Transcript
Dinner
It is early in 1932, in New York.
One night, a lawyer comes home from dinner. He is in his thirties, and he used to box. He has been out with an old friend, a sportsman called Jay O’Brien.
His wife was called Peggy. Many years later, she still remembered what he said when he came through the door.
“Guess what. I’m on the United States bobsled team.”
He had never sat in a bobsleigh.
Twelve years earlier, he had been the Olympic boxing champion.
A few weeks later, he would be an Olympic champion again.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
His name was Eddie Eagan.
He won his boxing gold at Antwerp, in 1920. He won his bobsleigh gold at Lake Placid, in 1932, in the back of Billy Fiske’s sled. It was, as far as anyone can find, the only bobsleigh race of his life.
Ninety-four years later, he is still the only person to win Olympic gold in different sports at the Summer and Winter Games. One gold in a summer sport. One in a winter sport.
The wording of that matters, and this episode will come back to it.
But first, a simpler question. What does a boxer bring to a bobsleigh? Fiske was driving. Two other men rode behind. So what did the man in the second seat actually add? And whose gold medal was it?
To answer that, you have to know who Eddie Eagan thought he was. And that begins with a boy in Denver, reading a cheap magazine.
Frank Merriwell
Edward Patrick Francis Eagan was born in Denver, Colorado, in the late 1890s. The records disagree about the year.
His father was killed in a railway accident when Eddie was a baby. His mother, Clara, was left with five sons. She kept them by teaching German and French.
There was not much money. But there were stories.
In 1896, a weekly magazine called Tip Top Weekly began printing the adventures of a young man called Frank Merriwell. The author was Gilbert Patten, writing under another name, Burt L. Standish. The stories went out to hundreds of thousands of American boys every week, in cheap paper covers. They were dime novels, the comic books of their day.
The publisher was a New York firm called Street and Smith. The first Merriwell story appeared in April 1896, two years before Eddie Eagan was born. By one estimate, each issue reached half a million boys, because every copy was passed from hand to hand.
Frank Merriwell went to Yale. He was good at every sport he tried. He was brave, modest and fair. He did not smoke. He did not drink. He always played the game.
Frank Merriwell did not exist. But Eagan later presented him as a model for his own life.
In his memoir, he wrote about it. “My first glass of wine, which I do not care for, was taken under social compulsion in Europe. Frank never drank.”
A boy without a father had taken his rules from a character in a magazine.
He grew up partly in Longmont, a cattle town north of Denver, and he found boxing young. His first coach was a man called Abe Tobin. Tobin could have pushed him to fight for money. Instead, he told him to stay in school.
The story is that Tobin gave him one more piece of advice: box, but only for fun. Many years later, Eagan called his autobiography Fighting for Fun.
He went to the University of Denver for a year, on a scholarship, according to TIME magazine, which reviewed his memoir in 1932. He won a western amateur title there.
It was in Denver, that same review says, that Jack Dempsey came to town, and the two boxed an exhibition. Dempsey was a Colorado man too, and within a few years he would be the heavyweight champion of the world. Sports Illustrated tells it differently, and puts their exhibitions in England, years later. Nobody has found the date.
Then America went to war.
Yale and Antwerp
Eagan joined the army, and became an artillery lieutenant. Some later accounts send him into battle in France. A magazine review of his own book, in 1932, tells it differently. He trained in the United States, in a camp at San Francisco, and went abroad only after the fighting had stopped.
His war, by his own account, had one fight in it. In that camp, the review says, he blacked both eyes of a top sergeant.
In the summer of 1919, still in uniform, he went to Paris. The armies that had won the war held a great sports meeting there, the Inter-Allied Games. Eagan won the middleweight boxing title.
Then he went to Yale.
It was Frank Merriwell’s university. Eagan became captain of its boxing team. According to Sports Illustrated, he also tried tennis, fencing, swimming and wrestling. It is easy to hear Merriwell in that list.
That same year, he entered the American amateur championships. According to a Sports Illustrated profile in 1997, he lost a close decision at light-heavyweight. Then, the same evening, he came back and won the heavyweight title.
In August 1920, the Olympic Games came to Antwerp, in Belgium. They were the first Games after the war, and after the cancelled Olympics of 1916.
The boxing was held in a festival hall at the city’s zoo.
Antwerp had little time and less money. The organisers went bankrupt, and no official report of those Games was written at the time. Belgium put one together from the archives thirty-seven years later. So the record of Eagan’s first gold was assembled in 1957, by people who had not been there.
