Transcript
Canvas over the ice
Sunday, the first of February, 1914. A mountain above the town of Reichenberg, in Bohemia.
The sun is out. And that is a problem.
Thousands of people stand along a narrow track of packed snow and ice. It winds for more than three kilometres down through the forest. The spectators’ boots are soaked. The snow under their feet is melting.
So is the track. In places, officials have stretched canvas above the run, to shade the ice from the sun.
At the top, a man of thirty sits down on a small sled and leans back. Feet first.
He is a customs officer from a village just down the road. In summer he climbs mountains. He also writes poems. His name is Rudolf Kauschka.
He pushes off. The sled drops into a banked curve, its outer wall of snow built up over earth and timber, higher than a man.
A little over two minutes later he is at the bottom, faster than anyone had come down that track before.
The basic idea beneath him was not new. Long before racing, related sleds had carried children, hay and firewood down mountain roads.
What was new was everything around it. The built track. The clocks. The rules. The crowd. And one word on the posters.
Championship.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
Episode one of this series began with a race on a Swiss post road in 1883. Episode four followed a rider who lay down head first on the Cresta Run in 1887.
Bobsleigh and skeleton each have a famous first ride, argued over but remembered.
Luge is the third sliding sport. The rider lies on their back on a small sled, feet first, and steers with the calves and shoulders. At the top level, races are decided by thousandths of a second.
And luge has no famous first ride. There is no inventor. There is no first ride that everyone agrees on, and no single home track.
That is because feet first was the ordinary way many people went down a hill on a sled. Children did it. Farmers and woodcutters did it, sometimes with a load behind them.
So how does something that ordinary become a sport, with clubs, records and a European champion?
That is the question for this episode.
How did the sled everyone already knew become an international sport?
And there is a second question hiding inside it. Why, by the end of this story, did that sport have to join somebody else’s federation?
Here is a clue from 1909. A Munich sledding champion, Adolf Rziha, complained in a newspaper that his sport was not considered fashionable.
It had a German name. It did not cost much. And try as you might, there was nothing foreign about it.
Keep that complaint in mind. It will help explain what follows.
Sleds, not races
Start with the oldest sleds we can actually see.
In 1904, archaeologists in Norway dug into a great burial mound. It was at Oseberg, near the Oslo fjord. Inside was a Viking ship and the remains of two women. There were also four sleds.
Tree rings date the burial to the year 834. Three of the sleds are richly carved. The fourth is plain, and built very much like the working sleds of Norwegian farms a thousand years later.
They were not sports equipment. They were vehicles, used in summer and in winter, and pulled over grass as well as snow.
This year, those sleds began a journey of their own. They are being moved into Oslo’s new museum of the Viking Age, on steel tracks, at about twenty-five centimetres a minute. Conservators say they are as brittle as biscuits.
Twelve hundred years after the burial, they are making the slowest descent in the history of sledding.
There is an even older story, if you want one. The Greek writer Plutarch tells of a northern tribe, the Cimbri, crossing the Alps more than two thousand years ago. They climbed through the snow, he says, sat on their broad shields, and slid down the cliffs.
He wrote that two centuries after it happened. It is a good story. It is not evidence of a sport.
Popular histories like to go further. They say the Vikings raced sleds. There is no evidence for the racing. There is plenty of evidence for the sleds.
Then there are the dates you will find on sports websites, including some very official ones.
Written records of sled racing in Norway in 1480. Races in the Ore Mountains, on today’s German–Czech border, in 1552. An archduke staging sled races in Innsbruck in the 1560s.
Even the background notes for this series repeated some of them. So we went looking for the original pages.
The oldest version we could find is a report published in 2002 for the International Olympic Committee. It does not talk about races at all. It talks about texts describing the pleasures of sledding.
It names no chronicle for 1480. We found nothing behind the Ore Mountains date. And for the archduke’s races, we found no source at all.
So this episode leaves them out. Not because nobody raced a sled before 1800. People probably did. But nobody has yet shown us the page.
What we can show is the working sled.
For most of history, a sled was a tool. In the Alps, hay cut in summer was often left high on the mountain. It came down in deep winter, when snow turned the slopes into roads.
