Transcript
Eight in the morning
It is eight o’clock in the morning on Friday, the seventeenth of February, 1928. St. Moritz, in the Swiss Alps.
For a week it has rained. The thermometer has stood at ten degrees above freezing, and the Winter Olympic Games have been fighting the thaw. But in the night the cold came back. This morning is fine and freezing.
At the top of a run of ice that winds down the valley towards the village of Cresta, ten men are waiting with their sleds.
Episode four of this podcast left them right here. Lined up at the top of the Cresta Run, on the morning of the seventeenth, about to race for the first Olympic title in head-first sliding.
Two of the ten are brothers. One is an earl.
And watching somewhere in that town, according to the Olympic historians, is a small boy whose family sells fruit and vegetables.
Twenty years later, he will be standing at the top of the same run.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
Skeleton has been an Olympic sport twice in its long life.
The first time was brief. It was raced at the Winter Games of 1928 and 1948, both times on the Cresta Run, both times at St. Moritz. Then it disappeared from the Olympics for fifty-four years.
So for half a century, the whole Olympic history of head-first sliding came down to two mornings on one run of ice.
This episode is about those two races, and the people who won them. Two rich American brothers. A Scottish earl with a colourful private life. And a local greengrocer who had been riding the run for barely two winters.
It asks two questions. What did it take to win an Olympic race on the Cresta? And why were there only ever two?
The brothers
The brothers were called Jennison and Jack Heaton.
They came from a wealthy family in New Haven, Connecticut. There were three Heaton boys, and according to Olympedia, the online record of Olympic history, the family spent much of its time in Europe. The boys grew up holidaying in the Alps. At St. Moritz, they found the Cresta.
The third brother, Trowbridge, never rode at the Olympics. But the same record lists him too, as a bob and Cresta enthusiast. It was a family habit.
Jennison, the elder, was twenty-three in February 1928. Jack was nineteen.
On paper, Jack was the better rider. A year earlier he had won the Grand National, the Cresta’s greatest race, ridden from the very top of the run. Olympedia counts him, with his friend Billy Fiske, among the most brilliant American riders the Cresta ever had.
But Jack had a problem. Olympedia says he was riding with a broken wrist.
Jennison was busy that week, too. Episode nine of this podcast followed the bobsleigh race at those Games, and in it, Jennison Heaton drove an American bob called Hell. Episode nine said that he had won the skeleton the day before his last bob run. In fact the skeleton came two days before it, on the Friday, the day before the bob race began.
One more family thread. Jennison would later marry Billy Fiske’s sister, Beulah. The Heatons and the Fiskes became one family.
The earl
Then there was the earl.
David Carnegie was the eleventh Earl of Northesk, a Scottish title. He was twenty-six, and had held the title since he was twenty. One biography says he had resigned from the Guards to marry.
He was the favourite. According to Olympedia, in the week before the Games he broke the Cresta’s record from the top, at fifty-eight and a half seconds, and then won the Grand National.
He was not a quiet favourite. According to newspaper reports of the time, he had married a former dancer from the Ziegfeld Follies, the famous Broadway revue, five years earlier in Chicago. That autumn, after the Games, she would divorce him.
The same reports go on. Within days of the divorce, the earl announced that he was engaged to another famous American, Peggy Hopkins Joyce. She called it off. The next summer, he married again, at a register office in London.
And six weeks before the race, he had been in a different kind of headline. In January 1928, he rode as brakeman on a bobsleigh carrying the King of the Belgians. The sled skidded at a corner and partly overturned. According to the New York Times, the earl was thrown twenty feet into a pile of snow, and wrenched his back.
Six weeks after the bob crash, he was at the top of the Cresta, the favourite for an Olympic title.
Another favourite never made it to the start. John Moore-Brabazon held Britain’s very first pilot’s licence, number one. He had won the Cresta’s Curzon Cup three times. Two days before the race, according to Olympedia, he came off his sled at Shuttlecock, the run’s most famous bend, broke several ribs and cut his face badly.
Episode four told the story of Shuttlecock, where riders who take it too fast are thrown out over the top. Even the favourites were not safe there.
Brabazon never stopped riding. In 1955, at the age of seventy-one, he is recorded winning one of the Cresta’s cups. The same record gives his average speed down the run: about seventy kilometres an hour.
Another entrant who did not start was an American called Harry Morgan. One biography makes him the brother of Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, the mother of the heiress Gloria Vanderbilt.
