and Canadian delegations. It was held as a precursor to that year’s summer Olympics in Paris. It wasn’t a separate competition, and it certainly wasn’t billed as a Winter Olympics. It was called, instead, the “International Week of Winter Sports.” Only five sports were contested, and just sixteen countries represented. So it was a thoroughly low-key affair at which, one journalist wrote, “everyone knew each other, at least by sight, because no team was composed of more than 30 or 40 competitors.” It was a success, however, so the IOC decided to recognize the event retrospectively as the first Winter Olympic Games, and to stage another in 1928.
Ideally the second Winter Olympics (but the first to go by that name from the outset) would be held in the Netherlands, as the Summer Games were due to be held in Amsterdam, but Holland isn’t overly blessed with mountains. Instead, they were awarded to St. Moritz. The town had only a couple of years to get ready, and soon started gearing up. A new ski jump, the tallest in the world, was built, and new stands were put up around the ice rink. A deluxe train service was laid on from the port of Calais to the Swiss border, and plans were made to open up the hotels around the spa, which were typically closed outside summer months, to house the extra visitors.
Otherwise, life went on much as it always did in winter. In fact the organizers were especially keen to stress that the Games wouldn’t impose on the tourist season. “Ordinary visitors must not imagine that preparations for the much-talked-of Olympiad will in any way interfere with their convenience or curtail their activities,” read a report in the UK Times. “Far otherwise. The rinks and runs will be used as always up to the second week in February, and all the usual competitions and sporting events will be organized. Olympic teams and competitors will arrive in January.”
For the Bobsled Club, the Games promised a season of “great sport, since men with bobs from every country will be represented there, practically for the whole season.” The members relished the chance to compete against the best bobsledders from around the world. There would be twenty-five nations at the Games, with Holland, Romania, Germany, Latvia, Argentina, Japan, and Mexico all taking part for the first time. The bobsledding competition included twenty-three teams from fifteen nations—115 athletes in all, since they were riding five-man sleds. That made it the largest bobsledding competition in the sport’s short history.
One thing that wasn’t clear at first was whether the United States would be a part of it. Bobsledding had been invented in the United States, but it had been perfected in Europe. There wasn’t a single course in North America, and the United States Olympic Committee wasn’t at all sure it wanted to foot the cost of sending over to Europe the few drivers who did feel able to compete. In fact it wasn’t even clear whether the USOC wanted to send a team to the Games at all. As late as April 8, 1927, they were still discussing whether or not the United States would be represented in St. Moritz. They decided to delay the decision until the committee could “ascertain just how much support the winter sport governing bodies in the country would lend the project.”
The USOC needed to corral together a disparate group of governing bodies and amateur sports organizations from across all Olympic disciplines. The new president of the USOC, Major General Douglas MacArthur, had been appointed to the job in 1927 on the strength of the reforms he’d made to the athletics program at West Point military academy. Years before George Orwell first coined the phrase, MacArthur was a firm believer that sport was war minus the shooting. He had these words engraved in the stone outside the West Point gym:
UPON THE FIELDS OF FRIENDLY STRIFE
ARE SOWN THE SEEDS
THAT, UPON OTHER FIELDS, ON OTHER DAYS,
WILL BEAR THE FRUITS OF VICTORY.
MacArthur’s speech to the US Olympic team in Amsterdam that summer of 1928 included the famous line “We have not come so far just to lose gracefully, but rather to win, and win decisively.” He wasn’t interested in the idea of fielding a Winter Olympic team for its own sake, or in paying the traveling and accommodation costs of athletes who had little chance of winning. Under MacArthur, the USOC decided that it would provide guarantees only for the figure and speed skater
s; competitors in other sports would have to prove their worth, or pay their own way to Europe.
The USOC appointed a man named Gustavus T. Kirby to be its delegate to the Winter Olympics. Kirby was a New York attorney, “tall, distinguished, and of brisk bearing,” as his obituary in the New York Times had it. He was a troubleshooter, with a “particular facility for placating dissident groups” (the Times again) in the world of sports administration. It fell to him to whip the United States’ Winter Olympics team into some kind of shape. Kirby knew plenty of people. He had played tennis and golf, been a yachtsman and a horse rider. He was a familiar figure on the New York steeplechasing scene. He hosted a prestigious horse show at his ranch in Westchester, and even invented a camera timer for photo-finishes in close races. So of course he was friends with Jay O’Brien.
By 1927, Jay was the keystone of St. Moritz high society. He had charmed the British members of the SMBC with his easy manner and apparent sportsmanship. Hubert Martineau had appointed him to the SMBC’s committee in 1926. It helped that O’Brien had bought the club a cup, the Boblet Grand Prix, as a prize for one of its races. He was beginning to make plans, too, for a new ski club in St. Moritz. His partners in this scheme were all European aristocrats: the Duke of Alba, the Duke of Sangro, Prince Boncompagni, and the Marquis de Polignac. It would, in time, become the prestigious Corviglia ski club. And he was at ease among the Americans, of course. Jay knew the Heatons and the Fiskes; he knew everyone who was anyone, whatever station of life they were in. One story goes that at the Cresta Ball in St. Moritz early in the winter of 1928, the guests were puzzled by three empty tables in a choice corner. The room was overflowing with people but the prime seats were reserved. Eyebrows were cocked upward, quizzically. They lowered again when Jay arrived, fashionably late, with the former Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of the kaiser, on one side, and Gene Tunney, heavyweight boxing champion of the world, on the other.