Transcript
The uncanny man
February 1887. St. Moritz, in the Swiss Alps.
A crowd stands beside a narrow channel of ice. It drops away below a church and twists down the valley towards the next village.
One by one, the riders come down. They sit upright on small wooden sleds, feet forward, the way children ride.
Then one of them does something no one there has seen in a race.
He lies down. On his stomach. Head first.
His face is a hand’s width from the ice. His hands grip the front of the sled. His legs flail behind him, now in the air, now dragging on the snow.
The local newspaper, the St. Moritz Post, did not quite know what to call it. To see him coming head first down the Leap, its reporter wrote, was what the Scots call “uncanny.”
He fell more than once. He did not win.
But within a few winters, almost every rider on that run would go down the same way.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
There is an obvious question about skeleton, the sport in which athletes dive onto a small sled and go down an ice track head first.
Why would anyone do that?
The usual answer is: because it is fast. And that is true. But it hides a more interesting story.
Going head first did not just make riders faster. Around that one change, almost everything else moved too. The sled changed. The way a rider steered and braked changed. The run settled into its shape, and a club wrote its rules and built a culture. They all evolved together. In the end, a stunt had become a sport of its own.
So that is the question for this episode.
What changed when riders turned head first?
The answer lives almost entirely on one ribbon of ice in one Swiss resort. Its name is the Cresta Run.
Previously, on the Cresta
If you heard the first episode of this series, you have already been to the Cresta. A short reminder.
In the 1860s, the hotel families of St. Moritz began to attract a new kind of guest: wealthy visitors, many of them British, who stayed through the winter. Those guests had snow, sunshine and a great deal of time. They borrowed the small wooden sleds local people used for carrying goods, and they raced them.
Down the valley in Davos, another resort full of foreign winter guests, the same thing was happening. And in the winter of 1884 to 1885, St. Moritz built something Davos did not have.
A committee of guests at the Kulm Hotel laid out a purpose-built run. It began near the hotel, dropped past the hamlet of Cresta and ran down towards the village of Celerina. It had steep banks on the corners, shaped by hand from snow and ice. The hotel’s owners, the Badrutt family, paid for the labour.
Then St. Moritz invited Davos to race on it. Davos won.
In 1894, one of the Badrutts, Peter Badrutt, gave a speech to the club that by then ran the Cresta. He remembered how it had all looked to the Swiss.
“We Swiss looked upon tobogganing as a fitting amusement for children,” he said, “until you Englishmen came among us and made of it a sport for men.”
Then he added: “Now you have gone still further. You have made that sport an art.”
Episode one followed the people who then bolted sleds together and invented the bobsleigh. This episode follows the people who stayed on a single small sled — and lay down on it.
Lying down
The rider in that 1887 race is recorded only as Mr Cornish. No source found for this episode gives his first name or where he came from.
What we do have is that newspaper description, reprinted seven years later in the first serious book about the sport. It was called Tobogganing on Crooked Runs, and its main author was a rider named Harry Gibson.
The report is worth hearing in a little more detail, because it shows how strange the idea looked.
Cornish, it said, lay his body on the toboggan and grasped its sides well to the front. His legs alternated, in the paper’s words, between “a flourish in mid air” and “an occasional contact with mother earth, or rather father ice and snow.” That contact was how he steered.
The reporter added that, before the race, Cornish had been doing rather well on the course. He had almost won converts to the new style.
Then, in the race itself, he came to grief more than once. The reporter was impressed by how quickly he recovered. But the result did not recommend the idea. The club’s own history says he finished fourteenth, after three erratic rides.
Gibson added one line of his own. This, he wrote, was “the first recorded attempt at the head-foremost position, which has since become universal.”
That word “universal” took a few years to come true.
The following winter, in 1888, a rider named Cohen tried going head first before the main race. He gave up on it, raced sitting up, and won. Another rider, Wilbraham, did race head first. He fell.
Even the riders who believed in the new position struggled with it at first. One of them was H. W. Topham, who would become one of the great Cresta riders of the 1890s. In January 1889, he tried going head first in a race.
Gibson records the result without mercy. Topham’s first run was one of the slowest of the day. In each of his next two, he fell.
A month later came the Grand National of 1889. Every rider but one sat up. The exception was a man named Vansittart. He lay down. And he won.
