by Andy Bull
Three weeks earlier, thirteen teams had been entered for the event. Since then, six had fallen away. The last withdrawal happened that very morning, when the first Swiss team, led by Donald Unger, pulled out because they simply didn’t believe the course was safe to ride. So there were only seven teams left, the survivors “seven reckless, iron-nerved pilots” and their crews. There were the Romanians, led by the stunt pilot Lieutenant Alexei Papan; the Italians, led by Count Rossi; and the Swiss, a late entry, led by Reto Capadrutt, keen to exact revenge for his defeat in the two-man competition. Capadrutt was the only driver in the field who insisted on using a sled steered by rope pulleys rather than a wheel, which meant he was handicapped from the start. Then there was Walther von Mumm’s screwball group, only recently recruited to the sport. Most reckoned it would be a miracle if they could just get down without breaking their necks. Finally, the contenders, the three favorites in the betting: Germany’s Hans Kilian and the two American sleds, No. 1 driven by Billy Fiske and No. 2 by Hank Homburger.
From the moment the first sled set off, it was obvious that the times were going to be slow. Capadrutt finished in 2:06. Papan and Rossi were slower still. Mumm, of course, was well back, in 2:11—over twenty seconds slower than the times the top teams had achieved earlier in the week. Then came Kilian, his team bobbing together to try to wring every little drop of extra forward momentum they could from the sled. Even he could make only 2:03.11. Next up, the Red Devils. There were, the Times said, “involuntary exclamations of awe from the crowd as Homburger swept past each point.” The Red Devils were kitted out in extraordinary leather helmets, which covered their entire faces. “They looked like automatons rushing down the course.” The times came over the PA as the sled traveled. They were 1:46 coming out of Zig-Zag into the home straight, and then they hit a thick patch of snow. It stripped them of all their speed. When they broke the thread attached to the electronic clock at the bottom of the course, the timer stopped at 2:01.77—the quickest of the day but still slow by Homburger’s standards. Billy’s team was last to go. They reached Zig-Zag in 1:47—a little slower. But he brought the sled right around the thickest part of the same patch of snow and stopped the clock at 2:00.52. He had the lead.
While Billy was steering, he was charting the course in the back of his mind. It took four runs to win the title, not one, and he knew better than to blow it all out on this first run. He used this first trip for reconnaissance. He made mental notes about the slush puddles and snow piles, plotted a quicker route for his next run. And it showed. On the second run, Kilian got his time down to just under 2:02. Homburger was a little quicker, just outside 2:01. But Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay broke the two-minute barrier. 1:59.16. With two runs to go, they led the Red Devils by a little more than three seconds.
When Billy hit the ramp at the bottom of that second run, there was a gaggle of athletes and officials waiting. He could see right away that something was up, since the first teams should have already been back at the top of the mountain, ready to make their third descent. He climbed off the sled and walked into an almighty row. The Red Devils were in the thick of it, along with officials from the organizing committee and the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation, surrounded on all sides by eager onlookers and journalists with their notebooks out. He could hear shouting. It was Paul Stevens. He had buttonholed Erwin Hachmann, the man in charge of the course that day. “If you insist on making us race in these conditions,” Stevens said, “you’ll go on without us. We’re through racing today. It’s a travesty on bob-racing. We came down so slow I had time to get off at Shady and fetch myself a drink.”
Stevens was on strike. He had had enough of Dewey’s meddling. Control of the track had been handed over to the European members of the International Federation, but they were just as keen as Dewey to keep the track running slow, since it suited the European drivers. They’d done their work so well that the American riders considered the slowness of the course an insult to the sport. Soon, Henry McLemore wrote, it was a mutiny. The rest of the Red Devils joined in with Stevens, and then Hans Kilian declared that he, too, was going to pull out of the race unless something was done to speed the course up. “The snow had slowed the course to a sluggish descent that would hardly baffle a kid,” Neil wrote. “The crowd of 25,000 was starting to wonder who started those stories about the thrills of bobsledding as they watched sleds plow through several inches of snow, slowing down almost to stopping at some points.”
As for Billy and Jay, they kept their thoughts to themselves. They were in first place, after all. But when it became clear which way the weight of opinion was falling, they, too, nodded their assent to the strike. There would be little satisfaction to be had, Billy realized, in beating the Red Devils if they had a ready-made excuse. All right then. He’d beaten them twice on a slow track, he could beat them twice more on a quick track. Whichever way they wanted it.
“The officials stomped their feet in rage,” McLemore wrote. “The officials coaxed and teased. The officials threatened all manner of dire things. But the bobsledders stood firm.” Eventually, after an hour’s argument, the officials caved in. They called the races off for the day, even though that meant they would now take place after the IOC’s twenty-four-hour window had shut. They didn’t like it. But they didn’t have any choice. That night, the volunteer workforce was out again, undoing all the work they’d done the night before. They raked away all the snow they’d shoveled onto the course a day earlier and sprayed it with water until it glistened in the moonlight. At last the sledders had gotten the kind of track they’d wanted all along. “This,” wrote Neil, “is now a course for Americans, with American speed.”