Eagan boxed at light-heavyweight. He had a bye in the first round. On the twenty-third of August, he fought twice, against a South African and then a Briton, and won both on the judges’ decision.
The Briton was Harry Franks. Olympedia remembers one thing about him. He was the only man at those Games to last three rounds against the heavyweight champion, Ron Rawson.
The final was the next day. His opponent was a Norwegian, Sverre Sørsdal.
Eagan won on points again. Every bout in his division was decided by the judges. He became Olympic champion without knocking anyone out.
It was the kind of victory Frank Merriwell would have approved of. Clean, hard-earned, and at the end of it, a Yale man on top.
Two other men at those same Antwerp Games will matter later in this story. One was a Belgian sprinter called Max Houben. The other was a Swedish figure skater called Gillis Grafström. Figure skating, in 1920, was part of the Summer Games. Keep both men in mind.
He graduated from Yale the next year.
Oxford, and the world
After Yale came a year at Harvard Law School. Then, in 1922, Eagan won a Rhodes Scholarship, and went to Oxford University in England.
He kept boxing. TIME later reported that he won his Oxford Blue as a boxer. A Blue is the university’s highest sporting honour. In 1923, he won the British amateur heavyweight championship, boxing for Oxford. American sources have long called him the first American to win it.
At Oxford he made a friend. The Marquess of Clydesdale was a young Scottish aristocrat. He boxed too. TIME magazine later called him “The Fighting Marquess”, and said that Eagan coached him.
Clydesdale had an extraordinary life ahead of him. In 1933 he became one of the first two men to fly over Mount Everest. In 1941, as the Duke of Hamilton, he was the man Rudolf Hess flew to Scotland to find.
But in the 1920s, he was Eagan’s teammate and friend.
By 1924, the Olympics were in Paris. Eagan did not defend his old title. He moved up and entered as a heavyweight.
His first bout was on the fifteenth of July. His opponent was Arthur Clifton, an English policeman. Clifton had just taken over Eagan’s British title.
After three hard rounds, the judges gave it to Clifton. It had cost him. He had hurt his hands so badly that he could not box his next fight.
Eagan went out in his first bout. It was his last Olympic boxing.
What came next sounds like a dime novel itself. Eagan and Clydesdale set off round the world. TIME later wrote that on the way they fought the best amateurs in the British Empire. Eagan’s wife put it more simply. In every country, she said, he challenged the amateur champion, and he finished the tour undefeated.
There is one glimpse of that tour in print. In June 1926, a New Zealand newspaper noted a boxing party stepping off a steamer. The Marquess led it, and Eagan was in it. They were on their way to Sydney. The rest of the record is his wife’s word.
Back in America, according to Sports Illustrated, he sparred with Gene Tunney, the new professional heavyweight champion. Tunney was preparing for his famous rematch with Dempsey in 1927. Eagan, as ever, took no money for any of it.
In 1927, he married Margaret Colgate, known as Peggy. Her father ran the Colgate company, the makers of soap and toothpaste.
Eagan settled in New York to practise law. He also wrote a book about his life so far. It came out in 1932, called Fighting for Fun. TIME reviewed it, and noted, a little drily, that he felt he had known and fought enough people to write his autobiography.
The book deserves a word, because so much of this story rests on it. Its subtitle called it a scrap book. It ran to three hundred pages, from a New York publisher, at two dollars fifty. Before that, it had run in instalments in the Saturday Evening Post, one of the biggest magazines in America.
It is hard to find now. It has never been put online. Nearly every line of his that this episode quotes reaches us second-hand, through profiles that quoted it decades later.
That is worth holding on to. The boy with the dime novel, the coach who said stay in school, the rules about wine: this is the story Eagan chose to tell about himself. He told it at thirty-three, with the glow of Lake Placid still on him.
By the start of 1932, by his own account, the law had begun to feel “a little cobwebby”.
He was ready for something new.
A few weeks
Episode nine of this podcast introduced Jay O’Brien. In 1928, he had raised the American bobsleigh crews in Europe, and won a silver medal himself.
O’Brien was not a typical official. He was an investment banker and an estate agent, in New York and Palm Beach. He had been married to Mae Murray, one of the great stars of silent film, and then to another actress, Irene Fenwick. He was in his late forties.
By 1932, he was the chairman of the American Olympic committee for bobsleigh. In November 1931, he went on national radio to talk about the coming Games, in that role, beside the organiser Godfrey Dewey from episode twelve. And he was going to ride, as the brakeman in Billy Fiske’s sled.
