Speed Kings (14 page)

THE RACE

T
he envelope was slim and stamped with a Paris postmark. Geoff Mason guessed it was from the offices of the
Herald Tribune
. He had written to the paper a few weeks earlier, putting himself forward as a volunteer for the US Olympic bobsled team. Mason had never been near a bobsled, but he had been a fine athlete and football player in his college days. And besides, he had time to kill. He had come over to Europe from the United States the previous summer to take up a place at the University of Freiburg, in Germany. He'd brought his family with him, his wife and their two young daughters. They had done a little traveling. Now they had settled down in their new hometown, only a short distance from the Swiss border. The new term wouldn't start till later that winter. So when Geoff saw Sparrow's column, his first thought had been “Why not?” His second had been . . . well, he hadn't had a second thought. He'd sent off his letter and forgotten all about it.

He opened the envelope and took out the short note inside; it was signed “Jay O'Brien” and sent via Sparrow Robertson at the
Trib
. Geoff skimmed his eyes over it once, and again, slower, a second time. He was on the team. It didn't mention anything about a physical exam or a trial run in a sled. It just said, “Come down to St. Moritz, soon as you can.” It was late January 1928, a little over two weeks before the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics.

Mason took a morning train to Zurich, and a second on to St. Moritz that same afternoon. By the time he got in, it was ten at night. He trudged through
the snow to the Palace Hotel, where, so the letter told him, his new teammates were staying. It looked a little grand for his budget, but rates had been fixed for the Games: $1.50 a day for the cheap rooms, $4.50 for a suite. It was already full, so Mason made his way down the road to a cheaper place. He found he was sharing it with the Canadian ice hockey team. He was over six feet tall and weighed two hundred pounds, but for once, he wasn't one of the bigger men in the room.

The next morning, Mason walked back through the town to the Palace. He passed the ice rink, where an army of carpenters was working on the new grandstand, and went on through the busy streets, where painters and decorators were prettying things up, hanging up bunting and flags. He met with the rest of the US team at the Palace. First, Jay O'Brien. He was whippet thin, with a fine pencil mustache that hung over the long ebony cigarette holder that was always tucked between his teeth, cigarette smoldering at the far end. It was such an effort to keep it there that his face, already leathery from the sun, often seemed to be bunched up in a scowl. But he was a friendly man, and he made the introductions. There were a couple of other men who had replied to Sparrow's column: Nion Tucker, an unlikely-looking athlete, a portly chap with pebble-lens spectacles; and Clifford Gray, whom everyone called “Tippy,” short and stout but with a warm grin and a wickedly quick sense of humor. And then there was Billy Fiske, youngest of the bunch by far. O'Brien and Tucker were both in their forties, Gray was a little younger, Mason was twenty-five, but Fiske was just a kid. Nonetheless, he struck Mason as “an extremely mature young man,” “very sophisticated,” “very smart but not a smart alec.” And he was, they said, “a crackerjack bobsled driver.” The others seemed to have “utter confidence” in him.

Mason would soon come to think of Billy as “unquestionably the best anywhere.” O'Brien, who had to pick three teams for the Olympics—USA 1 (the top sled), USA 2, and a reserve crew—didn't quite agree with that. Jay was a good friend of Billy's father, and he felt that the boy, talented as he was, was still a touch too young to be No. 1. Billy had, they said, actually approached Jay and asked to be his sled driver in the Olympics. When Jay knocked him back, Billy had replied, “Well, sir, what shall I do with the bobsled my father gave me?” He was certainly sure of himself. But Jay had an idea that either Jennison or Jack Heaton would be the best pilot. The three of them were all good friends; Jennison was still dating Billy's sister, Peggy.

The two big questions were who would get to drive which sled, and who would have to sit it out, and Jay decided that the best way to settle the issue was to wait until the Derby was run on the St. Moritz track, just a week before the
Olympic race was due to take place. Billy had won it the previous year, on his very first attempt. And he had made an astonishing start to the Olympic season. He had already won the Netherland Cup on January 9 and the Argentine Cup on January 17. That very week, with Mason watching, Billy triumphed in the prestigious Gold Cup, the ornate trophy presented to the club by Jay's good friend Princess Vlora. So Fiske was the man in form. But O'Brien insisted on basing his decision on the results of the Derby. As the UK
Times
reported, “The Derby is the biggest race of a normal year, and will provide an excellent pointer for the Olympic race, since most of the crews competing in it are to engage for Olympic laurels.” The top two Americans to finish would be Jay's first and second drivers for the Olympics, and the third would be the reserve.