A book from 1856 describes the winter hay haul at Heiligenblut. The village sits below the Grossglockner, Austria’s highest mountain.
The farmers set out on a moonlit January night, after kneeling at the wayside cross. On the way down, ropes held each loaded sled back. Otherwise, the book says, it might shoot off and drag the men in front of it into the abyss.
Sometimes a bridge of snow gave way, and sled and men vanished into the gorge.
Whoever came home was given a feast. It was a meal for surviving what the book calls the dreadful dangers of the winter hay pull.
Elsewhere across the Alps, much of this heavy work was done with the horn sled. Its two runners curve up at the front into long horns. The driver sits or stands between them, holds the horns, and steers and brakes with his feet.
Feet first, long before luge became an international sport.
And on a free winter evening, the same sled could carry people instead of hay. A Bavarian writer in 1881 described the village lads taking one down a hill. The most skilful sat at the front. He braced his iron-shod heels against the ground, and they tore a deep furrow in the snow.
Behind him sat a load of village girls, and the whole sled rang with yodels. For the young people of the hills, the writer said, it was what a ball was for the young people of the town.
The true feeling of flying
Now go north, to the Giant Mountains, on today’s border between the Czech Republic and Poland.
Here too, horn sleds hauled timber down to the valleys. And by the early eighteen hundreds, local guides were taking visitors down on them, for fun.
A magazine from 1804 explains how it works. The sled is a light frame, it says, with a board nailed over the runners for a seat, and an old sack for a cushion.
The guide pulls the empty sled uphill. Coming down, he sits up front with a horn in each hand, and steers with his feet. On his heels he wears a kind of ice spur.
There is no danger in it, the writer promised. Unless the track is very icy, and the guide is bad.
Sixty-five years later, in 1869, a writer for a popular German family magazine, Die Gartenlaube, made the trip in winter.
He took the train, then a horse-drawn sleigh. Then horses pulled the horn sleds up the mountain, each guide clinging to the horns behind.
There were torches. At seven in the evening the party crossed the black-and-yellow barrier of the Austrian border, to a mountain inn on the ridge. There was a dance, with girls from the village on the Bohemian side.
When the moon rose, one of the hosts turned to the visitors and asked a simple question.
“Shall we?”
They covered about seven hundred paces in little more than half a minute.
“That,” the writer said, “is the true feeling of flying.”
Where the track stepped down, the sled lifted into the air and flew a good way before it landed. The guide stopped it by planting his foot in the snow.
The writer kept going all night. His seventh and last run was at three in the morning.
Then came the long ride down to the town below. The guide rode in front, both feet hovering just above the snow. At exactly the right moment, he dropped one of them, like a rudder.
They took a steep short cut known as Murder Hill.
The whole descent took about seventeen minutes, the writer said. Ten in hard frost.
And then he added a detail that matters for our story. There were people in the town, he wrote, who had already done it in seven or eight minutes.
Think about those people for a moment.
Nobody had organised a race. There was no start list and no official timing. They were racing a time: a number passed around the inns, and the memory of their own best run.
Anyone who plays racing games knows that opponent. In Slidensa, the game we make, it is called the ghost.
Your best run rides beside you as a translucent blue sled, replaying the inputs that set the time. And the game shows how far ahead or behind you are at every metre.
The locals in 1869 had to carry their ghost in their heads.
The trade grew. One Sunday in 1879, a newspaper counted the traffic on a single route. Thirty to forty sleds went up. Sixty to seventy came down.
Ten years later, one village had some forty horn sleds and thirty horses ready for visitors. That winter, two gentlemen from Sweden opened a new run from a mountain inn. They came down in barely twenty minutes, the paper said.
The resorts began to argue over whose run was the longest. In 1891 a surveyor had to correct them. One claim of thirteen kilometres turned out to be eleven.
In 1895, a group of members of parliament from different parties took a saloon car on the train to the mountains. They rode the horn sleds down twice.
Then, one paper reported, the gentlemen intended to return to their parliamentary duties.
But was any of this a sport? A German sports handbook from around 1910 said no.
The sleds, it said, were steered by woodmen and professional drivers. So riding in one was no sporting activity at all.
