Transcript
Like bricks
It is the winter of 1936, at night, beside a small frozen lake in the Bavarian Alps.
Men are cutting slabs of ice out of the lake. Each one is about twenty-eight centimetres square. They carry them up the hill to a bobsleigh run.
There, in the curves, they lay them. The organisers’ official report describes how. “Slab on slab, like bricks,” it says, the ice is stacked up and set side by side, then bound tight with soaked snow. Then the whole wall is sprayed with water from the lake, until it freezes into one.
The report printed a photograph of this work. A dozen men under a floodlight, on a curve whose wall is built of rows of ice blocks, stepped like brickwork.
In a few days, the best bobsledders in the world will come down that wall.
These are the Winter Olympic Games of 1936, at Garmisch-Partenkirchen. And this is a bobsleigh track built out of a lake.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
The 1936 Winter Games are remembered for other things. They were held in Nazi Germany, and the regime used them as a showcase. This episode will say plainly what that meant.
But it is mostly about the ice, and the sleds.
On that run, a village policeman from New York State won the two-man without wearing goggles, because he did not want to give away a hundredth of a second. A German sled went over in the main curve and finished the run without its crew. And a Swiss pilot was the fastest man on the hill, in a family that had built a new kind of bobsleigh, and still did not win.
So what did it take to race a bobsleigh on a track made of lake ice? And what was beginning to change about the machine?
The most dangerous run
The run lay at the Riessersee, a little lake in the woods above Garmisch-Partenkirchen, under the Zugspitze, Germany’s highest mountain.
It was one of the oldest bob runs in Germany. It was built in 1909, and opened the following winter. Even then, the weather had a say. A Munich paper reported in January 1910 that the opening race had been put off, because the snow was still too poor. And it soon had a reputation. The town’s own leaflet says it was considered one of the most dangerous tracks in the world.
Its first death came in January 1911. A Munich newspaper reported it a few days later. A bob carrying four men and a woman went over the wall at a bend called the small curve, and fell down the steep slope. The heavy sled was thrown against a beech tree. A dentistry student called Oberüber, sitting behind the driver, died a few minutes later. The driver broke a rib, another man a shoulder, and the woman her collarbone. Two doctors, who happened to be staying at the lakeside hotel, came to help them.
The wall that sled went over, the paper said, was a metre and a half high. Keep that number in mind. The walls in this story get taller.
The run was rebuilt after the First World War. The old track had barely been kept up through the war years. In 1921, the same Munich paper reported, a new sports club at the lake had it built again, almost from nothing. The paper gave the figures. Thirteen hundred metres long. A drop of a hundred and fifteen metres. Ten curves, the tightest with a radius of only thirteen metres. On the straights, the track was a metre and seventy wide. And to hold the curves, the builders laid brushwood into the earth banks before the snow and ice went on.
A second driver died on the run in 1934. He was Leonhard Lang, a local man. The sources give his name and the year, and little more.
By then the club had a champion of its own. Hanns Kilian, born in Garmisch, became the first world champion in the two-man in 1931, at Oberhof. The club wanted more. And in the summer of 1933, the organisers of the coming Winter Games called in an expert to rebuild it again.
He was an engineer from Berlin. His name was Stanislaus Zentzytzki. Episode twelve of this podcast told how he had designed America’s first Olympic run, at Lake Placid. The Official Report of 1936 introduced him the same way, by pointing to his work in America.
The report’s own chronicle gives the pace of it. On the fourth of August 1933, his plan for the Riessersee was laid on the table. Work started at once, because the four-man world championship had already been given to Garmisch for the following January. The new run opened on the fourteenth of January 1934. Two weeks later, the world championship was raced on it, and Kilian won it. The report admits that those first races saw some bad crashes. It blamed inexperienced crews.
According to the report, Zentzytzki had walked the ground and worked out an almost ideal line. Every curve was surveyed again, and every curve was rebuilt. The following summer he came back and improved it. And in 1935, the outer bank of one curve, the Kreuzeck, was made bigger, along with the run-out of the finish curve.
A water main was laid along the whole run, with a pump in the lake. Cables went in for telephones, timing and loudspeakers. There were stands, and a press box for three hundred and twenty reporters, with its own little post office. From a radio tower, five commentators could see about three quarters of the run. Loudspeakers carried their reports to the crowd. And an electric lift carried two four-man bobs and their crews back up the hill.
