Transcript
The empty sled
It is the first week of February, 1932. The place is the Adirondack mountains, in the north of New York State.
A bobsleigh run comes down through the forest. It is a channel of ice, walled in places with stone, curving down the side of a mountain. A third of the way down, there is a hairpin bend called Shady Corner.
Two men are riding a sled into it, fast.
At Shady Corner, the two men come off.
The newspapers said they jumped. The official report said they were thrown. Either way, the sled goes on without them.
Nobody is steering it now. Nobody can brake. It rounds the hairpin and carries on down the mountain. It takes the next curve, and the one after that. It does not tip over.
It reaches the finish on its own.
The organisers wrote it into their official report, as proof. They said the empty sled had come down “as safely as tho piloted by an expert steersman”.
Two years earlier, there had been no run here at all. Just the forest.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
Episode nine of this podcast told how an American teenager won the Olympic bobsleigh race at St. Moritz, in 1928. His name was Billy Fiske.
So America had bobsledders. It even had a champion. What it did not have was a proper place to slide.
In 1929, a small American town said so in writing. It was bidding to host the Winter Olympics. Its own bid admitted the problem. No place in the United States or Canada, it said, had a bobsleigh run to compare with the great runs of Europe.
The town promised to build one anyway. A run, it said, “equal to any of the famous European slides”.
The town was Lake Placid. It had fewer than four thousand people.
This episode is the story of how that promise was kept. How a village turned an Olympic bid into a working track on a mountain, in less than two years. Why the first place it chose was forbidden. Who drew the curves. What happened when the best drivers in the world arrived to ride them.
And why that mountain is still, nearly a century later, the fixed point of American sliding.
The promise
Lake Placid sits in the high country of northern New York, between lakes and forest. By the 1920s it was already a resort.
Much of that was the work of one private club. The Lake Placid Club was founded in 1895 by Melvil Dewey. He is the Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System, the numbers that still put library books in order.
The club began as a summer place. From the early 1900s it stayed open in winter, too. In the words of the official report, a few hardy souls “tried the Adirondack snow and found it good”. The report later called the club the true pioneer of winter sport in Lake Placid.
That report is an odd thing to read. The club had its own way of spelling, with the silent letters taken out. So the report says that the run was “promist”. Where you would write “established”, it writes “establisht”. The official record of an Olympic Games, printed in a club’s private spelling.
The club also kept people out.
Its rules barred anyone against whom there was, in its words, a “race objection”. A company circular from 1904 was plainer. It said it was “impracticable to make exceptions for Jews”.
That year, a prominent New York lawyer joined others in a petition to the state’s Board of Regents. His name was Louis Marshall. Melvil Dewey was the State Librarian at the time, and the petition asked that he be removed. The Regents did not remove him. But they rebuked him for his part in the club’s discrimination against Jews.
Remember Louis Marshall. His family comes back into this story.
By the late 1920s, a leading figure at the club was Melvil Dewey’s son, Godfrey.
Early in 1928, Godfrey Dewey went to Europe. He made a special trip to study the great winter resorts: Chamonix, Davos, St. Moritz and more. Then he went to the Winter Olympics at St. Moritz, as the leader of the American ski team.
He came home sure of one thing. In the things money could not buy, the report says, Lake Placid could match the best of Europe. It had the climate, the terrain and long experience.
On the twenty-first of March, 1928, he spoke to the Lake Placid Kiwanis Club. The town, he said, should bid for the next Winter Games.
The official report remembers the reaction. Many residents, it says, “were aghast” that a little mountain resort could even think of entertaining the winter-sports world.
Two weeks later, at the Chamber of Commerce, the town learned the price. It would need a bobsleigh run. Without one, the International Olympic Committee would not take the bid seriously.
It was not the only problem. A committee went round the village counting beds. In the whole of Lake Placid, in winter, it found about two thousand four hundred.
But a run was the hardest thing on the list. Skating needed a frozen surface. Skiing needed a hill. A bob run needed a mountain, an engineer, and a great deal of money.
The bid made the run sound grand. It would drop about two hundred metres from top to bottom. The famous run at St. Moritz, the bid pointed out, dropped about a hundred and thirty.
The money came from several places. Lake Placid and the neighbouring town of Saranac Lake pledged fifty thousand dollars as a guarantee. New York State promised to pay for the run. Its governor, Franklin Roosevelt, signed a law for it in February 1929. A copy of that law went into the bid.
