Speed Kings
Page 21
Kirby’s reply can be condensed into two words: nothing doing. But Dewey had already won one battle: selection for the US Olympic squad would be based on results in a series of pre-Olympics trial races on the Mount Van Hoevenberg run. After all the fuss, Olympic qualification would be a simple business. Anyone who wanted to make the team would need to finish in the top two in the tryouts, which were due to be held on January 15 and 16. That meant the odds were already stacked in favor of the local riders, especially Homburger. They may have had only a year or two of experience, but almost all of it was on that one track. Billy, Jay, and the outsiders, on the other hand, had never even seen the run before, let alone ridden it. And Billy himself hadn’t been able to practice much in recent months: he had broken his ankle in the autumn and only just come off crutches. The injury meant he had couldn’t compete in the 1931 World Championship in St. Moritz, which had been won, in his absence, by Werner Zahn. In fact, Billy hadn’t ridden a sled in almost a year. He was so rusty that when he set off on his very first run down Mount Van Hoevenberg, riding a two-man sled with Jay working the brake, he didn’t even make it round the first corner. The sled slipped into a skid as it climbed the bank and toppled over onto its side, spilling Billy and Jay out onto the ice. “So this,” Homburger thought, “is the great Billy Fiske.”
For the next fortnight, Billy and Jay found themselves bound up in bureaucratic red tape. It was impossible then, and now, to prove that this was Dewey’s doing. But it certainly suited his purposes. On January 11 the referee for the Olympic trials, George W. Martin, who happened to be the sporting director of the Lake Placid Club, announced that he had decided to limit practice on the run to “properly entered teams and contestants who have been entered in writing.” Jay didn’t have his paperwork in order, so his team couldn’t get back on the run until he did. It cost them precious practice time. But he and Billy got lucky. When the weekend of the trials came around, the weather was too warm for the track to be used. So the trials were postponed. It was decided that the National Championship, due to be held on January 28 and 29, would double up as the Olympic tryouts. Billy and his team would have two badly needed weeks in which to practice—if, that was, the race officials would let them on the track. Jay and his committee would need to pick a squad of fifteen men before the National Championship, as the date for final entries was January 21; the trials would be used to decide which eight of those fifteen actually got to race in the Games and which men would be left in the reserves.
It was then that Dewey declared his hand—though he had kept it at best only half hidden—in a five-page letter to Gustavus Kirby. He had, he said, “conferred with all the best bob drivers” and found “a surprising and encouraging unanimity in their judgments.” Billy, Jay, Clifford, and Eddie, he said, should not be selected for the team. “In the absolutely unanimous judgment of every driver who has watcht their preliminary work on the run, they have not the slightest chances of qualifying for the final team.” In fact, Dewey continued, one of the local drivers—he wouldn’t say who—had easily raised five thousand dollars to bet that Billy and his team wouldn’t finish in the top three at the trials. It is a large-enough sum today; back then it was six months’ earnings for the average American household. “I fully recognize the impracticability of eliminating without trial the men who are identified in the public mind with the brilliant St. Moritz victory,” Dewey continued, but he didn’t recognize it enough to stop him from suggesting that they do exactly that. “Billy Fiske drove the winning sled at St. Moritz, and deserves utmost credit for a brilliant win against keen competition, altho not so keen as will be shown here. The conditions, however, were entirely different.” And so they were. At St. Moritz, the teams had been five-strong rather than four. At St. Moritz, they had raced ventre à terre; here they would be sitting up. At St. Moritz, they had used old European-style sleds rather than the new ones Dewey had designed. And then there were the runs themselves, which were, as Dewey noted, incomparable in both their speed and their difficulty. “With the best of good will, not one of the experienst drivers here concedes them an outside chance in any event this year.”
Dewey said that he, personally, would select Hank Homburger, since his “world record calls for no comment,” and Hubert Stevens to lead two teams of local drivers. Stevens, he pointed out, had “built to order this year a personal bob including all the distinctive features of our Olympic design with a few slight further refinements which quite possibly make it the fastest bob in the world today.”
To press his point, Dewey argued that it wasn’t only the bobsledding medals that were at stake, but the United States’ overall position in the final medal table. “I feel keenly that the American chance of winning the III OWG . . . stands or falls with securing the bob sports points to offset the inevitable leadership of the Scandinavians in skiing.”
The bobsled committee decided to meet on the morning of January 21—the latest date possible—to make its final selections. They planned to wire the teams over to Lake Placid as soon as they had finished talking. Godfrey Dewey made one final attack. He objected again to Jay’s “dual position” as both a contender for a team and the chairman of the selection committee, as well as to Jay’s position as a delegate of the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation, even going so far as to dig into the small print of “rule 2, section 3,” which stated, “Contestants are ineligible for any official function.” He trashed Billy on the grounds that he insisted on racing with his own crew of Jay, Clifford, and Eddie, whereas other drivers were happier for the selectors to pick and mix teams from across the squad. “If Fiske would show the same sportsmanship which has been displayed by all the rest of the drivers,” Dewey complained, “the way would be open to pick the strongest possible American representation.”