The Suicide Club met for the final time early on the morning of Monday the 15th. The Olympics had been over for two days already, but twenty-eight athletes had business to settle on the mountain. The crowds had already split up and quit town, even Billy’s own family. There were only around seven thousand fans left. The grandstands weren’t even full. It was a bitterly cold morning. And the run, Neil wrote, was “a huge open conduit of twisted, burned silver,” one long ribbon of ice winding down the mountain. It looked quick. And it was. Capadrutt and Papan both cut their times down to a shade over two minutes flat. Kilian broke the barrier, finishing in 1:58.19, which was quicker even than Homburger, who clocked 1:58.56. And then there was Billy Fiske. Fastest again. As he had been in all three rounds. His time was 1:57.41. That meant he had a lead of 4.33 seconds going into the final run. But Homburger, at his quickest, had done the run in 1:47, ten seconds faster than the time Billy had just set. Homburger was sure he could find four or five seconds in a single run if he needed to. And he needed to now.
There is a second line that all bobsledders have to keep in mind. The first, we know, is the fastest path down the mountain, the racing route, high into one corner, low out of another, high into the next. The second line is in the mind. It’s the one that marks that outer limit. Cross it, and you crash. Because when you reach the far side, that’s when the sled flips over and you wind up unconscious on the track like René Fonjallaz, or the sled flies off track and you finish up in hospital with a broken arm, back, or skull, like Zahn, Grau, and Brehme. “The best drivers in the world,” says Steve Holcomb, “are the drivers who know exactly where that edge is.” They can push their sled right up to it, to the point where the runners are shrieking, and voices inside the riders’ minds are screaming, and then they hold it there. Right on the line. “You go over that edge, and you will crash,” says Holcomb. “And if you hang back from it, you will lose. Because every single guy out on that track is pushing it as far and as hard as they can. Right to the edge. So that’s where you have to take it. And that’s where you have to hold it.” And that was the line Billy hit on his fourth and final run.
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 runn
ers as they cut through the ice. The wind whipped the sounds away from the ears of the four riders. Up front Billy Fiske 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. Behind him, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay were huddled together, with Eddie pressed right up against Billy’s back.
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, where Max Houben had crashed. 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. The sled was really racing now. Sixty miles per hour. Sixty-five. Seventy. As fast as a man could travel without a motor. And then Shady, where Grau had flown over the lip. The sled slid up the wall, pulled higher all the time, up and up, passing perilously close to the lip. Eddie remembered looking down, seeing the rim inches from the runner. He saw a picture in his mind of “a steel comet with four riders hurtling through the air.” And then the sled spat down and around, swept on toward Zig-Zag, where Zahn had lost control. Snap, snap, this way and that. Then the home straight.
In 1:56.59. The fastest run of the Olympics.
But there was one team still to come. If Hank Homburger and his Red Devils were going to beat Billy to the gold, they would need to match the world record set on this same course in the National Championship the previous year. Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay climbed out from their sled and stood by the finish line. There was nothing they could do now but wait, watch, and listen to Homburger’s times come over the PA.
“Twenty-nine seconds at Eyrie!” That was quick. Quicker than Billy.
“Fifty seconds at Whiteface!” World-record pace.
“One minute five seconds at Cliffside!”
Billy bit his lip. He could hear the roars rolling down the mountainside. The crowd was howling in excitement. Homburger was going to do it.
“One minute twenty-four at Shady!”
Homburger had done it. “It was a spectacular effort,” wrote Neil. “He was riding the curves high and taking every chance.”
Then he hit Zig-Zag. He took his sled so high on each bank of the chicane that the spectators thought, just for a moment, that he was going to fly over the top. Homburger had crossed the line. He was going to crash. He wrenched the wheel, hauled the sled away from the brink and back into the center of the track. It hit a bad patch of ice, rutted and torn from all the previous runs, and swerved around, almost turning sideways. The sled slowed. The thread broke. The clock stopped at 1:54.28. Billy Fiske was Olympic champion by all of 2.02 seconds.
Billy turned to Eddie, Jay, and Clifford. “Fellas,” he said, “I think I’m going to go check myself into a sanatorium. I think I’ve earned it.”
Just like 1928, there was no great ceremony. No band. No national anthem. No flags. Not even a podium. Just the bobsledders, gathered at the bottom of the run, in celebration this time rather than in protest. Hans Kilian won the bronze, Hank Homburger the silver. Billy, of course, got the gold. “He had nerves of steel,” McLemore wrote. “But what a modest kid, all he did was smile and shrug his shoulders.”
The sweetest part of it? Godfrey Dewey was there to present the medals. He called Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay forward from the pack. Billy made sure to look him right in the eye. “That two-faced, pedantic, hypocritical Dr. Dewey,” Billy wrote in his diary that night. “Thank God I managed to win that absurd event, otherwise his filthy, cackling laugh would have haunted me to my grave.”