At the end of March 1929, Godfrey Dewey sailed for Europe. The Olympic committee was meeting at Lausanne, in Switzerland.
There were other American bids. Six of them, from Minnesota to California. According to the Lake Placid side, California was ready to spend up to three million dollars.
On the tenth of April, the committee voted. It was unanimous.
Lake Placid had the Games. Now it needed the run.
That June, the voters of the township borrowed two hundred thousand dollars for the Games. The vote, the report says, was more than five to one.
The forest
The first plan was to build on state land.
Around Lake Placid lie the Adirondacks, a huge area of mountains and lakes. Much of it belongs to the people of New York, as the Forest Preserve. In 1929 that preserve covered almost two million acres.
A second state law that year allowed a bobsleigh run on a slope inside it.
But the Forest Preserve had a guard. A clause of the state constitution, in force since 1895, said that these lands “shall be forever kept as wild forest lands”. Their timber could not be “sold, removed or destroyed”.
A bob run needs a cleared path. Clearing it meant cutting trees.
The Olympic backers knew that. They did not want to start work, and then be stopped by a court order a few weeks before the Games. So they asked for the question to be settled early.
In June 1929, the state’s chief lawyer, the Attorney-General, advised the state to go ahead. He wrote that it was “for the purpose of bringing this matter before the Courts”.
A conservation group, the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks, took the other side. The town’s own parks district argued for the run. It was a test case, by design.
The first court ruled in January 1930. The run, it found, would mean cutting about two and a half thousand trees, on four or five acres.
The judge who wrote that ruling did not think the size mattered. The Forest Preserve, he wrote, “must always retain the character of a wilderness”. Sports that need a man-made setting, he said, simply did not belong in it.
If New Yorkers wanted their great park used that way, he wrote, they would have to change the constitution. And he added, almost apologetically, that it might be “too late” to help this bobsleigh run.
He also noticed something. There was a site on private land, he said. The backers preferred the state’s land because it was “easier and cheaper”.
That private site was a peak called Mount Jo. The organisers had put it on their list from the start, the report says, in case a run on state land was ruled unconstitutional. It was their fallback. In the end, the report says, it was found unsatisfactory too.
The backers appealed to New York’s highest court.
That court ruled on the eighteenth of March, 1930. Its chief judge was Benjamin Cardozo, who would later sit on the United States Supreme Court. The decision was unanimous. The opinion was written by Judge Crane.
He did not pretend it was a big intrusion. He called it a very slight inroad: about four acres, out of nearly two million. He could see no objection to a bob run, he wrote, except one. “One objection, and one only — the Constitution of the State, which prevents the cutting of the trees.”
A plea for sport, he wrote, could become an open door. Abuses could follow the benefits through it. So, he said, “the door must be kept shut.”
In that opinion, the judge cited a magazine essay. It had come out the month before. It was called “The Problem of the Wilderness”. It argued that wild land was worth keeping wild for its own sake.
Its author was a young forester named Bob Marshall. He would go on to help found the Wilderness Society.
He was the son of Louis Marshall. That is the same Louis Marshall who, in 1904, had petitioned against Melvil Dewey and the club that kept Jews out.
A local historian, writing in 1987, added one more thread. Louis Marshall, he wrote, had sat in the convention that put the “forever wild” clause into the constitution. He had been its watchdog until he died.
Louis Marshall had died the year before the ruling. Neither man was part of the case. It is a coincidence. But it is a striking one.
The run could not go on the people’s forest. So it went onto the club’s land.
Losing had a price. The ruling, the organisers’ report said, had taken away the most favourable site. Building on the other one would cost a great deal more.
Soon after the ruling, Godfrey Dewey found a site on a mountain the club owned, about eight miles from the village. It was then called South Meadow mountain. It would later be renamed Mount Van Hoevenberg.
Henry Van Hoevenberg had built a lodge in this part of the Adirondacks in the nineteenth century. He had named a nearby peak after a woman he met while climbing. That peak was Mount Jo, the fallback the organisers had found wanting.
There was one more problem. The state was paying for the run, and the land belonged to a private club that excluded Jews.
The historian Peter Hopsicker has written about what followed. He reports that a Jewish newspaper editor wrote to Governor Roosevelt. The editor, David Mosessohn, objected to public money being spent on the club’s land.
In the end, the run was built wholly with state money, on land handed to the state under a permanent easement. The run would be public.
The easement had a condition. If the state ever failed to keep the run going for two winters in a row, the land would go back to the town.