The Games that year were at Lake Placid, in New York State. And that winter, American bobsleigh had a problem. The trials that should have chosen the teams never happened. Warm weather prevented them, and a German protest stopped the last selection races. So committees had to pick the crews by hand.
And according to Sports Illustrated, one of the four-man riders had decided to race in the two-man event instead.
So there was a seat in the defending champion’s sled. And the man in charge of filling it was a friend of Eddie Eagan.
Hence the dinner.
“I was practicing law at the time,” Eagan said later, “and finding it a little cobwebby. I felt the change would do me good.”
His wife had a simpler explanation. “Eddie was absolutely fearless,” she said. “He would try everything just for the thrill of it.”
How long did he have to learn? The usual story says about three weeks. Nobody has found where that figure first came from. But there is one firm date.
At the end of January, the historian Peter Hopsicker found, a local official barred several American bobsledders. They lacked travel permits from the amateur sports body. The names on the list included Billy Fiske, Jay O’Brien, Clifford Gray, and a new one: Eagan.
The official was the local registration chairman of the amateur union, a man called Ralph Ury. Eight Americans were on his list, among them seven of the fifteen men entered in the American four-man sleds. The New York Times headline the next morning read “Lack of Permits Bans Bobsleighers”.
So by then, Eddie Eagan was at Lake Placid, named in Fiske’s crew. And he had already been barred. The permits were sent, and the problem went away.
Some newspapers of the time were sniffy about the sport. As Hopsicker quotes them, bobsleigh needed no lifelong practice. Just enough skill with a knife and fork to keep a man heavy.
There was something in the sneer. In 1932, Hopsicker notes, there was no weight limit on the riders, and heavier riders meant a faster sled. A man who had boxed as a heavyweight was, at the least, not light.
Eagan had a few weeks to learn to sit still in a sled on a fast, high-walled track.
Fiske and O’Brien, Hopsicker writes, were the most experienced sledders on the American squad. Olympedia adds a detail about the practice week. The American sleds, it says, were mysteriously absent for much of it, fiddling with their new runners.
Peggy Eagan remembered the practice differently. “After a few practice sessions,” she said, “they performed like they had been together for years.”
How do you learn a track that fast?
In 1932, the only way was to ride it.
Our game has its own version of that. It is called Learn the Track. The computer drives the sled down the line. Touch the steering, and the sled is yours. When you need the line again, you hand it back. And a learning run can never count as a record. It is practice, and nothing else.
Eagan did not even have the steering. His job was to hold on.
The second seat
The crew of the first American four-man sled was an odd set.
At the front, driving, was Billy Fiske. He was twenty. Four years earlier, as episode nine told, he had won the Olympic title at St. Moritz at sixteen.
In the second seat was Eddie Eagan, the boxer.
Third was Clifford Gray, known as Tippy. He was forty, and he had ridden with Fiske in 1928.
At the back, braking, was Jay O’Brien. He was forty-eight, a week short of his forty-ninth birthday. According to a Team GB history of the sport, no older man has ever won Olympic bobsleigh gold.
A driver of twenty, a brakeman of nearly fifty, and between them, a man who had been in a bobsleigh for a matter of weeks.
What did the second man do? The sources from 1932 do not say. Nobody wrote down how he pushed, or how he sat, or what he added.
In Slidensa, the four-man is the quickest of the sleds that start with a running push. On the game’s Igls run, it reaches fifty metres in about four point six seconds, one tenth quicker than the two-man.
But the game cannot tell us what Eagan added. Its four point six belongs to the four-man as a whole.
Neither could anyone at Lake Placid. All they had was the clock.
As episode twelve told, the Games had already closed when the four-man began.
Seven sleds started. The order was drawn on the tenth of February, and rotated from run to run.
The four-man was raced over four runs, two on each of two mornings. The times were added up. The lowest total won.
On the morning of Sunday, the fourteenth of February, Fiske’s crew made the fastest first run: two minutes and half a second. They led by just over a second.
On the second run, they were fastest again, just under two minutes. The lead grew to more than three seconds.
On Monday morning, the third run. Fastest again, at a minute fifty-seven. Now the lead was more than four seconds.
Then the last run. And this is the one Eagan remembered.
At Whiteface, one of the great curves near the top, one of the sled’s runners crept over the edge of the wall. That, at least, is how Sports Illustrated told it in 1997. Eagan later described what nearly happened.
“Picture a steel comet with four riders hurtling through the air,” he said. They missed becoming that, he said, “only because Billy Fiske was at the wheel.”
