Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  The times were slow—slower than Jack Heaton’s when he’d won the Derby a week earlier, and almost ten seconds down on the track record. Jack’s brother Jennison, in the sled with Jay O’Brien riding brake, could clock only 1:42.3. Martineau managed 1:41.7. Kilian matched that. Gramajo was a little quicker at 1:40.3. Henri Lambert was the first to break the 1:40 barrier, the outer limit of what the bobbers considered to be quick. And then came Billy and his rookie crew, Nion, Geoff, Clifford, and Dick. Billy, one reporter wrote, “took chances streaking down the bobsleigh chute that would make a man smoking a cigarette sitting over a powder magazine appear a first rate insurance company risk.” When they cut the thread at the finish line, the clock stopped at 1:38.9. He had a lead of nine-tenths of a second over his nearest rival, Lambert.

  The going may have been slow, but the sport still made a hell of an impression on John Kieran. “The safest way in which to watch one of these bobsleighs is to run down behind it,” he wrote in the New York Times. “Dress is optional, but the best costume for bob sleighing is a suit of thirteenth century armor. Incidentally no one had yet covered the course in a one-piece bathing suit. The ordinary costume is of heavily upholstered leather with large metal cups for the elbows, and smaller metal cups for the hands and wrists. The helmets worn by the riders are like football helmets, only more so.” The easiest and most common way to get injured on the bob run was to lose your foothold on the sled. The rider’s leg would slip out and get caught, bruised, and snapped between the bob and the ice wall. Kieran concluded, “These courses at St. Moritz, by the way, were built by the theorists for their own enjoyment. The Swiss natives do not use them. The Swiss are a sensible people.”

  That night, Billy was sensible too. He got to bed early. He had been told that the odds on him had been cut to 3 to 1. He would start the second, and final, run as the favorite for the gold medal. That brought a different kind of pressure. The race started at 8 a.m. on Sunday. Over an early breakfast, the sledders discovered that the organizing committee had made yet another bad decision: they had canceled the ballot for the second half of the race and decided instead to follow the normal procedure and reverse the starting order from the previous day. Jay O’Brien had talked them into it, out of fairness, he said, to the other teams. Not least his own. The decision seemed sound. It is what they should have done from the start. But the late switch threw everyone out of kilter again. The riders complained. Some insisted that they had taken it easy on the first run because they knew they had a good draw for the second, and so would take their risks that time round.

  Billy had had a late draw on the first day; now he had an early one. He finished it in 1:41.6. That gave him a combined final time of 3:20.5. With nothing to lose, the other riders cut loose. Martineau crashed, like his compatriot Pim had the day before, and though he managed to keep his sled upright and running, he lost so much speed that he finished in 1:44.5, six seconds back overall. Pim was even slower. Both British riders were out of the running.

  Lambert, second overnight and therefore Billy Fiske’s biggest rival, was a wild driver. His attitude was that his team would either crash or win, which is why Hubert Martineau once described him as “a source of tremendous danger.” He was right too: Lambert died three years later from injuries sustained when he crashed on the Cresta Run. He also pushed his sled too hard on this February day in 1928, and it slipped into a skid that slowed it to a neat halt, skewing it sideways across the track. He finished in 1:44.7. Gramajo drove well, but was still too slow to best Fiske’s second run, let alone his first. Among the contenders, only Hans Kilian managed to pip Fiske’s time: he was 1.4 seconds quicker. That wasn’t enough to make up the deficit from the day before.

  Billy had counted off his rivals, one by one. He was still leading as the day’s racing moved toward the bottom of the running order, and by then there was only one man left who could beat him, his great friend Jennison Heaton. They say that the spectators cried, “What nerve!” as they watched Heaton race his sled down around Sunny and on into Horseshoe. It was the fastest run of the day—of the competition—at 1:38.7. But it wasn’t fast enough. Billy Fiske was Olympic champion, by half a second. Jennison Heaton was second. It was a one-two for the United States.

  There was no ceremony and no formal celebration. There wasn’t even an official medal presentation. The bobbers broke up for the day and met again at the closing ceremony later that afternoon. Truth was, by then the Olympics had become a bit of farce. The organizers had a Swiss brass band play all the anthems at the closing ceremony. The French delegation was especially offended by their ear-rending rendition of “La Marseillaise,” which provoked great gales of laughter from the spectators.

  “Can’t you play the Marseillaise?” bellowed the secretary of the French Olympic Committee.

  “It’s been so long since you won an Olympic event that we’ve forgotten it,” the bandleader shot back.