That was the Cresta in 1928. A run on the edge of a Swiss village, ridden by heirs, officers, aristocrats and a pioneer aviator, who came to St. Moritz for the winter.
The seventeenth of February
So, to the morning of the race.
The weather had put it off the day before. The official report of those Games keeps a diary. On the Wednesday, it rained all day. Through the night into Thursday, the air stayed mild. Then, at six in the morning, the thermometer dropped below zero. But the ice was not ready, and the report records that the skeleton and the bobsleigh were put off to the days that followed.
On the Friday, the riders started at eight o’clock in the morning. Olympedia says it was to beat the sun. The report says the racing went on through the whole morning.
Elsewhere in St. Moritz that same morning, the cross-country skiers set off on their fifty-kilometre race, and the ice hockey and the figure skating went on as normal. The Cresta was one of four Olympic contests running at once.
Ten riders started, from six countries. Each rode three times, and the three times were added together.
The official results book names the men in charge. The president of the field jury was a Swiss colonel called Thoma. Beside him sat a Mr Curzon, from Great Britain. Any rider would know both names. Thoma and Curzon are corners on the Cresta. Whether these were the same men the corners are named after, the book does not say.
There is one more small thing in that book. Three years earlier, when the Olympic programme was drawn up at a congress in Prague, the sport had been written down as tobogganing. In the official results of 1928, the heading is a single word. Skeleton.
The run they rode was about twelve hundred metres long, and fell more than a hundred and fifty metres from top to bottom. An American paper said the winner came down at nearly a mile a minute.
Every run began with a dive. As episode four described, the rider dived head first down the slope towards the first bank.
Head-first sliders still begin with a dive. In Slidensa, the skeleton’s start is a sprint and a dive. The rider must be aboard within twenty-five metres of the start gate, or the run is void. The bobs get thirty-eight metres. And getting aboard costs the skeleton three per cent of its speed. The bobs lose less.
On the Cresta in 1928, the dive was the easy part.
Jennison Heaton went fastest in the first run: one minute, and just over a fifth of a second. His brother, with the broken wrist, was more than a second slower. One second and two tenths, to be exact. In a race that would be decided by one second, that first run was the race.
The earl had a bad start. Olympedia says that in his first run he made a mistake and broke one of his brakes. He lost seconds he would never get back. After one run, he was already two and a half seconds behind.
Two riders fell off, a Frenchman in the first run and a Swiss in the second.
On the second run, Jennison was fastest again. On the third, Jack beat him. But the gap was too big.
When the three runs were added up, Jennison Heaton had won by exactly one second. His younger brother was second. The Earl of Northesk was third.
Fourth, just off the podium, was an Italian, Agostino Lanfranchi. Italy had come close.
None of them broke the earl’s record. The best run of the day was nearly two seconds slower. The New York Times put that in its headline too: “Misses World’s Mark by 2 Seconds”.
And the next morning, the New York Times got it wrong. Its headline read, “Jack Takes Skeleton Bobsled Title, With Jennison Second”. Its first line named John Heaton, of New York, as the winner. In the official lists, both brothers appear as J. Heaton.
The paper also said it was the United States’ first official victory of those Games. Then it put the wrong brother’s name on it.
The mix-up did not end there. Four years later, the official report of the Lake Placid Games, written by Americans, got the skeleton right. J. Heaton first, J. R. Heaton second. Then, in the same sentence, it gave the bobsleigh silver to J. R. Heaton, the younger brother. Jennison had driven that bob. The two initials followed the brothers around for years.
The first Olympic skeleton champion was, for a day at least, the wrong brother.
Twenty years
Then the Olympics left St. Moritz. The Cresta went back to being what it had always been: a private run, kept by a club. It was for the people who came to St. Moritz in winter.
The Games went to Lake Placid in 1932, and Garmisch in 1936. Neither had a Cresta. Neither held a skeleton race.
The Heatons kept sliding. In 1929, Jack set a new record from the top: fifty-eight seconds flat. According to Olympedia, it stood for seven years. He won the Grand National again that winter, and the Curzon Cup twice in the years after, and other cups besides. In 1932 he took a bronze medal at Lake Placid, in the two-man bob, as episode twelve mentioned.
The family gave the club a trophy, the Heaton Gold Cup. It comes back into this story.
