Speed Kings (10 page)

Despite de Coubertin's objections, the IOC did decide to stage a winter sports week in 1924 at Chamonix, in France. The proposal had been made by the Marquis de Polignac, a French IOC member; he was supported by the Swiss, Italian, and Canadian delegations. It was held as a precursor to that year's summer Olympics in Paris. It wasn't a separate competition, and it certainly wasn't billed as a Winter Olympics. It was called, instead, the “International Week of Winter Sports.” Only five sports were contested, and just sixteen countries represented. So it was a thoroughly low-key affair at which, one journalist wrote, “everyone knew each other, at least by sight, because no team was composed of more than 30 or 40 competitors.” It was a success, however, so the IOC decided to recognize the event retrospectively as the first Winter Olympic Games, and to stage another in 1928.

Ideally the second Winter Olympics (but the first to go by that name from the outset) would be held in the Netherlands, as the Summer Games were due to be held in Amsterdam, but Holland isn't overly blessed with mountains. Instead, they were awarded to St. Moritz. The town had only a couple of years to get ready, and soon started gearing up. A new ski jump, the tallest in the world, was built, and new stands were put up around the ice rink. A deluxe train service was laid on from the port of Calais to the Swiss border, and plans were made to open up the hotels around the spa, which were typically closed outside summer months, to house the extra visitors.

Otherwise, life went on much as it always did in winter. In fact the organizers were especially keen to stress that the Games wouldn't impose on the tourist season. “Ordinary visitors must not imagine that preparations for the much-talked-of Olympiad will in any way interfere with their convenience or curtail their activities,” read a report in the UK
Times
. “Far otherwise. The rinks and runs will be used as always up to the second week in February, and all the usual competitions and sporting events will be organized. Olympic teams and competitors will arrive in January.”

For the Bobsled Club, the Games promised a season of “great sport, since men with bobs from every country will be represented there, practically for the whole season.” The members relished the chance to compete against the best bobsledders from around the world. There would be twenty-five nations at the Games, with Holland, Romania, Germany, Latvia, Argentina, Japan, and Mexico all taking part for the first time. The bobsledding competition included
twenty-three teams from fifteen nations—115 athletes in all, since they were riding five-man sleds. That made it the largest bobsledding competition in the sport's short history.

One thing that wasn't clear at first was whether the United States would be a part of it. Bobsledding had been invented in the United States, but it had been perfected in Europe. There wasn't a single course in North America, and the United States Olympic Committee wasn't at all sure it wanted to foot the cost of sending over to Europe the few drivers who did feel able to compete. In fact it wasn't even clear whether the USOC wanted to send a team to the Games at all. As late as April 8, 1927, they were still discussing whether or not the United States would be represented in St. Moritz. They decided to delay the decision until the committee could “ascertain just how much support the winter sport governing bodies in the country would lend the project.”

The USOC needed to corral together a disparate group of governing bodies and amateur sports organizations from across all Olympic disciplines. The new president of the USOC, Major General Douglas MacArthur, had been appointed to the job in 1927 on the strength of the reforms he'd made to the athletics program at West Point military academy. Years before George Orwell first coined the phrase, MacArthur was a firm believer that sport was war minus the shooting. He had these words engraved in the stone outside the West Point gym:

UPON THE FIELDS OF FRIENDLY STRIFE

ARE SOWN THE SEEDS

THAT, UPON OTHER FIELDS, ON OTHER DAYS,

WILL BEAR THE FRUITS OF VICTORY.

MacArthur's speech to the US Olympic team in Amsterdam that summer of 1928 included the famous line “We have not come so far just to lose gracefully, but rather to win, and win decisively.” He wasn't interested in the idea of fielding a Winter Olympic team for its own sake, or in paying the traveling and accommodation costs of athletes who had little chance of winning. Under MacArthur, the USOC decided that it would provide guarantees only for the figure and speed skaters; competitors in other sports would have to prove their worth, or pay their own way to Europe.

The USOC appointed a man named Gustavus T. Kirby to be its delegate to the Winter Olympics. Kirby was a New York attorney, “tall, distinguished, and of brisk bearing,” as his obituary in the
New York Times
had it. He was a
troubleshooter, with a “particular facility for placating dissident groups” (the
Times
again) in the world of sports administration. It fell to him to whip the United States' Winter Olympics team into some kind of shape. Kirby knew plenty of people. He had played tennis and golf, been a yachtsman and a horse rider. He was a familiar figure on the New York steeplechasing scene. He hosted a prestigious horse show at his ranch in Westchester, and even invented a camera timer for photo-finishes in close races. So of course he was friends with Jay O'Brien.