  While all that was going on, Billy and his team were given their medals. Geoff Mason remembered that an official approached him in the crowd and handed him a box, with the words “Here, Mason, here’s your medal.” Billy liked it that way. He wrote in his journal, “In Europe someone wins an important sports event and no one cares a damn and very few hear about it; in America somebody wins a pole-sitting competition and they immediately become honored citizens of their community—by way of the newspapers.” He didn’t even let slip the fact that he was only sixteen, which is why not one of the newspapers mentioned it in the reports the next day, though they all made great play of the fact that Sonja Henie, who had won the women’s figure skating for Norway, was only fifteen. Billy’s record as the youngest male gold medalist in the Winter Olympics stood for sixty-four years, until 1992, when in Albertville the Finnish ski jumper Toni Nieminen beat it by a single day.

  It had not been a successful Games. The New York Times observed that its chief feature seemed to be all the protests made by the athletes against the officials’ decisions. The Times agreed that “the Olympic spirit of good will is not so apparent here at St. Moritz as it was four years ago at Chamonix.” In fact, the paper was one of several that doubted whether the event even had a future: “To the casual and unbiased observer a grave doubt must come whether these Olympiads are not a colossal mistake and a gross waste of money. It would seem that the thaw, had it remained, might not have been so great a catastrophe.”

  As for Geoff Mason, well, the wife of one of the Canadian hockey players told him later that he should take the American flag from the closing ceremony home with him as a souvenir. So he slipped it into his bag, then went back to his hotel, settled his bill, and caught the next train out of town. He never went near a bobsled again. He ended up becoming a Latin teacher in Pennsylvania. “In most pursuits,” he said later on in his life, “success is achieved by starting at the bottom and working one’s way as swiftly as possible to the top. In bobsleighing, particularly in my case, one starts at the top and works his way as swiftly as possible to the bottom.”

  PART TWO

  The world was divided into those who had it and those who did not. This quality, this it, was never named, however, nor was it talked about in any way. As to just what this ineffable quality was . . . well, it obviously involved bravery. But it was not bravery in the simple sense of being willing to risk your life. The idea seemed to be that any fool could do that, if that was all that was required, just as any fool could throw away his life in the process. No, the idea here (in the all-enclosing fraternity) seemed to be that a man should have the ability to go up in a hurtling piece of machinery and put his hide on the line and then have the moxie, the reflexes, the experience, the coolness, to pull it back in the last yawning moment—and then to go up again the next day, and the next day, and every next day, even if the series should prove infinite.

  —from The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe, 1979

  Godfrey Dewey, Lake Placid, 1931. In the photo above, he is shaking hands
with IOC President Count Baillet-Latour.

  CHAPTER 7

  A MAN WITH A MISSION

  Work started on August 4, 1930. The first thing they did was lay a track, running up from the brand-new Cascade Road right up to the top of the mountain. Once that was open, the workers could get access. They had a couple of hundred laborers up there, working with picks, shovels, saws, and more. First they cut a path through the pine forest, chopped the trees down flush with the ground, and trimmed the overhanging branches. They set dynamite into the ground, blasted apart the rock and earth. Then the shovel parties got to work shifting the debris, all thirty-six thousand tons of it. It wasn’t just these workers who needed to get up there; the public wanted to come too. There was such curiosity about the colossal earthworks on the edge of town that, according to the local newspaper, “all during the fall many motored out daily to watch progress of the construction.” And what they saw unfold was a mile and a half of winding dirt track, six feet wide at its narrowest points, almost thirty feet at its widest. Then the joiners came. They erected intricate spiderwebs of wooden beams around the corners. These were filled in with rocks and rubble, forming solid banks that stood, the tallest of them, thirty feet high, each capped with a two-foot-tall stone wall. The joiners then set to work on the huge wooden grandstands in the crooks of the two biggest turns, Shady and Whiteface, and the new lodge up at the summit. The plumbers laid the drains, and then the pipes to carry the water that would provide the ice, eight thousand feet of them, from the new reservoir through the pumping station and all the way up the slope. Then engineers strung up phone lines connecting the way stations along the route. By the end of December, the work was done. Lake Placid, a little town in the Adirondacks, had just become home to America’s first purpose-built bobsled run, the only one of its kind in the world outside central Europe.

  The locals had always known that piece of land as South Meadow. It was just another of the many picturesque peaks around their town. Now that it had a new purpose, they decided it needed a new name. They settled on Mount Van Hoevenberg, a fine tribute to an early pioneer of the Adirondacks, and suitably grand too: the run would, after all, be the central attraction of the 1932 Winter Olympics. And, though they didn’t know it yet, within a year that mile-and-a-half patch of ground on the side of the mountain would become the single most publicized, criticized, and dramatized stretch of terrain in the entire United States.

  Lake Placid, three hundred miles north of Manhattan, way up beyond Albany in the Adirondack forest preserve, was, and still is, a one-street town. The main road runs around the west side of Mirror Lake, where, in the winter, children gather, as they always have, to skate, sled, and play pickup games of hockey. In 1930 there were around three thousand residents, which meant that the entire population could have been seated in those new grandstands on Mount Van Hoevenberg with room to spare. The bob run had cost $227,000 to build, the single largest chunk of the $2 million that had been spent to bring the Winter Olympics to this little quarter of New York State. It had seemed a vast sum even when the plans were first drawn up, and that was before the Great Depression hit. A large part of it was public money, supplied, after much wrangling with Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, by the state legislature in Albany. Another sizable portion had been raised by issuing community bonds. The per-capita cost was almost sixty dollars per resident—about three weeks’ wages for the men working on the construction of the run. The Los Angeles Summer Games that same year, by way of contrast, cost the citizens of that city less than a dollar each.