Keep that condition in mind, too.
The engineer
To design the run, Lake Placid went to Germany.
Stanislaus Zentzytzki was an engineer from Berlin. He had designed the Schreiberhau run in Germany, and other European tracks. The organisers called him one of the foremost bob-run designers in the world.
He first came to Lake Placid in the summer of 1929. He spent weeks studying the mountains. The report puts it simply. There were plenty of mountains. Some were almost impossible to reach. Others were not steep enough.
He surveyed three sites, staked out routes, and sailed home to Berlin to draw the plans.
Two of the three were on state land. One was the slope of the Sentinel Range, the site named in the law. The other was a mountain called Scarface, which the report says proved the best of the three. The third was on private land: Mount Jo, which the judge would later point to.
Before he left, he laid out a practice run for the club, at a place called Intervales. It was half a mile long, with seven curves of sand and wood under snow and ice. The organisers’ report says the first bobsled race in the United States was held there, in January 1930.
It was a rough school. In one race that winter, a sled turned turtle. The crew were thrown into the middle of the run, and two of them went to hospital.
Godfrey Dewey was learning too. According to Hopsicker, he tested sleds on that practice run himself, and helped design an American sled with flatter, more flexible runners than the Europeans used.
Those sleds were steel and wood. A four-man weighed about four hundred and eighty pounds and was nearly twelve feet long. A two-man weighed about a hundred and thirty pounds less. Each cost five or six hundred dollars. Dewey rode them hard. In a practice run in 1931, Hopsicker writes, he crashed at sixty-five miles an hour.
When the court closed the forest, Zentzytzki came back. He arrived late in April 1930, made the final survey of the new mountain, and drew the run. He left in early June.
The man who turned his drawings into a building job was local. Henry Homburger was a civil engineer in Saranac Lake. He worked beside Zentzytzki on the survey, then took charge of the construction details once the German had gone home.
Remember Henry Homburger, too.
In April 1930, the state passed a third law. It set up a commission for the Games and gave it a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, mainly for the run. More state money followed.
That spring, a letter reached Godfrey Dewey from Germany. It came from Werner Zahn, one of the best bobsleigh drivers in the world. Hopsicker found it in the archives. Zahn urged Dewey to make the curves high enough that no sled, not even a badly driven one, could fly off the run.
The contracts were let at the end of July. A road about a mile long was cut to the site, and a steel bridge was thrown over the river.
On the fourth of August, 1930, the first shovel went into the ground.
The run, the report said, was “literally dug and blasted out of rock and forest”. More than twenty-seven thousand cubic yards of earth and rock were moved.
The straight sections were built of earth. The highest curves were built of stone. Some of them stood twenty-two feet high, the report said, “almost at right angles to the bottom”.
The finished run was about two thousand three hundred and fifty metres long. That is roughly a mile and a half. It had twenty-six curves.
Three were famous. Near the top was Whiteface. Then Shady Corner. Both were hairpins, turning the sled almost all the way round. Lower down came Zig-zag, shaped like a letter S.
The run had one unusual feature. Unlike most European runs, the report said, it dropped steeply through its curves. Pilots said they hardly needed to steer on the banked turns. The banks did the work.
On the straights, the channel was only about two metres wide. In the curves it opened out, to ten feet and more. The average slope was about one in ten. The straights were given a thin frosting of snow, the report said, so that the runners could bite in.
There was no refrigeration. The ice was natural. Workers froze a mix of snow and water onto the walls. Eight thousand feet of pipe ran underground from the bottom to the top. Each day, after the run closed, about twenty thousand gallons of water were sprayed onto it.
At the top, tractors would haul the sleds back up the mountain. Along the way stood telephone booths. Halfway down, at Shady Corner, there was a second start, for the lower half of the run. At the bottom, a log clubhouse looked out through a wall of glass at the finish.
All that autumn, people drove out from the village to watch it grow.
On Christmas Day, 1930, the run opened. It had taken less than five months.
It had cost nearly a quarter of a million dollars. The biggest item was the earthwork, at more than a hundred thousand. The water system cost over twenty thousand dollars. So did the engineering. Keeping the ice on it cost about twenty thousand dollars the first winter, and thirty thousand the next.
That first winter, almost two thousand people rode down it. In February 1931, a four-man team from Saranac Lake, the Red Devils, came down in one minute fifty-two seconds. That averaged about seventy-six kilometres an hour. The organisers called it a world record.