Then came the war, and twelve years without any Olympic Games at all.
And in the town, a boy grew up.
His name was Nino Bibbia.
He was born in March 1922 in Bianzone, a village in the Valtellina, the valley on the Italian side of the mountains. His father traded in fruit and vegetables, and as a small boy, Nino came with his family to St. Moritz. The sources disagree on exactly how old he was.
He went to school in St. Moritz. One of his schoolfriends was a local boy called Edy Reinalter. Remember him.
Bibbia stayed an Italian citizen all his life. And in 1947, he took over his parents’ shop. The boy who had watched the 1928 Games was now the town’s greengrocer.
He also discovered the Cresta. By the winter of 1948, he was in only his second season on the run.
There are a few versions of how. The local newspaper later said that the announcer at the run spotted him, and urged him to have a go. There is also a story, told more than once and always as a legend, that his first proper skeleton sled cost him a case of Chianti, swapped with a customer.
Whatever the truth, he was fast at once.
How a greengrocer got into the Italian Olympic team is told in as many versions. The St. Moritz museum says he wanted to enter five sports at those Games, hockey, cross-country and ski jumping among them. An Italian paper says a count and a sports journalist put his name forward to the team managers. An Olympic historians’ journal says he was picked for the bobsleigh first, and added to the skeleton only after he set a course record in December 1947.
The versions agree on one thing. The skeleton came last, and late.
1948
In 1948, the Winter Games came back to St. Moritz. They ran from the end of January into the second week of February. They were the first Games after the war, twelve years after the last. Germany and Japan, Olympedia records, were not invited. Twenty-eight countries came, with about six hundred and seventy athletes. St. Moritz had been chosen in September 1946, partly because the places it had used in 1928 were all still there.
The Cresta had to be built again, as it is every winter, out of snow and water. The organisers’ official report describes the job. One committee, under a Swiss doctor called Heinz Cattani, ran both the bob run and the Cresta. The builders were specialists, and they had been booked a year ahead. Work began in early December. The report calls each winter’s run “a new work of art”.
Both runs were faultless by New Year. Then the weather came. Keeping the ice in shape, the report says, took “extraordinary effort”. A warm mountain wind troubled these Games as it had the first ones, Olympedia says, though less badly. Some events were delayed. Nothing was cancelled.
One event had been added. The military patrol, a ski race for soldiers, was back as a demonstration. The organisers’ report says it was put in against the will of the Olympic congress, and only in June 1947. Keep that race in mind. It comes back with Italy.
Jack Heaton was back. He was thirty-nine now. At the opening ceremony, he carried the flag of the United States.
He was not the only man at those Games who had also won a medal at St. Moritz twenty years before. A Swiss ice hockey player, Bibi Torriani, had won bronze in 1928, and would win bronze again in 1948.
Ice hockey had its own drama that winter. Two rival American hockey teams turned up in St. Moritz, each claiming to be the real one. One played, and was later disqualified. One of the rinks was at the Kulm, the hotel where the Cresta begins. And one American official was caught up in the dispute: Avery Brundage, the senior figure of the American Olympic movement. Remember that name.
And Nino Bibbia was in the Italian team. But not, at first, for skeleton.
He had come to his home Games as a bobsledder. In the opening days, he raced in the Italian two-man bob, and finished eighth. The skeleton, as we heard, came late.
So his week went bob, then skeleton, then bob again.
That is not as simple as it sounds. A bobsleigh and a skeleton feel very different, even on the same ice.
Our game shows how different, in numbers. Switch from the two-man bob to the skeleton, and the steering pushes the sled sideways about a sixth less hard: four point seven, instead of five point six. The sled lines up with its new direction more slowly. When it skids, it loses a quarter more speed. And the air holds it back about a quarter more as well.
Bibbia had to make that change in his own body, between one race and the next.
The field
Fifteen men would start the skeleton. Look at who they were.
The American team had a problem of its own. Apart from Heaton and a few others, its riders had never seen the Cresta. Several of them were soldiers, sent from the American army in Germany. The team’s own report described what happened next. “The Cresta run at St. Moritz is the only one in the world,” it said, so the army men had to learn it from scratch.
The army had its own name for the event. In its section of the report, the Cresta is “the one-man bobsled”. It had sent some men over from Germany for it, the army said, and developed two very promising riders.