After that they stopped to pose for a few photos, some with Jimmy Walker, others with Werner Zahn, his arm still in a sling. He presented them with the fine silver cup, the Martineau Trophy, which he had won at the World Championship the previous autumn. It seemed right, he said, that they should have it, since they were now the quickest men in the world. The papers carried a picture of the four of them kneeling around their sled, each flashing a broad grin, while Zahn, the old World War I fighter ace, handed Billy the trophy. Eddie Eagan had just become the first athlete in history to win a gold medal at both the Summer and Winter Olympics. Jay, at the age of forty-eight, had just become the oldest Winter Olympics champion in history. And Billy, only twenty, was the youngest male athlete ever to win a second Winter Olympics gold.
Billy, Eddie, Clifford, and Jay never rode a sled together again. The National Championship was due to start at Mount Van Hoevenberg the very next day, and several of the overseas teams were going to stick around so they could take part as guests. Billy and his team turned the invitation down flat. They caught the first train back to Manhattan together with Jimmy Walker and Jack Heaton; picked up with Irv Jaffee, Peggy Eagan, and Dolly O’Brien; and went on a weeklong spree, from Delmonico’s to the Silver Slipper to El Morocco and, of course, the 21 Club. “We certainly broke down our bodies well in New York that week,” Billy wrote, “just as well as we had built them up for the Placid campaign.”
—
A fortnight later, when life in the small town of Lake Placid had returned to normal, a letter arrived at the Lake Placid Club lodge. It was to Godfrey Dewey from Gus Kirby. He was a scholarly old soul, a lawyer by trade, and a man who put great store in the amateur code. He was also an old friend of both Jay’s and Billy’s.
My dear Godfrey Dewey,
Being but human, I can’t help but take considerable satisfaction in that we won the bob-sleigh events at the III Olympic Winter Games, and particularly, in that I am confident that even you will now admit that those “experienced drivers here” who did not concede Billy Fiske and his team “an outside chance in any event” were either dumb or prejudiced, and that those who offered “to raise $5,000” to bet that the St. Moritz group would not place either first, second, or third in the eliminations should rejoice in that they had not realized their money. And further that the drivers whose opinions you quoted when you said that “Fiske and Heaton and their crews, in the absolutely unanimous judgment of every driver who has watched their preliminary work on the run have not the slightest chance of qualifying for the teams” didn’t really know what they were talking about. After all, it is not practice, but racing that counts, and that was the position taken by the bob-sleigh committee—and the results here have justified our conclusion.
Perhaps somewhat maliciously, but none the less sincerely yours,
Gustavus T. Kirby.
Godfrey Dewey, so far as anyone knows, never replied.
PART THREE
I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of “The Great Gatsby” I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, in a letter to his daughter, Frances, June 12, 1940
Rose Bingham at El Morocco, New York, 1937.
CHAPTER 12
THE NEXT BIG THING
Looking back from the stern, the ship’s wake seemed to stretch all the way to San Francisco. Billy breathed in the sea air; held it, let it out in one long, slow puff. He felt some of the tension slip away. It was only now that he realized how much those couple of months in the United States had taken out of him. After the Olympics, the bobsled team went their separate ways. Jay traveled down to Palm Beach. He had his eye on a house down there. Eddie was supposed to get back to work, but he was full of big talk about getting back in the boxing ring. As for Tippy, he had some half-baked idea about signing up as a crewman on a yacht for a race across the Atlantic. And Billy? He just wanted to get far away from it all—from Lake Placid, from bobsledding, from Godfrey Dewey. One morning in New York he picked up a copy of the Times and saw a picture of Hank Homburger and his crew in the sports
section. “The Saranac Red Devils,” read the caption underneath, “who retained their North American bobsled title yesterday.” Billy thought about the gold medal on his bedside table. The national title? Hank was welcome to it.
Billy was twenty, had two Olympic titles, a degree from Cambridge, an allowance of five thousand dollars a year, and a one-way ticket to the South Seas with his friend Jack Heaton. The two of them cut out for the West Coast. Their plan had been to hole up at a friend’s ranch just outside San Francisco for a little rest and relaxation. But the city turned out to be just too tempting. “Without doubt the most charming city in America,” Billy wrote in his diary. “They still have that old pioneer hospitality and good will.” Their last night there had been one of the wildest yet. They’d been drinking in a speakeasy run by an old Basque chap. He had invited them along to a party at the local police station. They’d thought it was a joke, but went along anyway, and an hour later they were knocking back beers in a back room of the district headquarters with the local lieutenant and a couple of his sergeants. They’d even taken their guests for a tour of the cells. “They were full of drunks and hop-heads,” Billy wrote, “ordinary humans who have had the bad luck to exaggerate a bit and be caught.” Then they’d gone on to the morgue. It had seemed like a swell idea until the moment they got there. The corpses had smelled like stale fish. “I guess,” Billy said, “God doesn’t think too much of us after we’re dead.” It had sobered them up sharp enough.