There was always a little gambling action around the bob run. Couldn't but be, what with all the money around the town, the idle rich spectators with nothing else to do for kicks till the bars opened and the balls started in the evenings. The St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club made most of its money that way, running auctions and sweepstakes on the results of the races. The 1928 season, though, was something else. St. Moritz was overflowing. The Olympics tourists were spilling out into the nearby towns of Celerina, Samaden, and Pontresin. The crowds weren't too popular with the regular guests. One British journalist complained about the new breed of swells, the “fur-collared males” and the “painted lady with her dog, her fat ankles, discontented face and bejeweled sports clothes.” But the townspeople loved it. Especially the bookmakers. The big money on the Derby was behind Jack Heaton. Second in the running was the crazy Belgian Ernest “Henri” Lambert. Fiske, despite his good form so far that year, was fourth. He was only sixteen, after all, and no one knew how he would handle the pressure of the competition.

The race was scheduled for a Thursday. On Wednesday night, someone—and no one ever discovered who it was—broke into the shed where the sleds were kept and fiddled with Henri Lambert's bob. Or so Lambert said once he had finished the race. He came in second, in the end, behind Jack Heaton. Billy finished third, though he did win the Olavegoya Cup, because he recorded the single quickest run during the competition. Each sled had taken four runs, and the winner was the one with the lowest combined time. None of which mattered much once Lambert's story got out. The journalists swilling around town, who had never seen a bobsled race before, smelled a more interesting story than the straight results of the race. “Here's fun,” wrote John Kieran in the
New York Times
. “It appears that some miscreant, under cover of night, strolled into the
stall in which the Belgian bobsled expert keeps his iron steed and gave the runners a severe twist. It is most important, of course, that the runners of the sled should be parallel, otherwise the speed is much diminished, and there is a tendency on the part of the sled to separate into several segments. Should the sled divide itself into several segments, the rider has a choice of evils. He can slide the next forty yards either on his nose or on his ear. Neither method is particularly comfortable, especially if the icy coating is inclined to be rough and bumpy. There are straw mats to catch those who fall off their sleds at various points, and the telegraph poles along the route are wrapped in many thicknesses of burlap placed for the reception of distinguished guests. Even so, many rich Americans and titled Englishmen miss the mats and the upholstered telegraph poles and have to be dug out of the common or garden variety of snowdrift.” It was no joke, this, as funny as Kieran made it sound.

Lambert had spent the morning of the race readjusting the runners on his sled, but still felt that the delicate calibration was out of kilter when he started. One punter won twenty thousand dollars on Heaton's victory. The rumor ran around town that someone was trying to fix the results of the races. Afterward, Jack Heaton declared, “This bob is going under lock and key. Anyone tampering with it must pick a lock and know the combination of my safe deposit box.” The
Times
reported that the sleds were “guarded like thoroughbreds . . . locked up in sheds as a result of heavy betting on the international event.” Billy certainly took the threat seriously: Peggy remembered that he spent the next few nights sleeping in the stall with his sled, buried beneath a mound of fur blankets, to make sure no one could get their hands on his equipment before the Olympics.

Jay O'Brien knew a thing or two about fixing from the days when he ran with Arnold Rothstein in New York, betting on racing and baseball. He wasn't surprised by anything. And all that aside, he now knew what his teams would be for the Olympics. John “Jack” Heaton would drive USA 1, Billy Fiske USA 2. He began to assemble their crews accordingly. He would ride as brakeman in the No. 1 sled himself, alongside Heaton and three men he seemed to pick on the strength of their social credentials as much as their sporting ones. Two of them were financiers: Lyman Hine, president of the American Cotton Oil Company, and David Grainger, a trader who had just bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $143,000. (They had contrasting fates ahead of them. Hine died in a car wreck in Paris in 1930, at the age of forty-one. Grainger ended up holding on to that NYSE seat for seventy-six years—a record. He was still going to
work in his Wall Street office in his nineties.) The final member was Tom Doe Jr., only fifteen but an athletic lad, and, just as pertinently, the son of the president of Eastern Air Transport Inc. The second team would take the three rookies, Nion Tucker, Geoff Mason, and Clifford Gray, with old hand Dick Parke as brake.