By now, Kirby, Ferris, and the rest were thoroughly sick of Dewey’s meddling. At noon on January 21 they sent a telegram to Lake Placid listing the fifteen men they had selected for the Olympic squad. Homburger was on it, along with all three of his Red Devils and the other three Stevens brothers. So were Billy, Jay, Clifford, and Eddie. Dewey had lost his battle. But he still had plans for the war.
The National Championship was postponed again because the weather was still too warm to race. This time, however, the Olympics were so close that they could put the competition back only two days. On Friday the 29th, two days before the big race, Jay O’Brien was called into the office of a man named Ralph J. Ury, chairman of the Adirondack branch of the Amateur Athletics Union. Ury was in charge of registrations for the National Championship. “Sorry to say it,” Ury told O’Brien, “but I’m going to have to ban you and your team from the championship.”
It was a paperwork problem. Ury pointed out that Jay, Billy, Clifford, and Eddie did not have the necessary AAU traveling permits. The document was designed to authorize athletes and officials to claim AAU expenses. If they didn’t get the right papers to Ury before the races started on Sunday, they wouldn’t be allowed to compete. Publicly, Dewey was indignant on behalf of the banned athletes. “We deeply regret that this unwarranted action should have been given out,” he told the New York Times. Ury, however, was an old friend of his. The two of them had worked together for years organizing sports in and around Lake Placid. The Boston Herald didn’t buy Dewey’s line. “Behind the entire move,” the paper reported, “was seen open evidence of the discomfiture of local bob sleighers over the manner of choosing the United States bob team.” The journalist Westbrook Pegler agreed. This, Pegler said in his column, was a “cruel class war” between the blue collars and the blue bloods. The Associated Press’s Edward Neil described how “the natives sniffed and hawed as the bobsledders put on a running fight all over town.” AAU secretary Dan Ferris declared it all “a tempest in a teacup” and arranged to have the correct papers sent up that same night.
Edward Neil was a canny man. He ended his AP report by pointing out that Dewey, Jay, and everyone else
at Lake Placid would soon have much bigger worries. “Unless brisk weather appears almost immediately there seems little hope that the event can be sandwiched in before the start of the Olympics next Thursday.” And he was right, if for the wrong reasons. It wasn’t the weather that stopped them but the German and Swiss teams, who felt the Americans were trying to cheat them by staging their National Championship so close to the Olympics. They argued, at first, that they should be allowed to enter as well. Dewey duly offended them again by demanding that they pay a registration fee for the event. Irked, the Germans dug an obscure rule out of the IOC’s small print. It stipulated that no races were allowed to be held on the bob run in the eight days before the Olympics were due to start. So the National Championship was postponed yet again, until after the Olympics. There would be no trials. Instead, the decision about which two teams would compete in the Olympics would be made by Jay O’Brien and his fellow committee members. They picked Billy, Jay, Clifford, and Eddie to ride the United States’ No. 1 sled. The second team would be Hank Homburger’s Red Devils, whose record on the run was too good to ignore.
In his final report to the USOC, Jay wrote that the selection committee “had a very hard task,” but “thanks to the experience of the members of my committee in the athletic world, they exercised rare good judgment in the policy and action that they took in the final selections. I feel that I would be very ungrateful if I did not mention the unswerving support that Major Philip B. Fleming, Gustavus T. Kirby, and Daniel J. Ferris, gave your chairman in all matters pertaining to these selections. When I state the term ‘unswerving support’ it is not a phrase lightly used, as there was tremendous opposition to the committee from several sources in their selections, and the committee was caused ceaseless annoyances by the advice and suggestions from outside parties who did not know the requirements of this sport as well as did your committee.” Being Jay, he was too polite to mention any names. He could afford at least a little magnanimity since he had gotten his way. Godfrey Dewey, after all his Machiavellian machinations, had not.
The very same week that the final selection decision was made, the fourteen trustees of the Lake Placid Club Foundation met to discuss the issue of who should succeed Melvil Dewey, who had passed away in December, as president. They resolved to postpone the full election till July, when the Olympics would be long over. In the meantime they would appoint a temporary president. Since Godfrey was a candidate, he left the room while the remaining trustees discussed the issue. The candidacy of Emily Dewey, Godfrey’s stepmother, was swiftly dismissed. Godfrey’s candidacy was voted down twelve to one. Instead, another man, from outside the family, was elected. It was an extraordinary show of ingratitude, considering all that Dewey had done for the club and the town. It was proof, too, of just how unpopular his high-handed manner had made him with his peers.
So he had been defeated, again. But he still had some hope. The final decision on the succession would be made at the club’s annual conference in July. The weight of opinion among the trustees was stacked against him, but if the Olympics were a success, well, perhaps that could turn it around. All he needed was a cold snap. And on January 30, Dewey finally got what he wanted. The weather broke. When he woke that morning, it was blowing a blizzard. There was a storm coming.
The Swiss team take Shady Corner, Lake Placid, 1932.
