Speed Kings

by Andy Bull

  “It’s Grau.”

  “They’ve gone through the bank at Shady.”

  It was the sixth crash of the week. The ice was too sheer. The run too fast. The risks too great. And they all knew it. But no one dared mention it. Not, at least, in earshot of one another. That was their code. You didn’t discuss the dangers. The knowledge of it was already there, always there, in the backs of their minds. And that was where it stayed.

  Twenty minutes later, another call came through. The ambulance had gone and the debris had been swept clear. The official lowered his red flag. “Track clear!” he said. “To the mark!”

  The next crew swapped handshakes with the riders around them. A solemn ritual, and one performed before every run. “They act,” Neil wrote, “as if they never expect to see each other again.” They picked up their sled, five hundred pounds of steel and oak, and heaved it over toward the ice chute at the start of the run. The driver took his place at the wheel; the No. 3 man took his seat behind; and the other two, No. 2 and No. 4, crouched down on either side of the sled, ready to make their running start. They rocked back and forth, from their heels to their toes, then set off at a sprint. The two runners leaped on as the sled shot into the mouth of the run and raced away down the mountain, a bullet along the barrel.

  Damon Runyon called it “the Suicide Club.” There were fifty-two men in it—more if you counted all the reserves. The little town of Lake Placid had never seen their like. Billy, Jay, and the American blue bloods had nothing on this lot. From Italy, there was Count Rossi, the millionaire heir to the Martini and Rossi fortune, “whose vermouth,” as Neil wrote, “is famous wherever they have cocktail hours.” Rossi was Italy’s national powerboat racing champion. From Romania, Alexandru Papană, a stunt pilot famous for the dazzling aerobatics he performed in air shows. From Belgium, Louis van Hege, a star striker for AC Milan and a gold medalist with the Belgian football team from the 1920 Olympics in Antwerp. Werner Zahn from Germany had been a fighter ace in the First World War, a onetime wingman of the Red Baron. The son of the hotel owner where Zahn and his team stayed always remembered their arrival: “These enormous men in long overcoats, they came in one at a time, bowed to my mother, clicked their heels the way Germans did then.” The family of Barbara Tyrell Kelly took in the Swiss team. Their driver was Reto Capadrutt, a handsome “little hop-of-my-thumb,” as Runyon called him, “with laughing eyes and coal-black hair.” He had barely settled in before he struck up a relationship with Kelly’s godmother, Betty Hood, a wealthy widow whose family ran Tammany Hall through the 1920s and into the 1930s. Capadrutt told the press that he couldn’t speak English because he didn’t want to have to give interviews, but he was fluent enough in it to woo Betty. Kelly still has copies of the love letters he sent her. They were such an exotic lot. “It felt,” Kelly said, “as though the world had come to us.”

  The Suicide Club had met for the first time on the last day of January, four days before the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Mirror Lake had finally frozen over. Up in the shade on the northern slope of Mount Van Hoevenberg, the surface of the bob run had become a mile and a half of solid ice, without a lick of snow to slow the sleds. Even the officials felt intimidated. They argued that they needed at least four days of freezing weather before the run would be ready for use, to allow time for the ice to even out and a layer of snow to form on top. But the bobsledders themselves were sick of waiting, bored stiff after a week in which they had barely managed a full day’s practice. There had already been dark mutterings among them about American gamesmanship. The foreign teams felt they were being denied the chance to get familiar with the run. The officials simply couldn’t afford to wait for four days and agreed to open the track. They were swayed by the size of the crowd. Six thousand people came out to watch the first full day of practice.