The bob run cost the organising committee about two hundred and forty thousand Reichsmarks. The Reich paid most of the bill for the Games.
The new run was one thousand five hundred and twenty-five metres long, and fell a hundred and twenty-nine metres. It had more than a dozen curves. The sources do not agree on exactly how many. They had names like the Crow’s Nest, the Labyrinth and the Kreuzeck. Above the Kreuzeck, the report says, a swinging iron footbridge was hung for the spectators.
The main curve was called the Bayern curve, the Bavarian curve. The stands were built around it. The town says sleds reached a hundred and twenty kilometres an hour on this run. A local guide to the track calls the Bayern curve the hardest bend on it, a turn of a hundred and eighty degrees.
Remember that curve.
The Games
Garmisch and Partenkirchen had been two separate market towns. In January 1935, the regime merged them into one, for the Games. The Garmisch councillors resisted. The local historian Alois Schwarzmüller has told what the town’s minutes record. On New Year’s Eve 1934, the councillors were told they could merge with Partenkirchen, or go to Dachau. They voted for the merger that night.
The new town had just under sixteen thousand people. About half a million visitors came to it for the Games, by the usual estimate. The railway alone carried about a quarter of a million of them. On ordinary race days the police counted between thirty-five and fifty thousand people in the town. On the closing Sunday they counted ten thousand motor cars.
The town was watched before the visitors came. The Bavarian political police had set up a post in Garmisch in the autumn of 1935. Its job, the regional history records, was to keep an eye on foreign athletes and visitors. One American group was singled out. It called itself the Committee on Fair Play in Sports. On the twenty-fourth of January 1936, the editors of the town’s two newspapers were arrested. Both papers were censored until the Games were over.
On the sixth of February 1936, in whirling snow, Adolf Hitler opened the Games.
Before the visitors arrived, the signs came down. There had been notices at the entrances to the town saying that Jews were not wanted. Under pressure from the International Olympic Committee and from the Americans, they were removed for the Games. After the Games, they went back up. Two years later, the regional history records a Nazi rally in the district under the slogan “a tourist season without Jews”.
An American correspondent, William Shirer, reported that the signs had been taken down so that visitors would not see how Jews were treated. His diary for the twenty-third of January says what happened next. The Propaganda Ministry’s man for the foreign press, a Mr Bade, telephoned to shout at him. Then German radio attacked him, and called him a dirty Jew. The Official Report, in its own staff lists, names the same Mr Bade as the ministry’s representative for press arrangements at the Games.
A Jewish news agency reported, in the second week of the Games, that Germans had been instructed to refrain from all anti-Jewish remarks until the Games had ended.
One German competitor at these Games had a Jewish father. He was Rudi Ball, an ice hockey player, who had left the country and was brought back to play. He was hurt during the tournament, and Germany finished fifth. There was nobody like him on the German bob sleds, as far as the record shows.
At the bob run itself, the regime was there in its own way. Men of the Reich Labour Service, the state’s uniformed work corps, pushed the sleds, spread grit and held the cordons. The Official Report lists fifteen units of about a hundred men each, and one of them came from the town of Dachau. The same report counts the SS. Two hundred men of Hitler’s bodyguard regiment on the three days he attended. Fourteen hundred more on the closing day. On the jury that judged the bob races sat an American, Avery Brundage. He had just won the fight to stop the United States boycotting these Olympics. The vote had been fifty-eight to fifty-six. Episode fourteen met him in the chair at Athens in 1954.
The Official Report puts Hitler at the opening, at the figure skating and at the closing. It does not put him at the bob races.
Shirer’s diary from those days complained of too much SS and military everywhere. He described the bob races as breakneck, and at times truly death-defying. He and two other American writers, the diary says, kept running into the SS guards who sealed the stadium whenever Hitler was inside. One of them, the columnist Westbrook Pegler, half expected the secret police to come for him. And on the whole, Shirer wrote, “the Nazis have done a wonderful propaganda job”.
That is the setting. The races were run inside it.
A lake for a wall
So how do you build a bobsleigh run out of a lake?
The Official Report explained it in a short note written the year before. The straight sections were shaped with a special plough. The curves were built up partly with wet snow, and partly with those slabs of ice, twenty-eight centimetres square, cut from the Riessersee.
Slab on slab, like bricks. Bound with soaked snow. Then about twenty hydrants along the run, fed by an electric pump drawing water from the lake, sprayed the walls until they froze together.