The wreckage of the sled, Lake Placid, 1932.
CHAPTER 10
THE SUICIDE CLUB
The sled hurtled down the mountain, 60 mph and still accelerating. There was a rattle from the metal frame, and a sharp rasping hiss from the runners as they cut through the ice. The wind whipped the sounds away from the ears of the four riders. Up front the driver was hunched over the wheel. He squinted through the early morning mist. He was thinking three corners ahead of the sled, trying always to urge it onto the right racing line. He had so little time. At that speed, as soon as he saw a corner, he was into it. And as soon as he felt a problem, it was too late. The sled moved almost as fast as his thoughts. Behind him, three riders were huddled together, with the first of them pressed right up against his back. They clung to the leather straps attached to the metal. Centrifugal force bowed them down, bent their necks, and pressed their heads toward their feet. But their stomachs shot back and up. Made them feel like they’d left their guts somewhere back up the track. They tried to lean together, as they had practiced, as the sled shot into and around the big white banks at the corners. Each one jolted the sled. Whump . . . whump . . . whump. One after another. The corners kept coming. They bounced the sled around, tipped it almost upside down, over and around, which is why the riders had to lean, until the course snapped them back up straight. They were like four coins in a tin can rolling down a flight of steps.
They counted every one of those corners. One, two, three. Eyrie, a dogleg kink from left to right that snapped their heads from side to side. On around five, six, seven, eight, nine. Then Whiteface, a sweeping hairpin, the biggest curve on the track, around a 30-foot-tall wall of snow. They passed the first grandstand. Out of that, then eleven, twelve, thirteen. Next, Cliffside, where the course ran right up against the rocky wall of the mountain. Fifteen, sixteen, a dogleg right at seventeen, and then four hundred feet of straight. The pine trees flashed by in fast-forward. Sixty miles per hour. Sixty-five. Seventy. As fast as a man could travel without a motor. And then Shady, a 28-foot-tall bank, almost straight up, with only a hint of a concave curve, which spun the bob around 160 degrees in the space of 150 feet. And that was where it happened. The sled slid up the wall, pulled higher all the time, up and up, passing perilously close to the lip. The riders leaned in, the driver stuck to his line, fixed the wheel in his hands to hold the front runners straight. A mistake. Too late. The sled crested the top lip of the wall and shot over the top. It was airborne for almost a full second before it hit the branches of a tree and crashed into the rocks and scrub in the ravine below.
The journalist Edward J. Neil was at the foot of the run, by the finish line, working on a story for the Associated Press. It was two days before the 1932 Winter Olympics were due to start in Lake Placid, and the bobsledders were the best story in town. He had just taken a run down the mountain himself for a feature piece. His editor thought it would be a good idea to give the readers a firsthand report of this strange new sport that had been in the headlines all week. He had been a passenger in a sled driven by Hank Homburger, the local boy, and one of the fastest sled pilots in the world. They had traveled with the brake on the whole way, moving so slowly that the brakeman told him afterward, “I wish I’d bought my gun, I saw a rabbit we could have shot on the way.” They had covered the mile-and-a-half course in a shade under two minutes. It was plenty fast enough for Neil. It gave him, he said, “enough thrills to last a lifetime.” He’d only just finished drinking the coffee they gave him to steady his nerves. He remembered how he saw it shimmer in the cup, spill out onto his shoes. That was when he realized how much his hands were shaking.
Neil and his crew were walking back up the track alongside the slide when the public address system burst into life. Through the static they heard the split times of the sled coming down the run. They leaped over to the lip and “peered through the snow up the twisted ice ribbon” toward Shady Corner. They saw the sled run out of control up the incline and smash through the top, scattering snow and rubble, “four bodies hurled through the air into the deep ravine below.” Neil and Homburger raced on up toward the crash, pumping their legs as they ran through the powder snow. The wreckage of the sled was quite a way down the slope, wrapped around a tall pine. The snow around the trunk was dyed red. There were three “battered, blood-soaked forms” on the ground. It was the No. 2 German team: Fritz Grau, Helmut Hopmann, Rudolf Krotki, and Albert Brehme. Neil’s mind shot back twenty minutes in time. He remembered how jovial Grau had been at the top of the run, how he had shaken Neil’s hand and slapped his back before he set off on Homburger’s sled.
Of course, back at the track, Neil didn’t know any of this yet. He was horrified by the “picture of sudden death and destruction,” aghast at the idea that the same fate “might well have come to me from less capable hands.” As the medics shut the doors of the ambulance, Homburger turned to Neil, sighed, and said, “That’s the way it goes.”
A mile away, up at the top of the mountain, a telephone rang. The shrill trill of the bell cut right through the cold air, across all the laughter and chatter, and carried right around the little plateau at the top of the bob run. An official answered it, spoke for a moment, and then raised a red flag into the air. The polyglot conversations of the assembled athletes—Swiss, Italian, French, Belgian, Romanian, German, Austrian, American—fell quiet one by one. “There has been a crash.”