Tourists rode. Workmen steered.
By that handbook’s definition, it would become a sport only when the rider took the steering.
Davos, in a minute
Episode one told the race that most histories begin with.
It was the twelfth of February 1883, in Switzerland. Twenty-one riders went down the post road from Davos towards Klosters. A local postman and an Australian visitor shared the win.
The sled they rode took the town’s name. The Davos sledge is made of ash, with three slats on top, and the word DAVOS burned into the middle one.
It spread all over the Alps as the family sled. A Vienna shop in 1908 sold Davos sledges beside sleds from Tyrol. The Davos models were sturdy family sleds, offered with as many as six seats.
But the Austrian racing sled did not simply descend from the Davos sledge. It developed among Tyrolean, Bavarian and Styrian types sold in the same market.
And most of them went by one word: Rodel.
Rodel is a southern German and Austrian word. A Tyrolean dictionary of 1866 calls a Rodel a boys’ sled. To rodel, it says, is to sit on one and slide down a slope, “a particularly popular amusement of the young.”
In the French-speaking Alps, the same small sled had another name. Luge.
Different words, but the same idea: a small sled, ridden sitting, feet first.
One of those words would become the name of an Olympic sport. But first, people who already rode these sleds had to organise their pastime as a sport.
Out of the way, my sled has iron on
Innsbruck, in the Austrian Alps.
The 1866 dictionary records a cry that Tyrolean boys shouted as they came down a hill. Roughly translated, it means: “Out of the way — my sled has iron on!”
The town did not always love them. In January 1870, after a boy and his sled went under a horse, the police confiscated the boys’ sleds.
The paper put two words above the report: “Rodel sport.”
Eight years later, the same paper used those words again, this time approvingly.
A columnist had watched some twenty boys, as he put it, old and young, riding small sleds up and down a road outside town.
“We have our ice sport,” he wrote. “Why shouldn’t we have our Rodel sport?”
He counted himself among the old boys.
In 1891, a Vienna newspaper looked back on the grown men of Innsbruck who had taken up sledding. They formed their own sledding societies, it said. They went on regular outings and held races, for the title of fastest rider.
The best of them, the paper said, was a man everyone knew by a nickname, Sprenger Hänsele. He sat on his little sled as if he had been moulded to it.
Then the students joined in.
It was Sunday the seventh of January 1894. A student climbing club, the Academic Alpine Club of Innsbruck, held a prize race.
It started on the slopes below the Lanser Kopf, a hill above the city. It finished down the road at the Sill bridge, at the foot of the Bergisel.
The road was closed for the race, with official permission. Thirty-seven riders started, one minute apart. A man from the cycling club lent the timing.
The snow was soft, and many riders had to carry their sleds part of the way.
The winner was a technical student from Vienna named Duregger. His time was four minutes and thirty seconds.
And the local paper’s verdict on safety was perfect. Apart from the loss of a few hats, there had been no accident.
The first prize was a sprung sled, made by a local wheelwright. The prize-giving at a hotel opened with “Gaudeamus,” the old student song.
That race began within a few kilometres of the modern ice track at Igls, built for the Olympics decades later.
Igls is the one track in Slidensa today, modelled from map and elevation data. The students’ road and the game’s track sit in the same hills above Innsbruck.
Six years later, the sport had moved one valley east, and into a mining valley.
It was Sunday the twenty-first of January 1900. A new sledding club from Innsbruck held its first prize race in the Halltal, a steep valley with a salt mine at the top.
Seventy-two riders started. The course ran about four kilometres down the mine road, lent for the day by the salt works.
The crowds gathered at a sharp bend called the Bettelwurf corner. There, the paper explained, flying off into the snow was possible, to the amusement of the spectators.
The winner was not a student. He was a miner from the town of Hall, Josef Würtenberger. His time of four minutes twelve was probably the fastest ever seen on that road.
Behind him came a medical student and a mountain guide. The salt works’ band played at the prize-giving.
That was the pattern. In one valley a sledding club was run by students. In another it was run by innkeepers, for their guests. In 1898, the innkeepers’ club in the Gröden valley raced down from a mountain pass, to the sound of sleigh bells and cheering.