Behind them, the second American sled, driven by a man from Saranac Lake, made the fastest run of the whole Games. It took back more than two seconds.
It was not enough. Fiske’s crew won by about two seconds. A German crew took the bronze.
Eagan’s own memory of riding was simpler. “It took only about two minutes to make,” he said, “but to me it seemed like an eon. My hands seemed to be slipping, but still I clung on.”
The other novice
Eagan was not the only beginner in that race.
Look down the result sheet. Fourth was the second Swiss sled, driven by the nineteen-year-old student from episode twelve, Reto Capadrutt. Fifth was Italy. Sixth was Romania, one hundredth of a second behind the Italians, after eight and a half minutes of racing.
Seventh, and last, was the second German sled. It had a story of its own.
Episode twelve told how the German crews crashed in practice. At Shady Corner, a Berlin radio manufacturer and his three teammates went over the wall and into hospital. Germany still had two sleds entered in the four-man, and now it did not have the men to fill them.
So the Germans called up replacements. One of them was a man called Hasso von Bismarck. He was twenty-nine. According to Olympedia, he and the men called up with him had no bobsleigh experience at all.
They went down the run four times, and did not crash. They finished forty-two seconds behind Fiske.
Two beginners rode in the same Olympic final. One sat behind the best driver of the age, in a crew that had been built around him, and won. The other sat in a crew put together in a hospital week, and finished last.
That is as close as 1932 comes to answering our question. The second seat can win a gold medal. It cannot win one on its own.
Hasso von Bismarck went home to Germany. He died nine years later, on the twenty-second of June 1941, in Lithuania. It was the first day of the German invasion of the Soviet Union.
Only a bobsledder
That was it. Eagan never raced a bobsleigh again. The four men never raced together again.
They did not have long. Jay O’Brien died in Palm Beach in April 1940, of a heart attack. Billy Fiske died four months later, flying for Britain, as episode nine told. Only Tippy Gray grew old. He lived until 1969.
Not everyone was impressed at the time. A New York columnist, W. O. McGeehan, wrote that it was a shame. A man educated at Yale and Oxford, he said, had turned out to be “only a bobsledder”.
Eagan went back to the law. For five years, he was a federal prosecutor in New York.
In the Second World War, he served in the Army Air Forces, with the Air Transport Command. He finished the war a lieutenant colonel. For the rest of his life, people called him Colonel Eagan.
The commissioner
In 1945, the governor of New York, Thomas Dewey, made him chairman of the state’s athletic commission, the body that ran professional boxing.
It was a hard job. In the next few years, three boxers died from injuries in New York rings. One promoter was tying the best fighters to exclusive contracts, and Congress was preparing to investigate. In 1951, Eagan resigned.
TIME magazine reported it in boxing language. Eddie Eagan, it said, had finally taken a count of ten. His successor was a hotel man, whose favourite indoor sport, TIME noted, was watching wrestling on television.
The new man had a world title fight on his hands within two days. After nine rounds of what TIME called butting, thumbing and gouging, one champion threw in the towel. That was the world Eagan had been asked to police. Red Smith warned the new man what to expect: a fight mob, he wrote, noisier than convention drunks.
The sportswriter Red Smith summed Eagan up, as TIME quoted it. “Eddie Eagan is a genuinely sweet guy. He is profoundly honest and profoundly sincere, diffident, humble and considerate.” Then Smith added the sting. The first two qualities, he wrote, were indispensable in a boxing commissioner. The other three were probably a handicap.
It is almost a description of Frank Merriwell. And it suggests that Merriwell would not have made a very good boxing commissioner either.
A boxing historian made the same connection, years later. Nobody ever spoke badly of Eagan, he wrote, who was a real-life Frank Merriwell. The job itself, he added, was tough on a man’s reputation.
In 1964, he ran the sports programme of the World’s Fair in New York.
He also chaired the sports committee of People to People, a programme started under President Eisenhower to bring ordinary people of different countries together. The bobsleigh federation says he held that chair under three presidents. In the White House garden, in 1960, the President opened a speech with the words “Colonel Eagan and gentlemen”.
The occasion was a festival of field hockey. The President admitted that he had never seen a game.
Eddie Eagan died in New York on the fourteenth of June, 1967. He was sixty-nine. It was a heart attack, at Roosevelt Hospital in Manhattan. He had lived up the coast, in Rye. Peggy had been his wife for thirty-nine years.
The year before, while he could still enjoy it, Colorado had put him in its sports hall of fame.
