Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  Jay O’Brien knew a thing or two about fixing from the days when he ran with Arnold Rothstein in New York, betting on racing and baseball. He wasn’t surprised by anything. And all that aside, he now knew what his teams would be for the Olympics. John “Jack” Heaton would drive USA 1, Billy Fiske USA 2. He began to assemble their crews accordingly. He would ride as brakeman in the No. 1 sled himself, alongside Heaton and three men he seemed to pick on the strength of their social credentials as much as their sporting ones. Two of them were financiers: Lyman Hine, president of the American Cotton Oil Company, and David Grainger, a trader who had just bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $143,000. (They had contrasting fates ahead of them. Hine died in a car wreck in Paris in 1930, at the age of forty-one. Grainger ended up holding on to that NYSE seat for seventy-six years—a record. He was still going to work in his Wall Street office in his nineties.) The final member was Tom Doe Jr., only fifteen but an athletic lad, and, just as pertinently, the son of the president of Eastern Air Transport Inc. The second team would take the three rookies, Nion Tucker, Geoff Mason, and Clifford Gray, with old hand Dick Parke as brake.

  Billy had the disadvantage of racing with a largely green crew, most of whom had never even been on a bobsled until they arrived in St. Moritz, and in Mason’s case had only had a fortnight to prepare for the Games. They were an unlikely lot—a sixteen-year-old pilot and three men who had only just taken up the sport. They were racing ventre à terre, though, which meant that their inexperience wasn’t quite the handicap it might have been otherwise. When you’re lying down, overlapping like slates on a roof, there’s a limit to how much you can roll from side to side, so sudden movements or miscalculations don’t have the same dramatic effect on the momentum of the sled as they do when you’re sitting up. But while such things wouldn’t actively hinder the sled, they wouldn’t do much to urge it on either. A well-drilled crew, one that knows how to bob in rhythm before the corners and lean in concert as they go around them, can add vital speed and help trim those crucial tenths of seconds from the time. The man in the middle seat of the five has to be able to absorb the bobbing of the two riders behind him and, by clenching onto the rails of the sled, convert their rocking into extra speed for the vehicle. This was the role Mason had taken on. He had been practicing it with the Polish crew, who had lost a member to illness, as well as with the Americans, because he wanted to put in as many hours as he could before the big race.

  Billy encouraged him to do exactly that. He knew Jack Heaton well. In fact, the two of them were pretty much best friends. So Billy had a keen awareness of Heaton’s flaws. Once, writing in his journal, he described “a damn good dinner” the two of them had eaten together, during which “Jack made the statement that ‘Independence is the only thing worth striving for.’” Billy thought there “was something in it” but found it “a bit far fetched” since Jack “hasn’t strived very hard so far, but he certainly seems to have reached his end.” He felt Jack was talented, but a little lazy. Billy knew that if he had an edge, it would be in the effort he and his crew put in. So he set the five of them to work, making them take run after run after run down the course at St. Moritz, drilling them until they knew each of the turns intimately and could anticipate whether they needed to lean left or right without waiting for Billy to shout it out. They had only a week to get ready for the Olympic bobsled race. Billy wanted to be sure they used the time wisely. He insisted that Gray and Parke bob together on the straights, and Parke bob alone going into the corners. He taught Mason how to absorb the shock of the two riders behind him throwing themselves onto his back, and how to transmit that energy into the sled. Tucker’s job, in the No. 2 seat, was simply to hold Billy fast and act as a buffer between the driver and the bobbers behind.

  Billy came to be quietly confident in his crew, but he wasn’t the only rider who fancied his chances. A lot of money was being bet on Lambert, spoiling for a second shot after being foiled by sabotage prior to the Derby. The British papers were talking up the chances of their riders, the current world champion Henry Martineau and Cecil Pim, the captain in the Scots Guards. Pim had crashed in practice, shooting his sled over the top of Sunny Corner into a group of spectators, but he had recovered. And he had won eight races on the track the previous year. The outspoken Argentine Arturo Gramajo gleefully told the press that he could “certainly beat” Heaton’s winning time in the Derby, and that he expected the winning order to follow on from the alphabetical one, with Argentina in first place. From out of town there was the German crew of Hans Kilian, a crack driver, but one who had precious little experience on the St. Moritz track. And of course there was Heaton with his crew, composed of Jay’s pick of the US riders.