  Not that the cost had been evenly shared around the citizens of Lake Placid. Even a small town has its divisions. And in the 1930s the split was drawn on either side of the Central School on Main Street. Anything south of that was considered downtown; anything north of it, uptown. An uptown address gave a family a certain standing. At the heart of the ritzy half, on the far side of Mirror Lake, lay the grand old Lake Placid Club, the fiefdom of the Dewey family. And if you want to understand the extraordinary accomplishments of this little town, how it came to be the home of America’s first bob run and the host of both the 1932 and the 1980 Winter Olympics, the Lake Placid Club is where you have to start looking. The residents liked to think of Lake Placid as “the little town that could,” echoing the can-do attitude of the little engine in a story familiar to all American children. And while it’s true that many had a hand in their organization, the 1932 Winter Olympics were, ultimately, one man’s work. His name was Godfrey Dewey, a fellow of singular vision and steel-strong will.

  When the United States Olympic Committee first asked Dewey, in January 1928, whether he thought Lake Placid would be willing and able to host the 1932 Games, his answer was “absolutely not,” though he put it in slightly more polite terms than that. It was, Dewey felt, an “impossible” job, because it would require cooperation “not merely by the civic bodies and community of Lake Placid itself,” but also by “many others thruhout the region and state.” Nevertheless, the USOC persuaded him to think the idea over. They arranged for Dewey and his wife to take a six-week trip to Europe to visit St. Moritz that February. They even gave him a job, as manager of the United States’ three-man skiing squad. Dewey inveigled his way into carrying the American flag, and he took the Olympic oath on behalf of the team in the opening ceremony, that long and comical march through a freezing blizzard. These were honors typically reserved for distinguished athletes. Dewey, at forty, was, in his own words, “an ardent and capable winter sportsman,” but not so capable that he was picked to compete. He did persuade Jay O’Brien to include him on the reserve team for the bobsledding competition, even though, like Geoff Mason and a couple of the others, he had never ridden a sled before. There was a sense, even then, that he wanted to impose his will on the American team.

  Dewey spent those weeks taking fastidious notes on “the housing, the budget, the facilities, organization, committees, health and safety, and policing” of the Olympics. And of course the St. Moritz Olympics were a mess, beset by bad weather and spoiled by slapdash organization and amateurish administration. By the time Dewey returned to America in March, he had changed his mind. He had decided that Lake Placid could “match the highest standards set abroad.” Fired by enthusiasm, he addressed the local worthies at a meeting of the Kiwanis Club. He told them, “What St. Moritz could do, Lake Placid can do.” He felt the town should bid for the Games, and would win the Games. There was only one major obstacle that he could see: they would need to build a bobsled run.

  Dewey thought the town could have a winter tourism season, just like those enjoyed by the leading French and Swiss resorts. The Games would be the great catalyst. “They are not an end in themselves, but a means of accelerating development of winter business so that the economic life of the town was transformed.” The central attraction wouldn’t be the downhill ski slopes—the sport had not yet become that popular—but a new bobsled run, the first of its kind on the continent. He had been so taken with his first taste of this new sport in St. Moritz that he now considered a run to be “indispensable,” a “matter of necessity for Lake Placid regardless of the Olympics.” The cost, he guessed, would be around fifty thousand dollars; but once it was up and running, drawing curious tourists from far and wide, the town could expect to make between one million to two million dollars of extra income each and every winter. Dewey firmly believed that Lake Placid could become the first great winter sports resort in the United States. At first, noted the official report of the ’32 Games, “many residents were aghast that there was even a remote possibility of this little mountain resort of less than 4,000 people entering the winter sports world in 1932. The responsibility seemed too heavy, the task too great. But to hear Dewey tell about what St. Moritz had done and what Lake Placid could do was to be anxious to start doing it.”

  —

  To make sense of Godfrey Dewey’s vision, to understand how he came to harbor such grand designs, and was able to wield such
influence on the community he lived in, we have to go back further still, to his roots. Godfrey’s grandparents were, one biographer wrote, from “typical pioneer stock.” There was nothing typical about Godfrey’s father. His name was Melville Dewey. In time he would cut off the last two letters of his first name, because the first and most enduring of his many obsessions was simplified spelling. He insisted that the English language was too complicated, and adopted a phonetic system he used in all his correspondence right through his life. He did his utmost to encourage everyone else to follow suit. He actually changed the spelling of his own surname to “Dui.” But he could never make it stick: by that point, the original spelling of his name was already too well known, too widely used.