In the iron-mining towns of Styria, around a mountain of ore called the Erzberg, local riders built the strongest racing scene in Austria. By 1910 their championship had been run seven times.
And the numbers grew. By 1902, hundreds of riders were using the Halltal road on a winter Sunday.
In 1910, Vienna’s workers’ newspaper described thousands of people on the city’s slopes. Grown-ups, it said, had taken up the arts of their youth again.
What the Prater funfair was in spring, the paper wrote, one sledding hill in the suburbs had become on a fine winter Sunday.
Not everyone was charmed. Back in Innsbruck in 1894, a girl had been run over by sledders on a lane where sledding was already forbidden.
And the winter after that Vienna report, the city council and police banned sledding on every street in the city. The Sunday accident lists, one paper said, read like disaster reports.
Women raced too, though not everywhere was willing.
In 1904, in the Zillertal valley, a lawyer’s wife, Lini Rainer, won the women’s race. Her husband won the men’s.
In one Bavarian village in 1907, there were two women’s races: one for tourists, and one for local women.
Yet two years earlier, the village of St Ulrich, in Gröden, had banned women from sledding altogether.
“Sadly, no carnival joke,” one sports paper reported. It caused very bad blood among the local innkeepers.
Six years after that ban came the day after Christmas, 1911. On a mountain road in Styria, nineteen women lined up for Austria’s first women’s championship on a natural run.
A snowplough had worked through the night. Spectators walking up from the station sank to their waists in snow.
The winner, over three kilometres, was Paula Röschl, from the town of Bruck.
That same day, across the border, a German sledding federation was founded. By November 1913 it had nearly ten thousand members.
Now go back to the Munich champion’s complaint. Sledding had a German name. It did not cost much. There was nothing foreign about it.
He meant it as a grievance. But the complaint also captures the sport’s breadth. Rich visitors had no special claim on it. It belonged to anyone with access to a sled and a hill.
Iron, wood and lying back
So what turns an ordinary sled into a racing sled?
Not everyone thought the question had been asked yet. In 1908, an English book on winter sports said that in Austria, only coasting was practised. It meant riding downhill for fun, with no racing art at all.
The same book described the best riders leaning their bodies strongly backwards, to reduce the wind pressure. Somebody, somewhere, was already racing.
One Austrian answer was steel.
In November 1904, two Styrian men applied for an Austrian patent.
They were Josef Sperl and Fritz Brandner. Their sled was bent from a single, seamless steel tube: runners, horns and side bars, all in one piece.
The steel sled took its name from the iron town of Leoben.
In February 1905, there was a winter festival at Mürzzuschlag. The Leoben iron sled won both sledding classes there, against the best wooden sleds. The first hundred sold out.
The second answer was technique. And here, Austrians and Bavarians disagreed.
In February 1911, the first Austrian championship was held. The venue was a new built track above Reichenberg, in Bohemia.
For the first time, riders of the two schools met head to head. The Styrians came on long iron sleds. The Bavarians came on short ones.
One paper put the crowd at about ten thousand, standing through an icy gale. The Bavarians won all three races. So the first champion of Austria was a Bavarian, Hans Gfäller.
What exactly were they doing differently? In December 1913, a writer named Langer published an article on sledding technique in a Viennese newspaper. It is the clearest picture we have of the sport at that moment.
He described three ways to steer.
The Styrians steered mainly with their hands. On steep natural roads, they sat up and used their feet as well.
But on built tracks with banked curves, the leading Styrian riders lay flat on their backs.
Why? Langer gave the reason in one line. Because the air resistance is lower.
The second way came from Tyrol. There, a rider sat up and steered with a long stick held under the arm, trailing behind him. The stick could be two to five metres long.
The third way was Bavarian. The rider sat fairly upright on a sled with springy front runners. A line was tied to the runners, and he pulled on it to bend them, and so turn the sled. His feet were mostly for braking.
Two of those ideas echo modern luge. The rider lies flat. And the modern sled is steered by flexing it, through calf pressure on the curved front of the runners and shifts of the shoulders.
Langer’s one line is also something a game has to model.