In 1890, fourteen riders started the race. Thirteen went head first.
And in 1891, a rider from Davos named Butler sat up and finished last. Gibson recorded him, with some affection, as the last “sitter” ever to ride in the race.
In four winters, the posture of a whole sport had turned over.
So why did it work?
The riders of the time were quite clear about the reasons, and they agreed with one another.
First, stability. Sitting up puts a lot of the rider’s weight high above the sled. On a steep bank, that weight wants to tip over. Lying flat brings it down to the ice. A writer in Baily’s Magazine in 1890 put it plainly: less top weight, and so less tendency to capsize.
Second, the air. A rider sitting up is a wall. A rider lying flat is a wedge. The same magazine said the new position was faster because it offered less resistance to the air. A writer in The Strand five years later said much the same: a much smaller surface of the body was exposed to the wind.
Third, grip and control. Lying down, the rider can hold the sled firmly with both hands. Both feet are free behind, to steer and to slow down. Gibson wrote that the head-first rider “has such a firm grip of his machine, and is so near the ice.”
Gibson even had advice on the legs. Keep the feet together, he wrote. It was the best possible position for cutting through the air.
A writer named Knapp, looking back in 1908, went further. The low sled, he said, had allowed the prone position, and the prone position reduced wind pressure. At high speed, he called that “a most material factor.” He thought Vansittart’s win in 1889 was down to the position he took.
Those writers were not physicists. But modern skeleton athletes lie flat for the same broad reasons: a low centre of gravity, and a small shape in the wind.
There is one more thing to say, though. The position was only half the story. The other half was the sled underneath it.
The sled follows
Cornish had ridden an ordinary Swiss sled. Wooden runners, a wooden seat, built for sitting up.
But in the winter of 1887 to 1888, a visitor from New York changed what the riders were lying on.
His name appears in the records as L. P. Child. He had a low sled built in Davos and called it the “America.” It was about a metre and a half long, only a few centimetres high, and it ran on thin, rounded steel runners that could flex slightly.
Gibson compared those springy runners to the pneumatic tyre on a bicycle. A small change in the machine had made it smoother and faster.
Child rode his America head first, though not quite flat. He lay on his side, American fashion, steering with his foot. That winter he won the main international race at Davos.
Which raises an awkward question for this episode. If Child won a major race head first at Davos in January 1888, where was skeleton born?
Davos has an answer. Its tourism history calls Child’s ride there the birth of skeleton. St. Moritz has a different answer: Cornish, a year earlier, on the Cresta. The two histories identify two different births.
Both histories point to something real. Cornish was first, as far as the records show. Child was the first to win a big race lying down. But it was on the Cresta, over the next few winters, that head-first riding stopped being one man’s style and became the way everyone rode. That is the story this episode follows.
Child, meanwhile, came over to St. Moritz to race on the Cresta. He walked the course, looked at the banks, and decided not to try it head first. According to Gibson, he went back to Davos without even unpacking his machine.
His sled stayed, though. Within two winters, almost every Cresta rider was on an America. And now they were lying on them.
The next step came from a man who keeps appearing in this story: William Bulpett. He was one of the guests who had helped lay out the run, and he would go on to mark it out and engineer it nearly every winter for years.
Bulpett did not like wood. At high altitude, a wooden frame could warp and shrink. When it did, the runners went out of true.
So, in the winter of 1888 to 1889, he designed a sled with no wooden frame at all. It was made of steel bars, with runners attached, and a separate platform on top for the rider to lie on.
The first ones were, in Gibson’s words, “a dead failure.” The village blacksmith who made them knew nothing about working with steel, and the steel itself was wrong. Bulpett tried German steel, then Belgian. Neither worked.
So he sent for bars of English steel, and he had the blacksmith taught how to weld and shape them.
The local museum in St. Moritz names that blacksmith as Christian Mathis. If you heard episode one, you have met him. A year later, he built the first bobsleigh.
By about 1890, the steel sled worked. In 1892, a rider named Topham won the race on one. He was the only rider in the field who used it. Two winters later, the wooden America had all but disappeared from the Cresta.
It is tempting to say the steel sled made the sport fast. Gibson’s own numbers suggest something more interesting.