  And even then the officials thought twice about letting anyone take a run. It was Werner Zahn who snapped them into action. Zahn had come to Lake Placid to add an Olympic gold medal to the world championship title he’d won in St. Moritz the previous year. He was a proud and stubborn man. It was Zahn who had told Dewey that it was “the driver who won the race, not the sled”—a clear dig at the inexperience of the local riders. Which was a little disingenuous of him, given the machine he had brought with him to Lake Placid. It was named the Fram III, in honor of the ship Roald Amundsen had used to explore the South Pole. The ship, the original Fram, had been designed to float on top of the polar ice, just as Zahn’s bobsled had been designed to float over the run. Zahn had built it himself, with the help of the engineers at the manufacturing firm he ran in Brunswick. No one had ever seen anything quite like it before. The Fram III had a streamlined hull, with a nose like a bullet that enveloped the driver’s legs. It made a joke of Dewey’s assertion that the sled owned by Hubert Stevens was “the fastest bob in the world today.” The Fram III, which preempted the aerodynamic designs of the late 1940s and 1950s, traveled like lightning. Zahn was itching to get it out on the track. And now the bureaucrats were trying to tell him the conditions were too dangerous to allow him out?

  Zahn knew all about the risks. He had pulled out of the 1928 Olympics when his brakeman, Werner Schroder, died in a crash during the trials. The idea that Homburger, a civil engineer who had been bobsledding for a year, could handle the conditions, but he, the world champion, couldn’t . . . well, he considered that an insult. “We are being treated like little children,” he said. “What are we supposed to do if the slide is this fast on the days of the Olympics? Automatically default to the unadmitted superiority of the Americans? They are our necks, to break as we want to.”

  Billy Fiske had no desire to get involved in a petty squabble, but he knew, too, how dangerous and difficult the course was. He’d already crashed on it once. He suggested a compromise.

  “Werner,” Billy said, “you know this run is quite different from the ones we ride in Europe. Why don’t your team let me drive you down the run, to give you a chance to get accustomed to it?”

  “Thank you,” Zahn responded, “but there is nothing we can learn from the American team.”

  It sounds brusque. And it was. Zahn was an arrogant man, and he didn’t appreciate being patronized, however well Billy meant it.

  “Well then, at least let me tell you this,” Billy continued. “You’ll be going about seventy miles an hour into Shady corner, and your drivers will lose consciousness for a second or two in the turn. They’ll come out of it when the pressure releases in the outlet, but be sure going into Shady that you take it early and come off it early, so you can straighten out for Zig-Zag.”

  Zahn smiled. “Germany,” he said, “needs no help, Herr Fiske.”

  The German team carried the Fram III over to the start chute. They were actually a man short—their No. 3 had fallen ill—so they had recruited Charles Devine, whose family owned the hotel they were staying in. Devine had done a little bobsledding over the last year, and would do a lot more in the years to come. He would, in fact, end up as a member of the team that won the American National Championship in 1932. But that ride with Zahn was one he never forgot. “Zahn was such a stubborn man,” Devine said, years later, “and so proud of the fact that he was world champion at the time. From the very start he took the run wide open—he didn’t feel his way at all, and he never once called for the brakes.”

  Anger can be a useful fuel in some sports. But not bobsledding. As Steve Holcomb, the 2010 Olympic champion, explains, “At the start the best drivers are just sitting there. They’re not stressed, they’re not panicked, they’re not pacing back and forth. They are calm at the starting line, relaxed, ready.” And then they have to flick a switch. In 1932 they were using sprint starts for the first time at the Olympic Games. Three seconds of fury. Pump the legs, pound the snow, push the sled. Jump in, then switch off again. “You flick that switch right back again,” says Holcomb. “Calm down. Slip right back into that mind-set you had
three seconds ago, be relaxed and passive, because here comes the track.” You don’t fight the g-force. You can’t. Instead you go with it. The driver lets it pull the sled up, around, and down, all the time making the tiny adjustments to the steering, urging the runners on to that perfect line, not for the corner ahead—it’s coming too fast—but the one four, five, six bends down the line.

  Zahn was running hot. He had designed the Fram III to cut through snow. But there wasn’t any snow on Mount Van Hoevenberg, only ice. The sleds designed by Dewey had long, flat, flexible runners that held contact with the run right along their length. The blades on the Fram III were short and curved in bows; only the middle inches were in contact with the ice. They were quick because there was no traction. Which also meant there was no control. “It was the wildest ride I’ve ever been on,” Devine said. “I knew from the first moment that the sled was out of control, that we wouldn’t make it.”