The British riders taught them. According to the American report, they “patiently coached our boys day after day”, knowing that in the race, the pupils might beat the teachers. In one case, the report said, that is exactly what happened.
One of those pupils, by the results, was Wilbur Martin. He was an army sergeant from Montana, picked, Olympedia says, as one of the best athletes in the army. He was nineteen. He had been born in July 1928, five months after the first Olympic race on the Cresta.
The American coach rode too. His name was Fairchilds MacCarthy, and the team list marks him down as both rider and coach. He would finish eighth.
The oldest rider was fifty-three. Jimmy Coats was born in New York, into the Scottish thread-making family of that name. He had served as an officer in the Coldstream Guards in the First World War, and won the Military Cross. In the Second, according to Olympedia, he commanded a special unit formed to protect the royal family if the Germans invaded. On the Cresta, he had won the Grand National five times in the 1930s, and the Morgan Cup twice, a trophy that comes back into this story. He would go on riding. At sixty-one, Olympedia says, he won the Cresta’s cup for seniors.
Then there was Richard Bott. Episode four told how a Mr Bott worked on the sled and gave the club a cup. Olympedia counts six generations of Botts on the Cresta. Richard was one of them, and he had won the Curzon Cup the winter before. That same winter of 1948, he would win the Bott Cup, his own family’s trophy.
The home favourite was Christian Fischbacher, from a textile family in St. Gallen. He collected art. The Olympic record puts it bluntly: he had the time and the money for rich men’s pursuits, and skeleton racing was among them.
There was a Frenchman, Marcel Gayraud-Hirigoyen. According to the museum in St. Moritz, he had set a record time on the run the winter before.
And there was a Swiss rider called Dialma Baselgia. He came from Kyiv, where he was born in 1904. His name had been on the entry list in 1928, too. He had not started then. Now, twenty years later, he was back at the top of the run.
And there was John Crammond, a London stockbroker of forty-one. He had flown with the air force in the war, and had taken the Grand National ten years before.
Three generations, then. A guards officer of fifty-three, with a medal from the first war. A stockbroker in his forties, who had flown in the second. A nineteen-year-old sergeant who had never seen the run until that winter. And a greengrocer of twenty-five.
The greengrocer’s race
The riders of 1948 went down in crash helmets, with aluminium shells over their hands, spiked boots, and leather pads on their knees and elbows. That, at least, is how the St. Moritz museum describes them.
The skeleton race in 1948 was longer than in 1928. There were six runs, over two days, the third and fourth of February. On the first day, the riders started lower down, from the point called Junction. On the second, they rode the whole run, from the top.
The fifteen came from six countries. A Swiss favourite, Fischbacher, crashed out at Shuttlecock on his very first run.
From Junction, the run is about eight hundred and seventy metres. The three men who would stand on the podium each won one of the three runs that day. Crammond took the first, in forty-seven point four seconds. Heaton took the second, matching it to the tenth. Bibbia took the third.
After the first day, Crammond led by two tenths of a second. Jack Heaton and Nino Bibbia were tied for second, to the tenth.
Fourth that evening was an American lieutenant, William Johnson. One of the army men.
Episode four explained the two starts. Beginners start at Junction, a third of the way down. Only experienced riders go from the top. And here is a thing Olympedia records about Bibbia. This was his second season on the Cresta, but his first riding the full course. The greengrocer had been going from the top for one winter.
The second day was from the top. The whole run is about twelve hundred metres, with a hundred and fifty-seven metres of drop. From Junction, the runs had taken forty-seven or forty-eight seconds. From the top, every run took about a minute. The top third of the Cresta added twelve seconds.
It was a day of falls. Johnson, the lieutenant, crashed out and never finished. So did Baselgia, the man who had waited twenty years. Entered in 1928, he never started. Entered in 1948, he never got down. A Swiss rider called Milo Bigler fell, climbed back on, and finished the run in two minutes. On the final run he fell again. The Frenchman with the record did not start the second day at all.
On the second day, from the top, Bibbia was the fastest, or joint fastest, in every run.
His first run that morning took fifty-nine and a half seconds. It was the only run of the whole race under a minute. It put him half a second ahead of Heaton.
On the next run, the two of them clocked exactly the same time. Still half a second.
On the last run, Heaton lost almost a second. Bibbia did not.
Heaton’s own record from the top, set in 1929, was fifty-eight seconds flat. Nineteen years later, nobody came within a second and a half of it. Not even the winner.