He recorded times over the same stretch of the Cresta, the straight, about two hundred yards long. That is around a hundred and eighty metres.
In 1887, Cornish, lying head first on an ordinary Swiss sled, covered it in ten seconds. That is about sixty-six kilometres an hour.
In 1893, a rider named Forster covered it in six seconds. He was head first, on a wooden America. That is about a hundred and ten kilometres an hour.
In 1894, Topham covered it on a steel skeleton in five and four-fifths seconds. That is about a hundred and thirteen.
In these three measurements, nearly all the recorded gain came before the steel skeleton. Gibson did not credit it to any one invention. The run had improved. The sleds had improved. And the riders had learned how to ride them.
The steel sled’s measured gain was small. Its great advantage was that it kept its shape, winter after winter.
And this is where the sport got its name.
Look at one of those early steel sleds and you see almost nothing. A few bars. Two runners. A pad. Compared with the solid wooden sleds before it, it looked like the bones of a sled.
People started calling it a skeleton.
Gibson’s book, in 1894, puts the word in quotation marks — the steel “skeleton” — as if it were still new. A writer in 1908 explained the name the same way: it came from the contrast with the sleds that went before.
You will hear two other explanations, and they should be handled with care.
The international federation has long told a story about 1892. In it, an Englishman named Mr Child surprises his friends with a new sled made mostly of metal. And the sled looks like a skeleton. But every source from the time says Child was American, and that his famous sled, the America, was wooden. The steel frame came from Bulpett. The federation’s version seems to have folded two different sleds and two different men into one.
The other story says that “skeleton” is a garbled English version of a Norwegian word for a sled, kjelke. It is a lovely idea. But no source from the period mentions it. Everything written at the time says the name came from what the sled looked like.
The steel kept changing. One rider cut grooves into the runners so they would bite into the ice. Around 1902 — sources say 1901 or 1902 — another added a seat that slid backwards and forwards on the frame.
That sliding seat tells us something important about how the Cresta was ridden.
Riding the Cresta
The Cresta has a rule that would sound familiar to anyone who heard our episode about steering.
In 1894, Gibson set it down. The club rules, he wrote, “forbid any mechanical means of steering or a mechanical brake.” The steering and the braking must come from the rider.
So how do you steer a steel frame with no moving parts, lying on your stomach, at speed?
With your whole body, and your boots.
Riders on the Cresta wear heavy boots with steel rakes fixed to the toes. In the early years, head-first riders steered and slowed with iron-tipped toes. The rakes, one writer recalled, came “somewhat later.”
The writer Knapp, in 1908, described how a skilled rider takes a bank. About fifty yards out, the rider moves close to the side the bank is on. A few yards before it, he slides back over the tail of the sled.
That weight at the back levers the front upwards. It drives grooves cut in the rear of the runners down into the ice. Those grooves become a pivot, and they stop the sled from skidding.
Then the rider forces the front of the sled down the slope with one arm, until it has swung right round. At the same moment, the rake on the inside foot digs into the ice to help the turn.
Knapp called it a compound motion. One hand presses on the tail. The heels pivot on the ice. The rake bites. And if the rider fails to finish that swing in time, the bank throws him over the top.
That is what the sliding seat was for. It let the rider move backwards and forwards smoothly and accurately along the sled. Its value was still argued about in 1908, Knapp wrote, though almost everyone used one.
So the body, the grooves and the rakes all steer together. And both rakes, dug in hard, are the brake. That is still the basis of how the Cresta is ridden.
Gibson described what this looked like from the side of the run, at Church Leap, in the 1890s.
A rider dives head first down the slope towards the first bank. To anyone who has never seen it, Gibson wrote, it is awful. There is something uncanny in watching that motionless figure carried swiftly towards what seems certain destruction on the grim black bank below.
Then, suddenly, the rider leaps back on the sled. He digs the steel rakes on his feet hard into the ice. The speed slackens. The sled swings round the bank as though of its own accord.
Another turn, and another, and the rider swings off the third bank, in Gibson’s words, “like a stone from a sling.”
That word “uncanny” again. Seven years after Cornish, it was still the word for a head-first rider.
Now the run itself.
The Cresta today is about one and a quarter kilometres long, and it drops about a hundred and fifty-seven metres. Its banks have names, and many of them come from those first winters.