Slidensa’s simulation models drag and runner friction for all four sleds. The luge, with its rider lying flat, has the least friction. Its drag is as low as any sled’s. On the game’s model of Igls, it is the fastest of the four.
Every sled uses the same three commands: left, straight or right. For the luge, those commands stand for pressure from calves and shoulders, not a pilot pulling ropes. And the luge is tuned to answer them fastest.
Back in 1913, a sled was still an argument between three schools. But the track was about to matter as much as the sled.
A run built by hand
The track at Reichenberg was on a mountain called the Jeschken. In Czech, it is Ještěd.
It opened in December 1909, with electric timing. It was built to the plans of Adolf Hoffmann, a factory owner from Görlitz, across the border in Saxony.
A ride cost thirty heller, a few coins.
By 1914 it was about three thousand three hundred metres long. It dropped four hundred and forty metres from top to bottom.
It had twenty banked curves. Six of them rose as high as five metres.
Under the snow were earth, stone and timber. Beside each curve stood a water tank. Workers used it to plaster the banks with slush, which froze hard.
Nobody was allowed to walk on the racing surface. A wall of snow separated it from the footpath. By race day, one newspaper said, it was closer to an ice rink than a sled run.
At the time, people called a track like this artificial. But that word meant something different then.
It did not mean refrigerated. Nobody was freezing this track with machines. It meant built: shaped by hand, banked, watered, and iced by the winter itself.
The word could fool people even then. In 1906, a company in Graz built an “artificial sledding run” for the autumn fair. It was a fairground ride for the warmer months, and it went on tour.
The Jeschken was the real thing: a mountain track. And a track like that depended on the weather. Which is why, on a sunny day in 1914, there was canvas over the ice.
Getting people to the tracks became an industry too. In 1906, a winter sports train ran from Vienna into the hills. One magazine thought it was probably the first train ever run for winter sport.
Another sledding train left the Moravian city of Olmütz. By February 1909 it was running with seven carriages, and it was still overfull.
Dresden and Reichenberg
By now there were clubs in several countries, championships in some, and no one in charge of all of them.
On the ninth of February 1913, sledding clubs met at the Semmering. It is a resort in the hills south of Vienna.
The chairman was Roger de Riedmatten. He was Swiss by birth, but he had lived in Vienna for decades, and he was a pioneer of bobsleigh.
The meeting agreed in principle to found a federation for sled sports.
That November, in the German city of Dresden, it happened. An international sled sport federation was founded.
It was not a luge federation. It was meant for every kind of sled. Its first decision was to hold European championships in bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.
And it gave the first European championship in luge to the Jeschken track, above Reichenberg.
Riedmatten became the federation’s first president.
So, back to where we began.
The championship was held over two days in February 1914, on Sunday the first and Monday the second.
At that time, Reichenberg was a German-speaking town in Bohemia. Bohemia belonged to the Austrian half of Austria-Hungary. Today it is Liberec, in the Czech Republic.
On the Sunday, the men raced two runs each. Kauschka, the customs officer from down the road, set a track record on his first run.
He won by about nine seconds, over Jakob Platzer from Sterzing, in South Tyrol. Eighty-three riders had started. One paper noted that Kauschka rode a sled of the Bavarian type. Later biographies also describe him as a serious climber, with first ascents in the Dolomites and elsewhere in the Alps.
The clocks counted in fifths of a second.
The crowd was delighted that a local man had won. And that first Sunday was busy. One report said that no fewer than three hundred and eighty runs had to be timed.
Hundreds of runs and a day of warm sun were too much for a track built of snow. By Monday the surface was damaged, and the doubles race was cut from the full distance to two thousand metres.
The doubles went to Karl Löbl and Erwin Posselt, from the nearby glass town of Gablonz.
One second behind them came a Bavarian, Hans Gfäller, with Kauschka himself.
There were lighter moments. One man came down on a one-runner sled, using his boots as two extra runners. The crowd greeted him, laughing, as the “three-runner.”
The guests included counts and a prince from the great families of the region. One count rode the consolation race with a young woman as his partner.
Many riders fell. A broken leg was reported. Riders talked of worse accidents that the official reports did not mention.