Simple arithmetic on the official times gives his best run an average of about seventy-four kilometres an hour. Nearly a mile a minute, as the American paper had written twenty years before.
He won by one point four seconds. Jack Heaton was second, twenty years after his first silver on the same run. Crammond was third. At forty-one, he was the oldest man ever to win an Olympic skeleton medal, or so Olympedia said when it wrote him up. He rode a few more seasons, then spent twenty-five years sailing his yacht around the Mediterranean. He also wrote about winter sports for a London Sunday paper.
Fourth was the army sergeant, Wilbur Martin. He finished ahead of three of the British riders who, by the American report’s account, had taught the army men the run.
It was Italy’s first medal of any colour at the Winter Olympics. Italy had won a military ski race in 1936, but that was only a demonstration event, and it does not count.
That 1936 race is worth a moment. It was a military patrol, put on at the German Games as a demonstration, Olympedia says, because Hitler wanted it. Four Italian soldiers won it by fourteen seconds from Finland. Mussolini, according to the same record, paid each man thirty thousand lire. Italian sports writers still call it the hidden gold. It is not in the medal table. Bibbia’s is.
And it was, according to Olympedia, the first race Bibbia had ever won on the Cresta.
Then Bibbia went back to the bobsleigh. The Italian four-man he rode in finished sixth.
Two schoolfriends
Remember Edy Reinalter.
He had been born in St. Moritz on Christmas Eve, 1920. He and Nino Bibbia had sat in the same school in the town. The local paper later said that the two schoolfriends swore, as boys, to do great things in sport.
In the same week as the skeleton, the Games held the first Olympic slalom for men. It was run on the Suvretta slope, above St. Moritz, through forty-seven gates. Seventy-seven skiers started, from twenty-two countries.
After the first run, Reinalter was third. An Italian led. On the second run, according to Olympedia, Reinalter was the fastest man on the hill. He won the gold medal by half a second from a Frenchman. Third was another Frenchman, Henri Oreiller, who had already won the downhill and the combined that week.
Exactly when, the sources cannot agree. The local paper and the St. Moritz museum say the two friends won their golds on the very same day. The official programme and Olympedia put the slalom on the fifth of February, the day after the skeleton ended. Either way, within a day or so, two boys from one small school had each won an Olympic title on their home ground. One was Swiss. One carried an Italian passport. One account calls Reinalter the first Swiss athlete to win Olympic gold in Switzerland.
Reinalter did not live long. He died in 1962, at forty-one. His schoolfriend would outlive him by half a century.
One line in the minutes
So why were there only two?
The next Winter Games, in 1952, were in Oslo. There was no Cresta in Norway, and so there was no skeleton race. When the bobsleigh federation held its congress in Oslo that February, according to a later Olympic review, skeleton was not mentioned at all.
The paper trail begins the next winter. In January 1953, at Garmisch, the bobsleigh federation’s congress asked the IOC to put luge on the Winter programme. That November, in Paris, the IOC’s programme commission met. It had four members. A Finn, Erik von Frenckell, took the chair. A Frenchman sat with him, and the IOC’s own chancellor. The fourth was Albert Mayer, of Switzerland. Item thirteen on its list reads: “Winter Games: replacing the skeleton by the luge.”
Then, in May 1954, the International Olympic Committee met in Athens. The session ran for four days at the Hotel Grande-Bretagne. In the chair was Avery Brundage, the same man who had fought over the hockey teams at St. Moritz.
One history of luge gives the day: the thirteenth of May. The minutes record the decision in one line. It was made at the request of the bobsleigh federation, and on the advice of that Swiss member, Albert Mayer. “The luge sport,” it says, “is to take the place of the sport of skeleton.”
That is all. The minutes give no reason.
Later histories supplied one. Olympic skeleton needed a Cresta, they say, and there was only one. But that is later explanation, not something written in the minutes. What the minutes do show is striking enough. It was skeleton’s own federation that asked for the change. And the advice came from a member from Switzerland, the home of the Cresta. And sitting in that room in Athens, on the list of those present, was a French count, the Comte de Beaumont. He had been entered in the Olympic skeleton race on the Cresta in 1928. He never started. Twenty-six years later, he was there when the sport was taken off the programme.
According to Olympedia, the count had also been entered for the shooting at the Summer Games of 1924. He was a fighter pilot, a member of parliament and a novelist, and he would become the IOC’s first vice-president.