The report’s second photograph of the work shows the mortar. A man in a hat carries a stack of clear slabs. Beside a handcart, men shovel snow into a wooden trough, with a hose running into it. That soaked snow went between the bricks.
You can still watch it being done. A German newsreel, shot shortly before the Games opened and kept in the federal archive, shows blocks of ice being sawn and stacked at the bob run. The copy that survives is silent.
It was a skill much older than bobsleigh. Before electric refrigeration, breweries and cold stores across the region were kept cool with natural ice, sawn from frozen lakes in winter and stored in cellars. Nobody has shown that the men at the Riessersee learned their craft that way. But a later account from a saw maker says the lake was still supplying blocks for the bob run into the 1950s, cut by then with a motor saw.
That week, the Riessersee did three jobs at once. Its ice lined the curves. Its water fed the hydrants. And on its frozen surface, below the run, the speed skaters raced. On the morning of the first bob race, the four-man started on the hill at eight o’clock. At ten, the five hundred metres began on the lake below. People who were turned away from the full bob stands, the report says, could watch the skating instead.
That was the plan. The weather had other ideas.
The organisers called the bob races their problem child, from the very start. They were afraid of the sun. In the middle of February, they wrote, the sun stood relatively high, and it could ruin the ice.
The first practice runs were made at the end of January 1936. Then a thaw came, and training had to stop. A few days before the Games, the report says, a warm wind and rain “gnawed mercilessly” at the thin snow of a bad winter.
The work did not stop. Building the curves with ice from the lake, the report says, went on without a break, with enormous effort, by day and by night.
On the eighth of February, the bob races were put back by three days. Then the frost came. The ice held.
The weather service wrote its own chapter in the report. The night before the four-man, it says, was the coldest night of the fortnight. The next day brought light snow. Then two days almost without a cloud. The last day of bobsleigh was the mildest of the four, with the thermometer a little above freezing at its warmest. The forecasters summed up the fortnight in one German word, Zwischenhoch. It means a short ridge of high pressure between two spells of bad weather. The Games had slipped through a gap.
To keep away from the sun, every race began at eight o’clock in the morning, about half an hour after sunrise. The timetable for the Sunday before the first race shows the same thinking. The four-man crews trained from eight in the morning. The two-man crews trained from three in the afternoon. Nothing was put in the middle of the day. Olympedia says it simply: the races had to run early or late, so that the crews were not driving on a melting course.
Later accounts say that the ice was poor, and splintered easily. That claim comes from Olympedia, the online record of Olympic history. The Official Report itself rated the run “very good” on almost every race day.
On almost every race day. Except one.
The four-man
The four-man race came first, on the eleventh and twelfth of February.
The night before it was the coldest of the whole Games. On race morning it was fifteen degrees below zero, under a clear sky, with a light wind. People began streaming up to the run just after six. By half past nine, the entrances had to be closed. The stands and the hillside held about nine thousand. The report says that number was reached on three of the four race days.
Among them were the first-aid men. The report says the bob run was the hardest medical posting of the Games, and the most important, because the danger to racers and to spectators was greatest there. The local first-aid corps had a doctor who had worked the run for years. A new first-aid room had been built near the finish curve.
Eighteen crews started. One of the early sleds down was a German one, Germany Two, driven by a man called Walter Trott.
A Hamburg newspaper described what happened next. The sled came down at a great pace, cheered all the way. It went boldly into the Bayern curve, ran up onto the bank, and travelled along it for about fifty metres. The driver could not bring it back. The sled turned over. A Saxon paper, the next day, put the fault at the exit of the curve: the sled had been carried too high there, and slid.
The crew fell into the snow. And the sled carried on alone, all the way to the finish.
The paper was quick to add that the four men got up at once. Nothing had happened to them.
Episode twelve of this podcast began with an empty sled finishing a run on its own, at Lake Placid. Here was another one.
Our game draws a line between two ways of leaving the run. Lose the wall’s grip high up, and the sled tips over. Climb too high, and it goes over the edge. In the game’s model, the sled tips if it loses its grip more than one point three five metres up the wall. Past two point four metres, it is over the lip.
By the paper’s account, the German sled had done the first. It rode high, lost the wall, and turned over.
Then, the paper said, the crowd went dead silent. The next German sled was starting. It was driven by Hanns Kilian, the home favourite. He was born in Garmisch, and he had won the world four-man title on this run two years before. He came down in one minute twenty and three quarters, the fastest run of the morning, and the silence broke.