In 1983, the United States Olympic Hall of Fame chose its first group of athletes. Eddie Eagan was one of them, alongside Jesse Owens and Wilma Rudolph. In 1990, his face was on an American postage stamp. It was a twenty-five-cent stamp, one of a set of five Olympians. Jesse Owens was on the same sheet.
There is one more bobsleigh link in the family. A cousin of his wife Peggy, Gil Colgate, had been at Yale too, a year behind Eagan. In 1936, Colgate won a bronze medal in the Olympic two-man bob. He later became a director of the family company. Eagan himself never went back to the sled.
The only one
Now, that claim. The only one.
You will often read that Eddie Eagan is the only person to win gold at both the Summer and the Winter Olympics. That is not quite right.
Remember Gillis Grafström, the Swedish skater at Antwerp. Figure skating was part of the Summer Games back then, and in 1920 Grafström won the men’s title. He went on to win it again in 1924 and 1928, once figure skating had moved to the winter.
So he too has gold at both. But in the same sport. Grafström was at Lake Placid in 1932 too, the same Games as Eagan’s bobsleigh. He took silver.
Eagan’s record is narrower, and stronger. He is the only person to win Olympic gold in different sports at the Summer and Winter Games.
Only seven people have won Olympic medals at both Games in different sports. That count stands at the end of the Cortina Games of 2026. The second in that group, after Eagan, was a Norwegian, Jacob Tullin Thams. He won the ski jumping at the first Winter Games in 1924. Twelve years later, he came second in sailing.
The third was an East German speed skater, Christa Rothenburger. In February 1988 she won gold on the ice at Calgary. In September of the same year, she won silver on a bicycle at Seoul. Two Games, two medals, one year. Nobody can do that again. The Summer and Winter Games have since been moved two years apart.
A Canadian, Clara Hughes, holds the most medals of the seven: six, on a bicycle and on skates. An American, Eddy Alvarez, has a silver from short-track skating in 2014 and another from baseball in 2020. The newest member is a German sprinter, Alexandra Burghardt, with a bobsleigh silver in 2022 and a relay bronze in 2024. But no one in that group, except Eagan, has gold at both.
So the double is rare. But the road Eagan took, from another sport into a sled, is not rare at all. People have arrived at bobsleigh, luge and skeleton from almost everywhere.
And each time, you can ask the question this episode asked about Eagan. What did they bring to the sled?
Roads into the sled
Start at Lake Placid, in February 1932. Eagan was not the only Summer champion on that ice.
Remember Max Houben, the Belgian sprinter at Antwerp. By 1932 he was a bobsleigh driver. His partner in the two-man was another Belgian from those Antwerp Games, Louis Van Hege.
Van Hege had been a footballer. Before the First World War he played for Milan, where they called him Luigi. According to Olympedia, he scored ninety-seven goals in eighty-eight games. In 1920, at Antwerp, he won Olympic gold with Belgium’s football team.
By 1932 he was forty-two, and sitting behind Houben on the run at Mount Van Hoevenberg. In practice their sled went over the top of the wall at Whiteface. Van Hege came out of it with a deep cut over his eyes. In the race they finished ninth.
Two Summer Olympic champions slid at Lake Placid that week. One won.
Houben kept going. He raced at four Winter Games. In 1948, at St. Moritz, he was in a Belgian four-man sled that won silver. That was twenty-eight years after he ran at Antwerp. One of his crewmates in the 1930s was a swimmer, Martial Van Schelle, who had swum at three Summer Games for Belgium. Van Schelle later worked against the German occupation, and in 1943 he was executed.
Two Swiss bobsledders of the 1930s had near misses of their own. One rider, Pierre Musy, was a horseman, the son of a Swiss president. In 1948, at the Summer Games in London, his eventing team finished fourth, just off the podium. Another rider, Charles Bouvier, was a footballer. He had gone to the 1924 Games as a reserve, and never got on the pitch.
Then there is a man who came closer still, and from a sport even nearer to boxing.
Fritz Stöckli was a Swiss wrestler. At the London Games of 1948, he reached the final, and lost it on a two-to-one decision. Silver. Four years later, in Oslo, he pushed a Swiss four-man bob. They finished fourth.
One place. That was all that stood between Stöckli and the club of seven. The next winter, he and his driver became world champions in the two-man. What happened a week after that is a story for a coming episode.
Some came from sports with steering in them.