There was a women’s race on the same track that weekend. A Miss Skoda, from Reichenberg, won it.
But it was not a European title. It was a regional championship for the Sudeten lands, run alongside the main event. A woman would not be crowned European champion for another fourteen years.
And the crowd? One paper reported that more than twenty-eight thousand tickets had been issued for the first day.
Another paper, writing the same week, thought there was probably some exaggeration in the talk of thirty thousand.
By 1931, a Vienna sports paper looking back put the crowd at about a hundred thousand.
Crowds, like fish, grow in the retelling.
The waiting room
Six months after Reichenberg, Europe was at war.
The new federation all but stopped. When the war ended, Austria-Hungary was gone.
The Austrian sled sport association, one paper said later, had been torn apart by the new states that replaced the empire. Reichenberg was now Liberec, in Czechoslovakia.
The riders did not move. Their country did. In 1928, Kauschka raced for Czechoslovakia. So did another Reichenberg rider, Fritz Preissler.
In 1927, the federation came back to life in Dresden. A report at the time counted four delegates, representing Austria, Germany and Czechoslovakia. They described it not as a new body, but as the one founded in 1913.
The next winter brought the first women’s European champion. At Schreiberhau, in the mountains of German Silesia, a local woman named Hilde Raupach won.
The men’s race went to Preissler. Kauschka, now forty-four, was second.
By 1935 the championship had reached Krynica, in Poland. Two Polish riders took silver and bronze. Medals had gone beyond the German-speaking world.
But one door stayed shut.
Bobsleigh had been at every Winter Olympics since the first, in 1924. Skeleton had been raced at the Olympics on the Cresta in 1928. Luge had never been on the programme.
So the lugers made a plan.
The 1936 Winter Olympics were coming to Garmisch-Partenkirchen, in Bavaria. In August 1935, the luge federation announced that its next European championship would be held there, during the Games.
A Vienna paper explained why. Luge was not yet recognised as an Olympic discipline. So this was a way to show the Olympic committee’s representatives that competitive luge was a serious sport.
On the nineteenth of February 1936, riders from seven nations lined up on the Olympic bobsleigh track.
One heat was run. A rider from the Semmering set the best time, a minute and twenty-nine seconds.
Then the race had to be stopped. Warm weather, the papers said, had damaged the track again. One paper blamed a single bend, the Bavarian curve.
The official list of European championships does not even count it.
That autumn, the newspapers reported a change. The international luge federation had been admitted to the international bobsleigh federation, as an independent section.
A Vienna daily gave the reason plainly. For years, lugers had tried to get their sport onto the Olympic programme, without success. The influence of this stronger body, it said, should help.
Roger de Riedmatten, the federation’s first president, did not see it. He had died in the summer of 1934, on a train taking him home to Switzerland.
The federation’s own modern history dates the move to 1935. The newspapers of the time report it in the autumn of 1936.
Everyone’s sled
So how did the sled everyone already knew become an international sport?
Not through one ride. Through thousands of them.
Boys in Innsbruck shouting at people to get out of the way. Old men who wanted their own sport. Students with a borrowed stopwatch. A miner on a salt mine road. Innkeepers, women, factory owners, and a customs officer who wrote poems.
None of them invented luge. Together, they made it.
Feet-first sledding was never waiting to be invented. It was already everywhere: as play, as work, as a tourist ride, as a Sunday race. What took time was pulling one sport out of that crowded family.
So they raced the sled they already had. Then they changed it. They built it from steel. They lay down on it, because the air resistance is lower. They built tracks for it, by hand, out of snow, earth and timber. They agreed on rules, and on a federation to speak for the sport internationally.
And when that federation wanted a place at the Olympics, the lugers went to the bobsledders, hoping a stronger body would help them in.
That arrangement did not last. In 1957, back in Davos, the lugers founded a federation of their own again. Luge and bobsleigh have gone separate ways ever since.
How luge finally reached the Olympics is a story for a coming episode.
On the first of February 1914, on a mountain in Bohemia, men stretched canvas over a track to keep the sun off it.
The oldest way down a hill had become something worth protecting.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.