The Bayern curve was busy that first morning. The Hamburg paper followed sled after sled into it. A Belgian crew, driven by Max Houben, set the second fastest time and led the race for a while, until Kilian came down. The Swiss pilot Pierre Musy went into the curve too fast and was carried high up the wall. His countryman Reto Capadrutt climbed even higher, the paper said, and caught the sled. An Austrian crew skidded because it braked too hard. A French crew lost its brakeman on the way down. And the two American sleds finished the run in exactly the same time, to the hundredth of a second.
But in the second run, something broke that was not a sled.
A crashing bob tore out a section of the Bayern curve itself. The ice wall had given way. The race stopped.
The men went back to work. In the afternoon they rebuilt the curve. At half past four, with the light going, the second run was finished, the report says, on a track in very good condition.
The ice decided more than the delay. Olympedia’s account says the fresh wall and the better conditions favoured the crews that came down after the break. It names two of them. One was Great Britain. The other was the second Swiss sled, Musy’s. Those two crews would finish on the podium. Kilian, who had run before the break, had one of the slowest second runs among the leading sleds.
Light snow fell the next morning, the weather service recorded. Musy had led after the first day. He won the third run, and his lead grew. In the fourth, the quickest descent of the whole race belonged to Capadrutt, one minute eighteen and six tenths. Olympedia calls it a track record. It took him past Britain into second, and no further. The one real crash of that last run was a Romanian sled, which went over and was out.
Kilian could not hold his lead. Over the four runs, the gold went to Switzerland. The winning crew was driven by Pierre Musy, the son of a former Swiss president, who had already appeared in episode fourteen. Behind him rode a boxer and wrestler, a footballer, and his brakeman, Joseph Beerli. The same four men had been second at the world championships the year before. This time they won by nearly three seconds.
The boxer, Arnold Gartmann, was a bank clerk from St. Moritz who later ran the town’s cinema. Beerli kept a sports shop. These were not professionals. There were none.
Second was another Swiss crew, driven by Reto Capadrutt. Episode twelve met him as a nineteen-year-old student at Lake Placid. Its third man was called Fritz Feierabend. Remember him.
Third was Britain, with Freddie McEvoy driving. His brakeman, Paddy Green, had been born in South Africa. Olympedia believes he was the first Winter Olympic medallist born on the African continent. And fourth, less than a second off a medal, was an American crew driven by Hubert Stevens of Lake Placid, who had won the two-man there four years earlier. Stevens had the fastest time of anyone in the second run, after the wall was rebuilt. The Hamburg paper called him the daredevil Stevens.
The report’s verdict on the four-man: some accidents, “though they ended lightly”, had forced five crews out.
The two-man
The two-man came two days later, on the fourteenth and fifteenth of February.
Twenty-two sleds finished, from thirteen nations. One of them was the first Olympic team that Liechtenstein had ever sent, two men on one sled. They finished eighteenth. And the first American sled was driven by a man called Ivan Brown.
He was from Keene Valley, a small village in the Adirondack mountains of New York State, not far from Lake Placid. The American press of 1936 described him as a guide, a caretaker and a policeman. His brakeman, Alan Washbond, ran a store in the same village.
They rode for the Keene Valley Athletic Club, and they had been North American champions the year before. Brown’s daughter, interviewed long afterwards, remembered how they got to Germany at all. The village got together, she said, and the church kicked in. The American Olympic body, as she recalled it, assigned them a coach. He was a wrestling coach.
The sled, the family remembers, was handmade, and cared for like a child. The family also remembers how they started. Washbond had a bad knee. So Brown did the pushing, and then jumped over his brakeman into the driver’s seat.
The 1936 press reported one more detail from the start house. Before the race, somebody brought Brown a birthday cake.
Brown did something unusual. He drove without goggles.
His reason, as he told the Associated Press at Garmisch, was speed. “Don’t tell me those big square goggles don’t add wind resistance,” he said. Even if they only cost a hundredth of a second, he and Washbond were not giving away any hundredths in a race like that.
A hundredth was a real unit on that run. The timing at Garmisch was electric, and the report says it was accurate to a hundredth. Over the two days of the two-man, the starter gave his signal ninety-two times. Only one sled failed to finish.