Later that month, a novice meet started halfway down, from Shady Corner. Fourteen teams raced. One of them, the report noted, was made up entirely of girls. It finished fifth.
Even in summer, with no ice at all, people came to look. In the summer of 1931, the report counted more than eight thousand visitors, from thirty-three states and twenty countries.
The run had been promised a year before the Games. It was ready a year before the Games.
The world’s best drivers would soon find out what it could do to them.
The fortnight before
The winter of the Games was not kind.
Before the Olympics, rain once washed the whole run out. Warm spells damaged it again and again. The weather was so bad that the American trials could not be held. The teams had to be picked without them.
When the ice did form, it was glassy. The press called it “a little too perfect”.
The European teams arrived at the end of January 1932. The run’s steep drops through the curves, Hopsicker writes, were something new to the sport.
He went back through the newspapers of those weeks. In little more than a week of practice, he counted eight crashes and three near-crashes. More than a dozen men went to hospital.
Before they rode, riders signed a waiver.
The Americans crashed too. On the first day of practice, according to the New York Times, one local driver found he had no brake. He tipped his own sled over on purpose to stop it. Billy Fiske, the champion of 1928, turned his sled over less than a hundred yards from the start.
On the thirty-first of January, Werner Zahn went down the run. The same Werner Zahn who had written to Dewey about the curves.
At Zig-zag, his sled flew out.
All four men were knocked unconscious. Zahn broke his arm. One of his crew was later found to have a fractured spine.
Zahn wrote about it afterwards. “My sail of 110 feet through the air,” he said, “was the greatest thrill of my entire racing career.”
Zahn had seen worse. Four years earlier, in practice at St. Moritz, his sled had crashed and his brakeman had been killed.
His brakeman at Lake Placid broke a hand. Two weeks later, by Hopsicker’s account, the same man raced the four-man with that hand in a plaster cast. His sled took the bronze.
That afternoon, in blinding snow and wind, two of the local drivers tried the whole run. One of them was Henry Homburger, the engineer who had supervised its building. They braked all the way down, and still nearly went over the walls. The officials ruled the run too fast for safety, and closed the top half-mile.
The visitors did not take that well. The Germans and the Belgians protested that closing the top favoured the Americans, who knew the run. Hopsicker says one American, Jay O’Brien, took their side. Each foreign team was allowed one full run from the top, braking all the way.
Hopsicker’s own reading goes further. The organisers, he writes, tried to limit the foreign teams’ practice under the cover of poor track conditions. That is a historian’s judgement, drawn from the newspapers of the day.
Two days later, it was Shady Corner. The German driver Fritz Grau was a thirty-seven-year-old radio manufacturer from Berlin. TIME magazine reported that his sled jumped the run there at sixty-five miles an hour. It plunged into what TIME called an eighty-five-foot gully.
Grau and his three teammates were taken to hospital. TIME listed concussions, broken bones and fractured skulls.
Grau had landed so far from the run, Hopsicker writes, that the rescuers took several minutes to find him. Practice started again twenty minutes later.
The organisers’ official report described the German crashes differently. It said the German racers were, fortunately, “not seriously injured”.
The next day, a Swiss driver, René Fonjallaz, crashed at Whiteface. He lay unconscious for five minutes, then got back on and finished the run. The Times said his Swiss sled was steered with ropes. Afterwards, it reported, he asked for an American one, with a wheel. He would never again, he said, drive a Swiss sleigh with rope controls.
A newspaper headline over a column by the writer Damon Runyon called the run the “Bob Sled Run Suicide Club”.
Not everyone stayed away. On the fifth of February, the local paper reported, the governor’s wife rode part of the run, with Henry Homburger driving. Her name was Eleanor Roosevelt. Her husband, the paper said, was anxious. Four days later, the polar explorer Admiral Byrd rode too.
The crowds were not put off. A Lake Placid teacher wrote that spectators planted themselves in the most dangerous places. One of the first questions from people buying tickets, he said, was where to watch the most hazardous chances.
The organisers tried to slow the run down. Workers shovelled snow onto the ice.
The foreign teams wanted more. On the first of February, seven of them handed Dewey a list of grievances. They wanted a doctor and an ambulance at the run. They wanted practice to start at eight in the morning, not half past five. They wanted European officials in charge of the run. According to Hopsicker, Dewey agreed.
A German protest had already done something else. Under an Olympic rule, it stopped all racing on the run for the eight days before the Olympic events. The North American championships, due that week, were pushed back until after the Games.