Billy had the disadvantage of racing with a largely green crew, most of whom had never even been on a bobsled until they arrived in St. Moritz, and in Mason's case had only had a fortnight to prepare for the Games. They were an unlikely lot—a sixteen-year-old pilot and three men who had only just taken up the sport. They were racing ventre à terre, though, which meant that their inexperience wasn't quite the handicap it might have been otherwise. When you're lying down, overlapping like slates on a roof, there's a limit to how much you can roll from side to side, so sudden movements or miscalculations don't have the same dramatic effect on the momentum of the sled as they do when you're sitting up. But while such things wouldn't actively hinder the sled, they wouldn't do much to urge it on either. A well-drilled crew, one that knows how to bob in rhythm before the corners and lean in concert as they go around them, can add vital speed and help trim those crucial tenths of seconds from the time. The man in the middle seat of the five has to be able to absorb the bobbing of the two riders behind him and, by clenching onto the rails of the sled, convert their rocking into extra speed for the vehicle. This was the role Mason had taken on. He had been practicing it with the Polish crew, who had lost a member to illness, as well as with the Americans, because he wanted to put in as many hours as he could before the big race.

Billy encouraged him to do exactly that. He knew Jack Heaton well. In fact, the two of them were pretty much best friends. So Billy had a keen awareness of Heaton's flaws. Once, writing in his journal, he described “a damn good dinner” the two of them had eaten together, during which “Jack made the statement that ‘Independence is the only thing worth striving for.'” Billy thought there “was something in it” but found it “a bit far fetched” since Jack “hasn't strived very hard so far, but he certainly seems to have reached his end.” He felt Jack was talented, but a little lazy. Billy knew that if he had an edge, it would be in the effort he and his crew put in. So he set the five of them to work, making them take run after run after run down the course at St. Moritz, drilling them until they knew each of the turns intimately and could anticipate whether they needed to lean left or right without waiting for Billy to shout it out. They had only a week to get ready for the Olympic bobsled race. Billy wanted to be sure they used
the time wisely. He insisted that Gray and Parke bob together on the straights, and Parke bob alone going into the corners. He taught Mason how to absorb the shock of the two riders behind him throwing themselves onto his back, and how to transmit that energy into the sled. Tucker's job, in the No. 2 seat, was simply to hold Billy fast and act as a buffer between the driver and the bobbers behind.

Billy came to be quietly confident in his crew, but he wasn't the only rider who fancied his chances. A lot of money was being bet on Lambert, spoiling for a second shot after being foiled by sabotage prior to the Derby. The British papers were talking up the chances of their riders, the current world champion Henry Martineau and Cecil Pim, the captain in the Scots Guards. Pim had crashed in practice, shooting his sled over the top of Sunny Corner into a group of spectators, but he had recovered. And he had won eight races on the track the previous year. The outspoken Argentine Arturo Gramajo gleefully told the press that he could “certainly beat” Heaton's winning time in the Derby, and that he expected the winning order to follow on from the alphabetical one, with Argentina in first place. From out of town there was the German crew of Hans Kilian, a crack driver, but one who had precious little experience on the St. Moritz track. And of course there was Heaton with his crew, composed of Jay's pick of the US riders.

On Saturday, February 11, the Olympics opened, and the weather broke. A strong wind came rushing down the Majola pass. It carried a heavy snowfall with it. And so the athletes were forced to march. Five thousand turned out to watch what should have been an impressive parade, but not many stayed till the end. It was seven degrees below zero. “The prevailing cold effectually prevented the presence of that dignity so essential to its success,” noted the
Times
. Most of the athletes were kitted out appropriately, in long fur coats, thick jerseys, and woolen stockings, but the International Olympic Committee's officials were “clad immaculately in lounge suits and bowler hats,” a state of dress so ill suited to the conditions that it “moved the small crowd present to mirth rather than the desired solemn exaltation.”