So he came down that run of lake ice with his eyes bare, at around fifty miles an hour, as the agency put it. The agency’s reporter wrote that Brown had exposed his keen woodsman’s eyes to the terrific pressure of that speed, in the belief that it might win.
The first run decided it. Brown came down in one minute twenty-two and a half. That put him two and a half seconds ahead of the next sled, and nearly four seconds ahead of a Swiss pilot who was only sixth.
The Swiss pilot was Fritz Feierabend.
On the second run, Feierabend was the fastest of all. On the third, fastest again. On the fourth, fastest again.
The third run is worth a second look. It was the first run of the Saturday, the mild day, with the thermometer about at freezing. Every one of the leading sleds was three or four seconds slower in that run than in the one before. In the fourth run, later the same morning, they were all quick again. The report records the times and the weather, side by side. It offers no explanation.
It was not enough. Brown never won another run, but he never lost much either. After four runs he was still ahead, by one and a third seconds.
Brown gave the agency his reasons for the win. The runners, which he called special. His partner’s powerful work on the sled. And no goggles.
Washbond cabled home to the Adirondacks. “We brought home the bacon,” the message said, “on the old tin runners.”
It was the only gold medal the United States won at those Winter Games.
Third was another American sled, with Gil Colgate, of the toothpaste family, who appeared in episode thirteen. McEvoy, the British driver, was fourth again. Kilian, the home favourite, was fifth.
And second, fastest on the hill for three runs out of four, was Feierabend. His brakeman was Joseph Beerli, the same man who had braked Musy’s sled to gold three days earlier. Beerli went home with two medals from two different sleds. He was not finished either. After the war, well into his forties, he came back and won a four-man world title in 1947. Then he went back to his shop, and kept it until he died.
The two men from Keene Valley went home to the village. Brown later moved to Hartford, in Connecticut, and worked as a machinist for more than twenty years. He died there in 1963. Washbond looked after tourist camps in the valley for most of his life. His son rode for the United States at two later Winter Games. The gold-medal sled, the family says, ended up on the roof of a restaurant in the village. One day it was stolen.
The steel sled
Feierabend came from Engelberg, a village in central Switzerland. His father, Carl, was a plumber who built bobsleighs. Sports Illustrated, visiting the family much later, noted that the small shop still made plumbing fixtures as well.
Episode one of this podcast mentioned, in passing, that the Feierabends were developing all-metal bobs. Here is what that meant.
Until then, a bobsleigh was mostly wood, with steel runners and steel fittings. Late in the 1920s, Carl Feierabend built a bob entirely of steel. The Swiss historical dictionary says father and son built it together. Most other sources give the credit to the father. Fritz was barely twenty at the time.
A Swiss architecture thesis from 2013 describes what was new about it. Steel tubes ran right round the sled, as bumpers against the walls. The steering was improved. And the runner, the thesis says, was given a new shape, like the letter U.
One Swiss account calls the steel sled clearly faster from the start. Another says that Carl and his brakeman, both over fifty, took it to Germany in the winter of 1927. They won race after race, and the German papers called it a wonder sled. Carl kept racing. Sports Illustrated says he drove his last race at the age of sixty-seven.
Whether Fritz drove one of his father’s steel sleds at Garmisch, no source from 1936 says. But by the 1950s, the Feierabend workshop in Engelberg had something close to a monopoly. Sports Illustrated reported in 1955 that every one of the thirteen sleds at that year’s world championships was a Feierabend. The magazine dated that monopoly from the 1932 Olympics, which would take in Garmisch. But that is a claim made nineteen years later, and no report from the Games names the sled. Each one, the magazine said, was worth about fourteen hundred dollars. The thesis puts the shop’s output at about sixteen sleds a season, for buyers around the world.
Other teams were trying other ideas. At Garmisch, the French brought a streamlined bob, with a body shaped to cheat the wind. The Hamburg paper noticed it, as it came down the run with “its well-known great din”.
And steering was not yet settled. The American two-man champions steered with a wheel, like a car. The Swiss four-man champions steered with cables.
The Feierabend name kept winning, and kept just missing. Fritz raced on for almost twenty more years. He won six world titles. At three Winter Games he won five Olympic medals: three silver, two bronze. He never won Olympic gold.
In 1955, at the age of forty-six, Sports Illustrated described him as “a thin fellow with enormously powerful hands and back muscles like iron bands”. That championship was his twenty-third, by the magazine’s count, and he had never finished worse than fourth.