Near the top is Church Leap, beneath the ruins of an old church. Further down are two banks called Battledore and Shuttlecock, after the old game that became badminton. And near the bottom is the Cresta Leap, where riders come over a lip at their highest speed.
Gibson records a small detail about Battledore and Shuttlecock. The banks were first named in 1887 by a guest, Mrs Bancroft. But the names were given the wrong way round. The bank now called Battledore was first called Shuttlecock, and the other way about.
In 1908, a rider named Knapp tried to describe a full run from the top. He warned that a proper description would need large diagrams. But even his short version gives a sense of how much a rider has to think about.
The start is a short, steep run onto a level terrace. Then comes the first drop to Church Leap, taken at top speed. The rider begins the turn on the first bank at once, so as not to climb too high. The second bank is ridden rather high and held flat for a moment. The third is taken late and low.
Then a straight, ridden down the centre. A bank called the Rise, taken low, with a little brake at the end.
Then the rider draws in to the left and arrives at Battledore, riding high but with the front of the sled well under control. The swing begins at once, and it carries on until the rider is thrown onto Shuttlecock.
Shuttlecock, Knapp wrote, must be taken as high as possible. The rider holds it, then swings hard to the left — and arrives at once at Stream Corner.
After that, he said, the crucial point of the race is over. There is a sudden twist at a bank called Charybdis, and then the headlong plunge down the Cresta Leap, at about eighty miles an hour. That is around a hundred and thirty kilometres an hour.
Shuttlecock became the most famous corner in the sport.
It is a long, sharp, left-hand bank. A writer in 1908 called it “the sharpest curve” and “the longest bank” on the run. A rider who comes into it too fast, or too low, cannot finish the turn. The bank throws them over the top and out of the run.
The club describes Shuttlecock as a safety valve. It is where riders who have lost control are thrown off the ice, into soft snow, before they reach the faster sections below.
Falling there became a tradition in itself. Anyone who comes off at Shuttlecock becomes a member of the Shuttlecock Club, and is entitled to buy its tie. The museum in St. Moritz dates that club to 1934.
Falls are a normal part of riding the Cresta. The club today says that about one ride in every twelve ends in a fall, and more for beginners.
And the run is built, every winter, by hand.
In the 1890s, Gibson recorded that it was built under Bulpett’s direction by “twelve picked men.” They staked it out early in November.
Then they built it from the bottom up. They trampled the snow, shaped the banks with wooden shovels, and tested each bank. Then they watered it until it froze hard. The whole job took more than six weeks.
Building from the bottom meant the lower part of the run could be used while the upper part was still being made. So the Cresta opened in stages, from the bottom upwards. In 1908, Knapp recorded the order. The lowest section opened around Christmas. The start called Junction, about a third of the way down, opened in January. The full run from the top did not open until the middle of February.
That is still how the run works, with two starts. Beginners ride from Junction. Only experienced riders go from the top.
Some winters made the work harder than others. In the winter of 1887 to 1888, so much snow fell that the run had to be marked out with a snow plough drawn by four horses.
And once built, the ice had to be protected. Benson described big canvas screens put up to shade the banks that faced the sun. Riding began early in the morning, after a night of frost. It stopped when the sun had softened the banks so much that a runner might cut through the crust.
The novelist E. F. Benson, writing in 1913, said the Cresta was built up each year “with as much thought and care as is lavished on a cathedral.”
Every yard of it, he wrote, was staked out, and the angles and curves of its banks carefully calculated. And the man in charge, after nearly thirty years, was still the same: Mr W. H. Bulpett, its chief architect.
That annual rebuilding still continues. The Cresta is not a permanent track. When the season ends, it melts.
The club
A run that has to be rebuilt every winter needs someone to rebuild it. A run that people race on needs someone to make the rules.
On the seventeenth of November, 1887, the year of Cornish’s ride, there was a meeting in St. Moritz. The Badrutt family offered to hand over the management and use of the Cresta to a committee chosen by the visitors.
That committee became the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club. Its purpose, as it still describes it, is to run races and practice on the Cresta, and to encourage tobogganing generally.
The first committee had four members. One was an Italian duke. One was a military officer. And one was William Bulpett, who would later serve as the club’s president.