  On Saturday, February 11, the Olympics opened, and the weather broke. A strong wind came rushing down the Majola pass. It carried a heavy snowfall with it. And so the athletes were forced to march. Five thousand turned out to watch what should have been an impressive parade, but not many stayed till the end. It was seven degrees below zero. “The prevailing cold effectually prevented the presence of that dignity so essential to its success,” noted the Times. Most of the athletes were kitted out appropriately, in long fur coats, thick jerseys, and woolen stockings, but the International Olympic Committee’s officials were “clad immaculately in lounge suits and bowler hats,” a state of dress so ill suited to the conditions that it “moved the small crowd present to mirth rather than the desired solemn exaltation.”

  An official named Godfrey Dewey led the American team and carried the flag. Billy Fiske hardly knew him then and could have had no idea how much he would come to hate him in the years ahead. Gustavus Kirby followed him, with the ski jumpers, speed skaters, and figure skaters in short order behind, and the bobsled crews bringing up the rear. There were only twenty-six of them altogether, twenty-four athletes and two officials.

  The weather didn’t get any better for the next two days. It was so bad, in fact, that the uncovered stands were mostly empty at the figure skating and hockey rinks because the fans stayed packed into the hotels. Some of the athletes wished they could do likewise. There were, as was typical in the early days of the Olympics, some strange events on the program. Oddest of all was the military patrol, which was junked from the Olympics after 1948. Teams of athletes had to ski a twenty-mile course while carrying a rifle, rations, and other field equipment. It was open only to soldiers on active service and had been included largely as a sop to the Norwegians: they were aggrieved that the Olympics was competing with their own Nordic Games, but appeased by the fact that the program had been tailored to include plenty of events they could win. Like the military patrol. No one else had much of a chance. The event took place on a course that was so grueling that the papers reported that most of the athletes collapsed face-first into the snow once they’d crossed the finish line. One young Frenchman fell down, delirious, three miles from the finish, and was carried on the shoulders of his teammates for the rest of the way. Two of the four members of the Finnish team passed out after the race. All three were sent to hospital, where, according to one report, “hot grog and other stimulants were administered.” The Norwegians, on the other hand, felt in such fine fettle at the end of the four-hour-long race that they burst into a spontaneous rendition of their national anthem “at the top of their lungs.”

  On Tuesday, the sun emerged, and a thaw started. When everyone woke, they found it was raining. The snow on the streets turned to thick brown slush, and the ice at the skating rink was water. The 10,000-meter speed skating had started at midday. The competition was being run in heats, with the athletes split into pairs for the individual races. Whoever set the fastest time of the day would win the gold. The hot favorites were two Norwegians: Bernt Evanson, who had already won a gold in the 500-meter sprint, a silver in the 1,500-meter, and a bronze in the 5,000-meter; and Armand Carlsen, who had broken the world record for the event a fortnight earlier, with a time of 17:17.4.

>   Evanson was drawn in the first heat. He would be racing against an American, Irving Jaffee. Jaffee came from a Russian Jewish family who had immigrated to the United States at the turn of the century. He had been brought up in the Bronx and had dropped out of high school when he failed to make the varsity baseball team. He took a job as a cleaner at the Gay Blades ice rink on West 52nd Street in Manhattan, not least because it saved him the seventy-five-cent cost of admission when he wanted to go skating. He was good at it. In 1927 he won the national five-mile race, which earned him selection for the Olympic team. Jaffee was only nineteen, and it was the first time he had ever traveled outside New York.

  Good as Jaffee was, he was still the underdog for this 10,000-meter heat. Evanson duly took a decent lead over the first half of the race. Jaffee slipped three seconds back, but he managed to hold the gap there; then, as the two of them continued to circle around, over the slushy ice of the stadium, he began, ever so slowly, to pull his way back toward Evanson. And then, as they entered the home straight, Jaffee snapped into a lightning sprint. He caught Evanson almost exactly as they crossed the line. The tip of the skate on Jaffee’s front foot was an inch ahead, and he was awarded the victory by a tenth of a second, the smallest margin the timing mechanism would allow.