And now the home drivers complained. The newspapers quoted one of them, a Lake Placid man named Hubert Stevens. With snow on it, he said, the run was “fit only for old ladies and little children”.
Practice went on. And it was in those same days that a crew came off at Shady Corner, and the sled went on without them, all the way to the finish.
Hopsicker, from the newspapers, puts it later on the day of Grau’s crash. The crew, he says, was Belgian, and they jumped rather than risk the corner. The official report says they were thrown.
That empty sled tells you something about a track.
In Slidensa, a bob left to itself after the push still reaches the bottom of the game’s Igls track. The banks carry it. But it slips off its line, and it loses more than three and a half seconds. That is one model, on one track. It is not a promise that a sled with nobody steering it is safe.
The run at Lake Placid could carry an empty sled. It could also throw out the best drivers in the world.
February 1932
The Lake Placid Games had something new on the programme: the two-man bob.
Until then, Olympic bobsleigh had been for crews of four or five. Now there would be a race for two: a driver, and a brakeman behind him.
The race was due to start on the eighth of February. A blizzard closed the run. So it began the next morning, with twelve sleds from eight nations.
Most of the field rode American sleds supplied by the organisers. The report said they could “steer like an automobile”, with a wheel.
The first sled for the United States was driven by Hubert Stevens, the man who had complained about the snow. He was forty-one. His family ran a hotel in Lake Placid, and he had sat on the committee that found beds for the visitors. His brother Curtis, in his early thirties, rode behind him as brakeman.
They were local men, on their own mountain.
Hubert Stevens had trained as an engineer. In the First World War, by one account, he had been a machinist and a pilot. The winter before the Games, by the same account, he had won the North American championship on this run. Curtis had learned to ride a bob on the club’s practice run at Intervales. In summer, he raced motorboats.
The first run did not go their way. The fastest sled was Swiss. Its driver, Reto Capadrutt, was a nineteen-year-old student. His brakeman, Oscar Geier, was forty-nine. He was a lawyer, Swiss by birth, who lived in New Jersey.
After that first run, the Stevens brothers were seven seconds behind.
In a sport decided by tenths, seven seconds is an enormous gap.
They went faster on every run. Two minutes thirteen seconds, the first time. Two minutes four, the second. After the first day, the gap was down to just over four seconds.
The run itself was changing under them. On the first morning, the organisers recorded an average of minus thirteen Celsius. Snow had been laid on the ice to slow it. By the second run, Olympedia’s account says, much of that snow was gone, and the ice was faster. Overnight it warmed. The organisers’ figure for the second day was minus two, and the ice got faster still. The Swiss sled’s times came down too. The brothers’ came down faster.
On the second day, they came down in just under two minutes. The gap was less than half a second.
On the last run, they came down in one minute fifty-eight.
They won by a second and a half.
Bronze went to another American, Jack Heaton. Four years earlier, at St. Moritz, he had won a silver medal riding head first, on a skeleton sled. Skeleton was not on the programme at Lake Placid, so he had moved to a bob.
Fourth were two Romanian army aviators. Fifth were the reigning world champions, from Germany.
The first Olympic two-man race had gone to two brothers from the town that had built the run.
That race is still part of the Olympics. And it still has a bigger sibling.
Our game carries both bobs, the two-man and the four-man, on the same ice. The two-man is meant to be the slower of the pair, as it is on real tracks. In the game’s own tests, with the computer driving, it is. On the Igls run, the four-man comes down about half a second quicker.
The four-man race at Lake Placid should have followed two days later. The weather pushed it back again.
So the Games ended before the bobsleigh did.
The closing ceremony was held on Saturday afternoon, the thirteenth of February. It came straight after an ice hockey game between Canada and the United States. As it ended, the report says, “the long-delayed and ardently-wished-for snow-storm” finally arrived. It covered the players and the crowd in white.
The next morning, the four-man began.
Special trains had been running into Lake Placid for days, from New York and from Montreal. Two days earlier, on the busiest day of the Games, the town’s restaurants had served nearly ten thousand lunches, letting diners in by turns. The village that had counted its beds was full.
The organisers estimated that about fourteen thousand people came up the mountain to watch the first two runs of the four-man. It was the largest single crowd they reported at those Games. Their Olympic stadium, by comparison, held fewer than seventy-five hundred.
There were stands at the three great curves, Whiteface, Shady Corner and Zig-zag. But people roamed the whole length of the run.
