Speed Kings (25 page)

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.

THE SUICIDE CLUB

T
he 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.

The ambulance pulled to a stop a hundred yards away, up on the road at the far side of the track. Neil and the others carried the men back up. Three of them were unconscious, deadweights. The fourth, Krotki, was the lucky one. He was awake and could walk, so long as he had someone to lean on. He shouldn't even have been on the sled. He was the team's masseur and medical officer. He had only been riding as a favor, filling in for an absent member. Like all the crews, the Germans had been wearing protective gear—leather helmets, elbow pads, knee pads. But that didn't offer them protection against a crash like this. The driver, Grau, had fractured his shoulder and his hip and had internal bleeding, skin lacerations, and a severe concussion. His brakeman, Brehme, had a fractured skull, a broken arm, and contusion of the spine. The third, Hopmann, was a mess. His calf muscles had been ripped away from his right leg. Brehme and Grau would be in a critical condition for almost a week.

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.”

“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.”