The steel sled from Engelberg did not last for ever. In the 1950s, the thesis says, it was overtaken by Italian sleds, from a maker called Podar. The last win for a Feierabend bob, it says, came in 1956. In 2013 the village museum put on an exhibition about the family’s hundred years of sled building. Its title was “Wonder Sleds in the Ice Channel”. And in 2021, a Swiss coachbuilder had its apprentices restore one of the old Feierabend bobs.
Walls of ice
The run at the Riessersee was built by hand, every winter, out of slabs of lake ice and wet snow. Every curve had its own wall, laid by men who knew where the ice needed to be thicker, and where a sled was likely to ride high.
Our game cannot do that. It does not hand-build a different wall for every corner. Every corner gets the same cross-section. There is a flat floor, a metre and four tenths wide. A rounded wall curves up from it until it stands vertical. Then a vertical lip rises to two point seven metres above the floor. The turns come from the line of the track. The walls are always the same shape.
At the Riessersee, the walls were never quite the same. They were built, and they broke, and they were built again in an afternoon.
What became of it
How dangerous was it, in the end?
The organisers were pleased with themselves. Despite many dangerous crashes, the report says, there had been no serious accident. And then, in the same sentence, it gives the number. Thirty-eight bobsledders had been taken to the sports doctors’ house.
Some of the men who raced that week had stranger lives ahead of them than any bob run.
Freddie McEvoy, the driver of the British bronze sled, had been born in Australia. He was a racing driver, and he carried the British flag at the opening ceremony. Olympedia says he was known as Suicide Freddie. Two years later, McEvoy won the four-man world title on this same Riessersee ice. In 1951, he drowned when his schooner was wrecked off Morocco.
He was not the only racing driver in that field. Antonio Brivio, the pilot of the first Italian sled, won the Mille Miglia road race a few weeks after Garmisch.
Reto Capadrutt, the silver medallist with the fastest run, did not see another Olympics. In February 1939, at St. Moritz, his sled left the run and hit a tree. He was twenty-six.
Avery Brundage, of the bob jury, went on to lead the International Olympic Committee, from 1952 to 1972. He later bought a house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and he died there in 1975.
The town wanted more Games. In June 1939, the Olympic committee gave the next Winter Olympics, for 1940, to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The Reich sports leader called it an Olympic victory for Germany. The war cancelled them.
The sun had the last word that winter, after all. Four days after the final bob race, the luge riders borrowed the run for a European championship. One heat was run. Then, the papers said, warm weather damaged the track, and the race was stopped. One paper blamed a single bend, the Bavarian curve. The weather service had already logged light rain on the closing Sunday. Episode six told the luge story.
The run carried on. It held world championships again, including one in 1953 that belongs to a coming episode. After the European championships of 1966, it was closed.
But it was not torn down. In 2003, the old run at the Riessersee was made a protected monument. Volunteers cleared the trees that had grown in the track bed, and a citizens’ foundation paid for information boards along it. You can still walk it, in sturdy shoes. The hydrants are still there, and the rails of the old lift. So are the footings of the start house, the pump stations by the lake and the foundations of the Crow’s Nest tower. At the Bayern curve, a plaque remembers the drivers who died on the run. The bob shed is a small museum, with seventeen old bobs and some of the original film, open on Wednesday afternoons.
And in 2013, more than nine hundred metres of the run were rebuilt, out of ice, for a race of historic bobsleighs. Thirteen crews came. It was the first race on it for forty-six years. Since then, the club says, the ice has been built again for wooden sleds, copies of the old three-man bobs.
Like bricks
So what did it take to race a bobsleigh on a track made of lake ice?
It took men with ice cut from a lake, working by day and by night, laying slabs like bricks and spraying them until they froze. It took races at eight in the morning, to beat the sun. And when the ice gave way under a crashing bob, it took an afternoon to build the curve again.
It took nerve. A policeman from the Adirondacks rode it with his eyes bare, because goggles might cost a hundredth. Thirty-eight men ended up with the doctors. One sled finished the run with nobody aboard.
And what was changing about the machine?
On that hand-built ice, a Swiss plumber’s son was the fastest man on the hill for three runs out of four. His family’s steel sleds would go on to fill the start lists of the world. The walls of the bob runs would change too, and in time they would stop being built from lakes at all.
But in February 1936, the curves at the Riessersee were still made the old way. Slab on slab. Like bricks.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.