They could not see a sled until it passed them. So the run had telephones. Seven booths stood along the course. As each sled took a curve, a report came down the line to an announcer at the finish. His voice went out through loudspeaker horns to every stand.
Imagine standing in the snow at Zig-zag, listening to a voice in a horn tell you where the sled is. Then hearing it.
Each stand had a scoreboard, too. It posted the split times from five timing points on the way down. No sled was sent off until the words “clear track” had been telephoned up from every booth below.
At the finish, the sled broke a thread. A machine stamped its time from the top onto a tape, to the hundredth of a second. Episode nine told how a thread started the clock at St. Moritz in 1928. Here, one stopped it.
Then a crane lifted the bob out of the run. In the log clubhouse, thousands ate upstairs behind the glass wall, by a fireplace of Adirondack stone, and watched the last curve.
Billy Fiske’s American crew won the four-man. Who rode with him is a story for a coming episode.
Second was the other American sled. Its driver was Henry Homburger, the engineer from Saranac Lake who had supervised the building of the run. Behind him rode Paul Stevens, a brother of the two-man champions.
On Monday the fifteenth, the medals were handed out at the bottom of the mountain. Werner Zahn was there, his arm still in a sling. He handed Fiske a world championship trophy.
One more thing about those four days of racing. Not one sled crashed. Every crew that started recorded four times. Hopsicker notes it: the danger had all been in the practice weeks.
What became of it
That May, the run was handed to the state’s conservation department. And the state kept it.
It did not stay the same. In the 1930s, the top half-mile above Whiteface was closed. Twenty-six curves became sixteen. The first Olympic line was left in the woods.
In 1949, the world bobsleigh championships came to Lake Placid. It was the first time they had been held outside Europe. The winter weather delayed them again and again. According to the track’s operator, snow was finally trucked in from nearby to save the event.
The same account says Germany was allowed back into the championships that year, over protests from Switzerland and Belgium. The four-man went to a Lake Placid man, Stan Benham. A bend on the run was later named after him.
Six world championships were held there, from 1949 to 1983.
The run was dangerous, and it stayed dangerous. Three drivers died in competition on the old run between 1949 and 1966.
For the 1980 Winter Olympics, the shortened run was rebuilt in concrete and refrigerated. In 2000, a new track for bobsleigh, luge and skeleton opened beside it. That is the one used for racing today.
In 2010, the historic run, the course used in 1932 and rebuilt for 1980, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. That summer, a retired worker who had restored the abandoned upper section led visitors up what the operator called “the 1932 piece of the track”. Parts of it can still be visited.
The run had carried paying riders since the day it opened. In 2010, the operator said, that had never stopped. In summer, sleds on wheels ran the lower half-mile, through Shady Corner and the Zig-zag, at more than fifty miles an hour.
And in 2024, the old promise was made again, in a different form.
Episode eleven told how the Olympic committee required a backup for the new track at Cortina, in Italy. In December 2024, it chose Lake Placid.
New York offered roughly thirty million dollars’ worth of services and venue use, at no charge to the Italian organisers. “Other cities were actually going to bill them,” an official of the state authority that runs the track said. “With us, there isn’t a cost.”
In March 2025, Lake Placid held the world championships. During the four-man, part of one curve lost its ice, and a German sled ran over bare concrete. One run was cancelled.
In May, Lake Placid was told that the Olympic backup would not be needed.
A last report from those years. In 2024, a local paper reported a university study of the past hosts of the Winter Games. By 2050, it found, only four of them would still have a reliable winter. Lake Placid was one.
The empty sled
So how did a village of fewer than four thousand people keep a promise it could not possibly have kept on its own?
It made the promise first, and found the means after. It asked a court a question, and lost. It moved the run onto private land, and made it public. It brought a designer from Berlin, then put an engineer from Saranac Lake in charge of the construction details. And it built the whole thing in under five months.
Why did the mountain become the fixed point of American sliding?
The easement made the state the run’s keeper. If the state failed to keep the run going for two winters in a row, the land would go back to the town. And the state kept at it. It shortened the old run, rebuilt it, and in the end opened a new track beside it, on the same mountain. Two Winter Olympics, a run of world championships, and an Olympic backup, all on one hillside.
The organisers of 1932 offered one strange piece of evidence that their first run had worked.
In February 1932, at Shady Corner, two men came off their sled. The sled went on alone, round the hairpin and down through the forest, all the way to the finish.
The forest is still there. So are pieces of the old run. And beside them, people are still sliding down Mount Van Hoevenberg.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.