By 1927, Jay was the keystone of St. Moritz high society. He had charmed the British members of the SMBC with his easy manner and apparent sportsmanship. Hubert Martineau had appointed him to the SMBC's committee in 1926. It helped that O'Brien had bought the club a cup, the Boblet Grand Prix, as a prize for one of its races. He was beginning to make plans, too, for a new ski club in St. Moritz. His partners in this scheme were all European aristocrats: the Duke of Alba, the Duke of Sangro, Prince Boncompagni, and the Marquis de Polignac. It would, in time, become the prestigious Corviglia ski club. And he was at ease among the Americans, of course. Jay knew the Heatons and the Fiskes; he knew everyone who was anyone, whatever station of life they were in. One story goes that at the Cresta Ball in St. Moritz early in the winter of 1928, the guests were puzzled by three empty tables in a choice corner. The room was overflowing with people but the prime seats were reserved. Eyebrows were cocked upward, quizzically. They lowered again when Jay arrived, fashionably late, with the former Crown Prince Wilhelm, son of the kaiser, on one side, and Gene Tunney, heavyweight boxing champion of the world, on the other.

Gustavus Kirby approached Jay, and the two of them hatched a plan for the US bobsled squad. They decided that Jay would be put in charge and he would recruit a team of American ex-pats from the club in St. Moritz, and find a few willing men to fill out the ranks. They would all be in town already, and wealthy enough to pay their own way, something Jay was particularly proud of. “The men whom I selected were fine types of amateur sportsmen, brought together by me from throughout Europe,” Jay later wrote to MacArthur. “I think it is only justified that I call attention to the fact that the training and participation of these teams did not cost the Olympic Committee one penny in way of expense.” There were a few likely bob drivers in St. Moritz, but Jay still needed to find ten men to make up the two crews, with a couple left over for reserves in case of injury. He could take one seat himself, having picked up a little bobsledding experience; friends of his from St. Moritz, like his pal the old soldier Dick Parke,
could fill a few of the other slots. But Jay was still short of a full squad. And then he had a bright idea: he would put out an advert calling for recruits.

Jay traveled to Paris to meet up with an old friend of his, Sparrow Robertson. Sparrow was a sportswriter on the Paris edition of the
Herald Tribune
. He was a sinewy old fellow, half-cut as often as not, always on a cocktail of rye, dry vermouth, and Campari—he called the concoction an “old pal.” When he wasn't at the fights or the races, Sparrow could usually be found in Harry's Bar on the Rue Daunou. He styled himself as “a philosopher of sport.” He could hardly string a sentence together—he'd conned his way into the job, his only previous experience being his work as a small-fry fight promoter and a one-time coach for the YMCA—but once the copy editors stopped trying to make sense of his copy, his twisted syntax earned him a cult following among the American ex-pats in the French capital. The poet and publisher James Laughlin, who lived in Paris in the 1930s, laughingly called Sparrow the “great living master of American prose” because he so loved the “literary pearls” he would slip into the “dignified account of the last boxing match at the Palais de Sport or a hailstorm of statistics about horse racing results in 1910.” Reading Sparrow's Sporting Gossip columns in the
Trib
was part of the daily ritual. “Back at home we would never have read the sports pages at all as a matter of principle,” Laughlin wrote in his autobiographical short story, “The River.” “But there in Paris at the big cafés, sitting and sipping, watching and reading, we came to be liking that part best of all.”

Sparrow, Jay had decided, was just the man he needed to help beat up a little publicity for the bobsledding teams. He invited him over for supper one evening. The only problem was, if you wanted anything from Sparrow, you had to give him something in return. He wasn't in the business of handing out favors for free. So Jay fed him a scrap of gossip for his column, a tall tale about a new sport he had encountered on the Riviera that summer. Sparrow didn't believe it, but it made for enjoyable copy. Not long after they met, the following snippet appeared in the pages of the Paris
Herald Tribune
:

The writer spent a very pleasant evening at the Paris home of Mr. Jay O'Brien, who a few years ago was the best of the American gentleman steeplechase riders. Mr. O'Brien's bobsleigh and crew won the famous St. Moritz Derby last year, and also several other races at the Switzerland resort. It is the intention of Mr. O'Brien to organize two American crews for the Olympic championship bobsleigh event which will be given during the winter sport next year.

Mr. O'Brien spoke of the latest sport which is called balloon jumping. A balloon about six feet high is strapped to the shoulders and with that contrivance one can hop around like a ballad [
sic
] dancer. One of the most expert of the balloon jumpers, Mr. O'Brien informed me, is Arthur “Bunker” Vincent, who is also one of the best American amateur golfers in France. Mr. Vincent puts the balloon attachment to his shoulders when he goes out on the links to sock the little pill around, and Mr. O'Brien says “Bunker” has a regular la-la time hopping around the links, feeling light as air. “It is a great sport, balloon jumping,” Mr. O'Brien says.

“It is a good story, even if it is not true,” Sparrow wrote to a friend of his. And for him, that was all that mattered.

For Jay, well, now word was out. Sparrow soon gave him another plug, calling for young male volunteers to ride on the US bobsled team. You needed to be American, in Europe, and athletic. Anyone interested should contact the paper. There were three responses. One was from a man named Geoffrey Mason, a student who was traveling through France on his way to Germany, where he was going to university. The second was from a man named Nion Tucker, a businessman from Hillsborough, California, who had studied at Berkeley.

The last was from a man named Clifford “Tippy” Gray, and his isn't the kind of story you can sum up in a line or two. No, the life of Clifford Gray is one of the great mysteries of the Olympics.

From left to right: Jay, Eddie, Clifford, and Billy. Lake Placid, 1932.