  The Fram III shot along, stopping the split-clocks as it went. The announcer called out the times through a public address over the grandstands. A new record as they sped through Cliffside. A new record as they swept through Shady. They were running at about 75 mph as they came into the wicked chicane at Zig-Zag. The Fram III started to fishtail wildly as it approached the first curve. Its rear end swung from side to side, heaving the riders first one way, then the other. Zahn shot low into the Zag, and the sled traveled on up the wall. “We went straight up,” said Devine, “and straight up and straight up, higher than the treetops, and planed through the air.” The sled flew over a hundred feet. “Remarkably, we all stayed on the sled until the impact,” Devine remembered. And then they hit a tree. The four of them scattered like shrapnel from an explosion. Devine was lucky: he landed flat on top of the No. 2 rider, Heinrich Rossner, who weighed three hundred pounds. “He saved me. His great size cushioned the impact.” Rossner, on the other hand, was battered black and blue. Zahn shattered his left arm.

  Ed Neil was a mile away when word reached him. The press had set up office in the high school on Main Street, their typewriters set out on rows of trestle tables in the hall. They had a PA wired up, so they could listen to broadcasts of events happening around the town, and a wire service run by a team of young ladies. When one of them read out a snap line about the crash at Mount Van Hoevenberg, the pack split for the bob track. But Neil picked up his hat and made for Lake Placid General Hospital. He figured he’d find the story there, if anywhere. And he was right. Charles Devine and the brake, Hans Melhorn, had both been discharged that same afternoon, after the doctors had checked them over, but Zahn was still being treated. Neil sneaked in to see him in his hospital bed. The crash made news across the country, from San Diego to Seattle, Boston to Biloxi, and Ed Neil was the one man who had an interview. He scribbled it down on his pad, put it out on the wires as a first-person account of the crash “dictated exclusively for AP” by “the ace of the European drivers and the most serious foreign threat to the Americans.”

  “My sail of 110 feet through the air after cracking up on the Zig-Zag turn was the greatest thrill of my career,” Zahn said. “During my 20 years of bobsledding I have been in five accidents, not a bad average for a sport. But I never before took an airplane ride in my bob. You know we really should have been killed. Take a man and throw him through the air for 110 feet and then drop him 45 feet more into a thicket of trees, stumps, and rocks, and you expect to find him dead. I sometimes feel like a cat with nine lives.” Instead, he had escaped with a broken arm. “The injury is nothing at all, as soon as it gets better I am going to get right back to bobsledding. It is insignificant compared to the fact that our team will be unable to shoulder its responsibility to Germany during the Olympic Games.” Zahn paused. “Every member of my team is keen to get back into the game. I guess that is what this sport does to you. You take hold of it and you can’t let it drop—at least until it drops you.”

  Back at the mountain, the bobsledding hadn’t stopped. Two hours after Zahn’s disaster the run was open again, though by now it was blowing a blizzard. Hank Homburger and Hubert Stevens took runs from the top. Despite being local men well used to the track, both had trouble making it down. They told the race officials that they “nearly went over the embankments on several occasions” and that “the course was too fast for the prevailing conditions.” There were more protests. Jay O’Brien, for one, was convinced that the Lake Placid teams were trying to screw their opposition, and even their American teammates, out of the chance to practice. He argued that if the organizers didn’t let the athletes run now, they could find themselves “racing for the first time over a strange course” come the Olympic competition. The officials relented, reluctantly. They allowed each team to take a single run from the top, with the proviso that they “had to brake all the way,” which was only a little better than nothing.

  As soon as the teams were done, the officials had workmen shovel fresh snow into the run, to slow it down and “minimize the chances of an accident.” A fat lot of good it did too. The next morning, the first day of February, the bobsledders had company on the mountain. The press were out in force, eager for more, as Neil put it, of this “spectacular ballyhoo.” And they got it. The Austrian two-man team toppled over at Shady, spilling the two riders out onto the track. The driver was fine, save for the cuts and grazes he suffered as he skidded along the ice. His brake, Count Baptist Gudenus, twisted his leg underneath the sled. It wasn’t the only close scrape. The Swiss four-man bob, driven by the dashing Reto Capadrutt, snapped an axle midway down the run. It was, Daley wrote, “miraculous” that Capadrutt still managed to steer his team down the mountain. “By a freak of fate the two parted ends caught in the supporting structure underneath the sled and it was not until the bottom was reached that the break was discovered. Veteran bobsleighers paled at the sight of the broken part and could not conceive how the Swiss managed to go the full distance without being upset and hurt.”