Inside the bobsleigh federation, the luge side was the growing force. Five years after Athens, the IOC approved luge for the Winter Games of 1964. The sport that replaced skeleton has a founding story of its own, for another day.
Skeleton came back to the Olympics in 2002, on artificial tracks, with women racing as well as men. That story belongs to a coming episode.
What the greengrocer did next
Nino Bibbia did not stop.
He rode the Cresta for half a century. According to Olympedia, he was also twice the Swiss champion in luge, the sport that had replaced his own at the Olympics. The local newspaper counted more than a thousand races, from 1947 to 1998, and more than two hundred and thirty wins. He won the Grand National eight times. They called him the King of the Cresta. His reign, the paper said, lasted more than thirty years.
And among his trophies, according to the same newspaper, was one he won fifteen times: the Heaton Gold Cup. The cup the American brothers had given the club. The greengrocer won it, again and again.
Look at the other names on his trophies. The Morgan Cup, which the obituary says he won four times, is named after Harry Morgan. He was the American on the 1928 entry list who never started. One history of the club has him as its president in the 1930s, one of only two presidents who were not British.
The Brabazon Trophy, four times, carries the name of the pilot who broke his ribs at Shuttlecock two days before the 1928 race. Brabazon, the same history says, led the club through the war years and beyond.
So the men of 1928 put their names on the cups. The brothers who won and lost. The American who never started. The pilot who never got to the start. And a greengrocer from the Valtellina spent thirty years winning them.
The Italian Olympic Committee gave him its gold medal for sporting merit. He was Swiss champion eight times, Olympedia says, while keeping his Italian passport.
When he married, Olympedia says, he and his bride went straight from the wedding to the bob run, and went down it together in a two-man sled. Her name was Rösli.
He kept the shop, too. And the Cresta now has a race named after him, the Nino Bibbia Challenge Cup, ridden around Christmas. The Italian press dates it from 1968, while he was still winning.
When he last raced, the sources differ. The local paper says 1998. An Olympic historians’ journal says 1996. Either way, he was still going down the Cresta in his seventies.
The others went their ways. Jennison Heaton died in California in 1971. Jack Heaton settled in France, and died in Paris in 1976. The Earl of Northesk served in the Second World War as an intelligence officer. A photograph in a Dutch archive is captioned simply: Lord Northesk in St. Moritz, 1935. He kept coming back to the run. Later he farmed in England, bred pedigree dogs, shot for sport, loved railways, and sat in the House of Lords. At his death in 1963, as one biography quotes it, a New York Times headline called him a “Colorful Figure in 1920’s” who had “Dropped Out of the News”. He left no heir of his own. The title passed to a cousin.
When he died in St. Moritz in May 2013, aged ninety-one, the news went round the town, the local paper said, like wildfire. His son summed him up for the paper. “He came from a simple background,” he said, “worked as a greengrocer, and rode rings round the posh Brits.”
The son, Gianni, ran the town’s cinema. In the week his father died, the same paper reported, the cinema closed its doors as well.
The paper’s own words for him were these: something like a St. Moritz icon, with an Italian passport.
The club itself, a club with very British roots, was gentler. It called him “a shining example of the Corinthian spirit”.
There is one more strange monument. When Italy built a new bobsleigh track for the Turin Winter Games of 2006, it named a corner after him. The tenth curve at Cesana was called Nino Bibbia. It was expensive to build. It was used for only a few years, then abandoned, and it is due to be demolished.
The Cresta, meanwhile, is built again from snow and water every winter, as it has been since 1885. The track that honoured the greengrocer did not last. The run that he rode has outlived it.
Two mornings
So what did it take to win an Olympic race on the Cresta?
In 1928, it took a rider who had grown up in the winter colony, holidaying in the Alps, with time and money to learn the run. Jennison Heaton beat his brother by a second, and an earl by three.
In 1948, it took a local man who had learned the run in two winters, between working in the shop. Nino Bibbia beat that same brother by nearly a second and a half.
And why were there only two? The record gives a narrower answer than the legend. The Olympic race was tied to the Cresta at St. Moritz. And in 1954, the sport’s own federation asked for luge to take its place. Nobody wrote down why.
Jack Heaton is the only man who raced in both of those Olympic races. He lost the first to his brother, and the second to the boy who had watched it.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.