Bulpett is often called “Major” Bulpett today. But in Gibson’s book, written while he was president, he is plain “Mr Bulpett.” Where the rank comes from is not clear.
The club was a visitors’ club in a Swiss village, and its world was largely British. The museum in St. Moritz says it still conducts its business in English. It calls itself one of the last truly amateur sports.
It also raced constantly. The oldest race is the Grand National, first held in 1885. Over the years, riders added cups and trophies, given by members and named after them. A rider named Bott gave one in 1905. Another, the Curzon Cup, was first raced in 1910.
The Grand National was where reputations were made, sometimes by very small margins.
In the same 1887 race in which Cornish lay down, the second place went to a boy of fourteen named Bertie Dwyer. Gibson says he lost the whole race by one fifth of a second, after being nearly a minute behind in his first run.
The club had colours, too: gold and scarlet. According to the club, they were first given to the riders chosen to represent St. Moritz against Davos.
The course itself settled down in those same years. In its first winters, the run changed length from season to season. One winter it was a full mile long. By 1889, Gibson wrote, it had taken the general shape it kept from then on.
And riders came back, winter after winter, for years. That is part of what made the Cresta different from a race on a public road. It was a place you learned. A rider had a whole season, and then another, to master one run and its twelve or so banks.
The club’s records show the same names again and again: Bulpett, Topham, Freeman, Bott. Some of them gave their names to trophies. One gave his name to a bank.
By the 1890s, the head-first rider was not a curiosity any more. He was the standard. And the club was building its whole world around him.
The women
There is a part of this story that most short histories of skeleton leave out. Women were riding the Cresta almost from the beginning.
The Kulm Hotel has published a history of women on the run. It records a women’s race in 1886, a year before Cornish’s ride. A rider named Annie Robertson represented St. Moritz against Davos.
Women went on racing. The museum dates the first Ladies’ Grand National to 1896. Some of the winners came from the same families as the men. A Swiss archive gallery shows a Mrs Bott winning the ladies’ race in 1902. In those same years, a Mr Bott was adding a sliding seat to the sled and giving the club a cup.
At first, most women sat up while the men went head first. The Kulm’s history mentions one champion, a Mrs MacLaren, who won three years running at the end of the 1890s riding side-saddle.
Then women went head first too. The Kulm names Lorna Robertson as the first woman to ride the Cresta head first. A later account describes her doing it in an ankle-length skirt.
The best known of the early women riders is Ursula Wheble. An Olympic study of the sport’s history says she won the women’s race nine times: three times sitting up, six times head first. In 1911, it says, she rode the full course in sixty-one seconds. The winning man that year rode it in fifty-nine point six.
The Kulm says her women’s record from the top of the run stood until 2023.
Women also earned the club’s colours. According to the Kulm, the last woman to be given them, before everything changed, was Myra Fullerton, in 1922.
Then the door closed.
The last women’s race of that era is usually dated to 1925, though one account suggests 1921. And in 1929, the club’s committee banned women from riding the Cresta.
The last woman to ride it officially, according to the Kulm, was Vivien Wrangham. She had been injured in falls at Shuttlecock and later at Bulpett’s.
A relative of hers, the writer Emma John, has told the family’s version. In it, Wrangham was so slight that she rode with heavy lead weights on her toboggan. And after her falls, the doctor who examined her is supposed to have said: “I knew this would happen sooner or later.”
That is a family story, passed down. But it fits what later club-linked histories report: the ban followed injuries.
The reason most often given today is injury. But another reason is repeated in almost every modern account: that the committee had been told riding face down on a toboggan could cause breast cancer.
It is worth being careful here. That story has been told in print at least since 2002, by the Olympic study, by magazines and newspapers, and by the museum. But none of the accounts found for this episode quotes a document from 1929, or names who said it. The club-linked history from the Kulm mentions only the injuries.
What the Kulm’s history says is this. In 1929, the ban came after injuries. And in 1933, a meeting of the club’s members upheld it.
The ban was not quite total for the whole of the next ninety years. From 1987, women were allowed back under strict limits. There was one women’s race a year, on the lower part of the run. In 2004 it became an official race.
But women could not become riding members. They could not ride from the top.