  It wasn’t just the best race of the day; it also turned out to be the only good race of the day. By the time the next heat was under way the temperature was up around 75 degrees Fahrenheit, and there were large puddles across parts of the track. Carlsen, the world record holder, finished with a time of 20:56.1—nearly four minutes off his personal best—which put him 2:20 behind Jaffee. Another Norwegian, Roald Larsen, gave up when he saw that his split times were two minutes behind Jaffee’s. No one could get within ninety seconds of Jaffee’s time. The pace grew so slow, and the ice so wet, that during the fifth race the referee decided to cancel the event.

  The Americans protested. They argued that the race should simply be postponed until the track was in a better condition. But the referee stood by his decision to scrap all the results so far. Jaffee’s race had been in vain. Most people agreed that it was the wrong call. The UK Times opined, “This surprising decision virtually robbed the United States of winning the event.” It led to a day of “bickering and dispute,” reported the New York Times. Gustavus Kirby led an appeal, and that evening the executive committee of the IOC ruled that Jaffee was the Olympic champion. Their decision was then overturned by the International Skating Federation on the grounds that Kirby’s appeal had been made more than three hours after the race and was therefore technically invalid. The results were wiped from the books, and outrage ensued.

  The officials from the ISF suggested that the race be rerun on the weekend. The only problem with this plan was that the Norwegian athletes left town the very next morning. They stopped off at Jaffee’s hotel before they went and congratulated him on a victory they felt he had earned, if not been awarded. Kirby, who had come down with a bad cold, addressed the press from his bed. He had just fired off a furious letter of complaint. “You may call this a real protest,” he thundered. “Yesterday’s complaint was merely a friendly suggestion.” As for Jaffee, he simply said, “This is a tough break, but I will race them again on skates, skis, or at foot-running.” Plucky in public, privately, of course, he was pretty despondent about what had happened. And who was there to throw an arm around him? Billy Fiske. The two kids had never met each other before, but they struck up an unlikely friendship that week.

  Billy and Irv came from opposite poles. Irv was a Jewish kid from the Bronx too poor to afford a skate at his local ice rink. Billy, he said, “was a blue-blood, and he was absolutely fearless. He’d try anything. He always had a lot of money, and he was always gambling. I still don’t know why we hit it off.” That night, Billy took Irv to the little casino in St. Moritz. “I’d never bet a nickel before,” Irv remembered. “So he handed me a $100 bill, which was big money in those days. Billy saw by my expression that I thought it was a put-down. Then he said, ‘Come on Irv, just because I’ve got money and you don’t is no reason not to have some fun. I’m going to lose anyway, so what’s the difference?’ He jammed the money in my hand, and I saw in his face that he was very sincere. From then on we became very close.”

  Billy, Irv, and the other athletes could afford to stay out late, living it up. The warm weather continued through the week, and the Games ground to a halt. “The temperature has gone up and the ice has gone down so rapidly that the rest of the program may be abandoned,” noted the New York Times. The rinks were under an inch of water. Canada refused to play its ice hockey game against Sweden on the grounds that, as one of the players said, “we came here to play hockey and not water polo.” The figure skaters, the paper noted, were “roaming about disconsolate.” And there were real doubts about whether the two showpiece events of the Games, the bobsledding and the skeleton sledding on the Cresta Run, would take place at all. The tracks just weren’t fit: The Cresta needed a good night’s frost to harden it up. The state of the bob run was sorrier still.

  With the rise in temperatures, the Times noted, there had been a rise in tempers too. “The extraordinary decision of those responsible for the control of the 10,000m speed skating event to abandon the race when it was already half over has caused a great deal of comment and not unjustified criticism. Whether the frost comes back or not, the United States and Jaffee, their representative, can claim, justly, a moral victory.”