The Marquis of Portago was a Spanish nobleman. He rode steeplechase horses, twice in the Grand National. He played polo, fenced, and drove Formula One cars for Ferrari. In 1956 he formed Spain’s first bobsleigh team, with his cousins. At Cortina, he drove the two-man to fourth place. He missed the bronze by sixteen hundredths of a second.
Olympedia puts it neatly. It was a different sport, it says, although it also involved steering. The next year, Portago was killed when his car crashed during the Mille Miglia road race in Italy. Spectators died too.
Some came from the stage, or the screen.
A Swiss gymnast called Robert Zimmermann raced in bobsleigh at the Games of 1964 and 1968. A year later, according to Olympedia, he did the bobsleigh stunts for the villain Blofeld in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.
And a British skier called Michel de Carvalho had been a child film star. Under the name Michel Ray, he played the boy Farraj in Lawrence of Arabia. In 1972 and 1976 he went to the Winter Games, as a luger.
Some came from the cycling track. The Italian Antonella Bellutti won Olympic gold on the track in 1996, and again in 2000. In 2002, when women’s bobsleigh entered the Games, she joined an Italian sled that finished seventh.
The American sprinter Lauryn Williams won relay gold in London in 2012. Two years later, she pushed a bobsleigh to an Olympic silver medal. She had first tried the sport six months before. She missed the gold by a tenth of a second. No one in bobsleigh has come closer to Eagan’s double.
And in February 2026, at Cortina, a Canadian pushed a sled in the two-woman race. Her name is Kelsey Mitchell, and she is the Olympic sprint cycling champion from Tokyo. Bobsleigh had contacted her the summer before, she said. She finished thirteenth, about three seconds back.
Some found that strength was not the same thing as speed.
A Croatian rower, Igor Boraska, won Olympic bronze in the eight at Sydney in 2000. Two winters later he joined Croatia’s four-man bob for Salt Lake City. He had the power from rowing, he said before the Games, but he lacked the explosive burst needed to push a sled off the start. Olympedia lists him as a non-starter. He carried his country’s flag at the closing ceremony, and went back to his boat.
Some came from nowhere near snow at all.
Tonga, in the South Pacific, has no snow. In 2014, it sent a luger to the Winter Games in Sochi. He had been born Fuahea Semi. One account says he heard on the radio that Tonga needed someone for luge. By the Games, his passport gave his name as Bruno Banani, after a German underwear company that sponsored him. Thomas Bach, then a vice-president of the Olympic committee, was reported to call it a perverse marketing idea. Banani finished thirty-second.
Some chose the sled because it was hard. An Argentine footballer, Rubén González, watched the 1984 Winter Games on television and went looking for a sport. According to a profile by his old university, he wanted one so tough, with so many broken bones, that most people would quit. He picked luge. He went to four Winter Games, in four different decades, the last of them at forty-seven.
And the road runs the other way, too. In 2012, the American skeleton slider Katie Uhlaender became world champion. That same spring, she entered the American trials for weightlifting. She explained why it was not so strange. “Weightlifting is power and speed,” she said. “In skeleton, coming off the block requires the same energy system.”
A Slovak weightlifter, Martin Tešovič, went there and back. He had been world champion in 1997. He pushed a four-man bob at Vancouver in 2010. Two years later, he was on the lifting platform at the London Games.
How did all these people find their way to a sled?
Eagan was asked over dinner by a friend.
In 1978, an American decathlete called Jeff Gadley was out on a training run when a car began to follow him. The driver was a veteran bobsledder, looking for new talent. Two years later, Gadley rode a four-man down Eagan’s mountain at Lake Placid. Beside him was Willie Davenport, the Olympic hurdles champion of 1968. They finished twelfth.
And in 2025, a British sprinter, Ashleigh Nelson, was asked if she fancied giving bobsleigh a go. The message came on Instagram.
Dinner
So what did Eddie Eagan bring to a four-man bob?
The record cannot tell us. He was the second man, not the driver. His own memory gives us one thing: when his hands slipped, he held on.
He also had a friend. There were no trials that winter. The man who chaired the committee that chose the crews was the man who invited him to dinner.
And whose gold was it?
It was four men’s gold. Fiske was the driver, and Eagan’s own account credits him with keeping the sled on the run. The other beginner in that race had no Fiske, and finished last.
But the double is his alone. A boy in Denver read about a hero who was good at every sport, and took him as a model. Frank Merriwell never existed. Eddie Eagan did, and in one way he went further than the hero in the magazine.
It began with a door opening, one night in New York, and a man saying, “Guess what.”
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.