That changed in 2018, when about two thirds of the members voted to admit women. Reports differ on whether the vote was in July or December of that year. That winter, a nineteen-year-old student named India Ford became the first woman down the run under the new rule. She started from Junction. “It’s such a different experience,” she told The Times, “unlike any other sport.”
The club’s secretary at the time, Gary Lowe, told The Times what the new rule meant. “We will let the ladies go from Top,” he said, “but treat them no differently to the men.”
In 2019, Carina Evans became the first woman in ninety years to ride the Cresta from the top. That same year a new women’s race began. It was named after Lorna Robertson, the first woman to ride the Cresta head first. And in 2024, the Ladies’ Grand National was raced from the top for the first time in more than a century.
A sport of its own
By the early twentieth century, the head-first sled had a name, a technique, a club, a rulebook and a home.
It was beginning to travel, too.
In Davos, riders on the new steel sleds raced for a separate prize.
Then the sport crossed a border. The federation’s history says skeleton was raced outside Switzerland for the first time in 1905. That was in Austria, at a bobsleigh meeting in the town of Mürzzuschlag. The first Austrian championships followed the year after. The same history records races on the Semmering, a mountain pass near Vienna, in 1908 and 1910.
Other Swiss resorts built ice runs too. In 1913, Benson described one at Villars. It was not as hard as the Cresta, he said, but fast and well banked. At Montana, he found what he called a fairly good artificial ice run.
And according to the Olympic study of the sport’s history, the first European skeleton championships were held at Davos in 1914.
But for anyone who rode, there was one place that mattered most.
Benson, writing in 1913, put it this way: “There is one Mecca: there is one St. Peter’s: there is one Cresta.”
There might be other ice runs, he admitted. There certainly were.
“But what does the Cresta care?”
By then the sliding sports had their own international federation. It was founded in 1923, to govern bobsleigh and skeleton together.
In 1926, that federation met in Paris. According to its own history, the congress accepted the skeleton rules of St. Moritz as valid for all competitions.
The rules written for one hotel’s run had become the rules of the sport.
Two years later, in February 1928, the second Winter Olympic Games came to St. Moritz. Skeleton was on the programme. And it was raced where the sport had grown up: on the Cresta.
A thaw delayed it by a day. On the morning of the seventeenth of February, the riders lined up at the top of the run.
What happened next is a story for another episode.
Two branches
There is one more thing to say about what changed in 1887. It changed more than one sport.
The Cresta kept its own way of riding. Even today, its riders use heavy steel toboggans, slide their weight along the sled, and brake with rakes on their boots. The run is still natural ice, built by hand every winter, and gone by spring.
But the head-first posture outgrew the Cresta.
In the late 1960s, head-first racing found a second home. An Olympic history of the sliding sports dates a revival of skeleton in Bavaria to 1967. Two years later, at Königssee, the first artificially refrigerated track opened: concrete, cooled from below, holding its ice all season. It was built first for luge. Bobsleigh and skeleton came to it later.
A later sports history dates a new sled designed for bobsleigh tracks to 1970. It had a fixed frame, with no sliding seat and no rakes.
That sled became modern skeleton, the Olympic sport. Its riders still lie face down and go head first, like Cornish. But they steer differently, with their shoulders and knees pressing on a frame that flexes, as our episode about steering described. They stop only after the finish, by sitting up and dragging their feet.
So today there are two descendants of that first ride. One is the Cresta, still raced on one run in one valley, with techniques developed around the turn of the century. The other is the skeleton you see at the Winter Olympics, on tracks around the world.
Both begin with the same decision. Lie down. Head first. Get low.
The first recorded attempt
Go back to February 1887. A rider recorded only as Mr Cornish lies face down on an ordinary wooden sled and goes head first down the Leap.
The newspaper calls it uncanny. He falls more than once and finishes far down the field.
Almost everything around that position changed.
Within four winters, the whole race had followed him. Within a few more, the sled had been rebuilt in steel, and named after its bones. A body sliding along that frame, grooved runners and raked boots became the steering and the brake. The banks were named, built and rebuilt by hand. A club wrote the rules, and in 1926 the international federation accepted them.
At first, going head first looked like a stunt.
By the end, it was the only sensible way down the Cresta.
And it was the beginning of a sport.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.