  Jaffee and the rest of the American speed skating team left St. Moritz on Friday. Dozens of their fellow Olympic athletes turned out to cheer them off, including a little group of Swiss competitors who carried a banner that read, “Jaffee, winner of the 10,000m race. Long live America.” The Finnish skaters sent him a farewell telegram that said, “Congratulations. The American victory in the 10,000m was well earned.” But he didn’t have a medal to show for it, and the records of the race had been scratched from the books. Jaffee’s abiding memory of it all, other than his night out with Billy, was a meeting he had with Count Clary, president of the French Olympic Committee. Clary, a venerable old soul, sported a fine flowing mustache several inches long. He grasped Jaffee by the shoulders, pulled him close, told him that “as far as France is concerned you are the Olympic champion,” then kissed him on both cheeks. “That,” Jaffee remarked afterward, “was even worse than racing Evanson.”

  That same night, a frost fell. “It undoubtedly saved the Games from being a complete fiasco,” noted one report. “But the IOC must consider itself extremely lucky. Even now the events are being carried out in circumstances which mitigate against the enjoyment of the spectators.” The organizers seized the opportunity to run the skeleton race on the Cresta Run. Two of the Heaton brothers, Jack and Jennison, were competing in it for the United States. In the years to come, Billy Fiske would become one of the great Cresta riders himself, but at that point the only experience of it he’d had was in a novice race, starting from midway down the run. Of course he’d won it. But for now he was concentrating on the bobsledding—if it ever got under way. The firm favorite for the Olympic skeleton title was the Englishman Lord Northesk. It was, his supporters said, going to be “a walk-over.” But he blew it. “He was palpably off form,” noted the Times, “and on the day was perhaps lucky to have taken third place.” The Heatons finished ahead of him, Jennison in first place and Jack in second. The result, the Times reckoned, was “humiliating both to Lord Northesk himself and Great Britain.”

  Finally, on the penultimate day of the Games, the organizing committee decided to try to run the bobsledding contest. It had been a long week for the athletes, though one enlivened, it’s true, by the nightlife at the Kulm and the Palace. After two nights of frost, the track was just about usable again, and the bobsledders snapped back into action. Jack Heaton had been injured during his final run on the Cresta, so Jay switched him with his brother Jennison; Jack dropped back to the reserves. Jennison would take the No.
1 sled and Billy stuck with the No. 2 team. There was so little time left before the closing ceremony that everything happened in a hurry. The organizing committee decided to cut the number of runs per team from four to two. The competitors felt that the decision made a mockery of the contest, much as golfers might feel if they were told the Open was going to be settled over two rounds. Major races, like the Derby, always included four runs. “With the reduction came the feeling that the race was reduced to the level of very minor races,” reported the Times. “This, it was rightly argued, was scarcely fitting to the dignity of an international event, supposedly the amateur championship of the world.” It would have been better, they said, to cancel the event altogether.

  With the number of runs cut from four to two, the advantage would be with the quickest crew rather than the most consistent. One great run coupled with another ordinary one could be enough, whereas over four it would take more than a single freakishly fast run to win. The flip side was that there would be a reduced margin for error, since the riders would have only one extra run to compensate for any mistakes first time round. So whoever wanted to win would need to switch on quick, to push all distractions to one side and rush out two fast runs in succession. There would be no time to ease into the contest. The long wait for the race, the St. Moritz nightlife, the brouhaha over referees’ decisions—all of this would need to be put out of mind, sharpish.

  Luck would play a part too. Since the running order counts for a lot in a bobsled race, the riders drew lots to decide it. Anyone with an early position typically gets to ride on a pristine track. But at St. Moritz, where it is carved out of the snow, the course still has a little too much loose powder on it to be run as fast as possible. Draw a late starting position, and that same snow is long gone, but then the ice underneath is creased and rutted from the passage of the sleds ahead in the order. In a typical contest, that same order is then reversed for the second run, so that everyone’s luck evens out. The IOC’s organizing committee, however, insisted on holding separate draws before both runs. It was another unpopular decision. And after the thaw and the hasty rebuilding work, the track was in a terrible condition, so bad that two sleds crashed on the first run. The driver of the Luxembourg crew lost control, and the two riders bobbing in the backseats slammed into the third man and broke his ribs. The second British sled, driven by Cecil Pim, whistled into a skid going into Sunny Corner, and though Pim was able to keep his sled upright, the collision cost him crucial seconds.