  Dewey was faced with a dilemma. He had promised the crowds that bobsledding would provide them with “the thrills of a lifetime.” And no doubt the run had delivered in that regard. But at the same time, he was determined to establish bobsledding as a mass-participation sport. He was planning to start running competitions for schoolchildren and novices as soon as the Olympics were over. He even encouraged his own daughter, Katharine, to take up the sport.

  While “the promise of contusions and abrasions or worse has appealed strongly to the buzzard instinct” in the spectators, as Westbrook Pegler put it, the crashes had received so much publicity “that the businessmen of Lake Placid, who are businessmen after all, with investments at stake, were afraid the bob run would receive a bad name with prospective customers who might wish to recapture the spirit of childhood’s happy hours by sliding down hill on sleds.” Dewey had no great sympathy for the injured athletes. He felt the drivers themselves were “chiefly responsible for these accidents, for they would accept advice from no one, either as regards the bobs or the run itself.” But he decided to pile more snow on the run to slow it down.

  He also came up with the odd idea of strapping four sandbags to a sled and sending it down the mountain, to demonstrate the safety of the run to the press. He wanted them to understand that it was the drivers who were at fault rather than the run. The sandbags, Pegler wrote, were named “Eenie, Meenie, Minie, and Moe,” although, he added in his inimitably acid style, “the head of the Lake Placid sports objected to the name of the last sandbag and suggested it be rechristened some Nordic name.” The sandbag team, Pegler continued, made easy work of the run. “This was all very embarrassing to the Olympic bobbers, as it seemed to indicate that a staff of sandbags presented just the correct degree of skill and intelligence for bob-bob-bob-bobbing downhill on a sled.”

  Insulted, the bobsledders broke out in open revolt. That simmering spat between Jay O’Brien and Godfrey Dewey finally boiled over. Jay spoke out against the “high-handed” running of the track in the pre
ss. He and the other competitors drew up a list of demands, which Jay then presented to Dewey. The bobsledders asked that the running of the course should be handed over to two officials from the International Federation and that each team should be allowed to take a minimum of two runs each morning. Faced with the threat of a full strike, Dewey gave way. The bobsledders were given their head. And so the run didn’t get any safer, or any slower.

  The Germans, having lost almost half their team before the Olympics even started, received special permission to recruit a new crew at late notice. And so the Suicide Club gained a new member, the “Champagne King,” Baron Walther von Mumm. He was perhaps the most remarkable of the lot. He had four scars on his chest, one for each of the bullets that had hit him in his life: The first two were a parting gift from his mistress, who shot him when he told her he was breaking off their affair; another he suffered while fighting on the Eastern Front. And the last was so fresh it had only just begun to heal. Mumm’s friends liked to say that he had one scar for each of the four fortunes he had lost. The first went when the French confiscated his family’s vineyards in the war; the second when the collapse of the German economy crippled his investments there; the third when prohibition ruined his attempts to launch the Mumm brand in the United States; and the fourth when he lost the little he had left in the Wall Street crash. By 1930 he was living in a boardinghouse, paying ten dollars in rent a month, and working in a brokerage. He was so depressed by his situation that he tried to shoot himself in the heart. He missed. That was in October 1931, just four months before the Olympics. He came up to Lake Placid to recuperate.

  Mumm was a pilot, really, rather than a bobber. He used to race balloons. But he had done a little bobsledding, and when his country called, he was happy to join the squad. He roped in three extras, none of them with a scrap of bobsledding experience. One was a baron, another a Bismarck. The other was Georg Gyssling, the German consul in New York and a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party. He wasn’t the only one in the Suicide Club. The Swiss driver René Fonjallaz became one of the Nazi Party’s leading propagandists in Switzerland.