Transcript
Rain at St. Moritz
St. Moritz, in the Swiss Alps. Saturday, the eighteenth of February 1928.
It should be cold. It is not. For days the Olympic town has had rain instead of snow. One day the thermometer has reached ten degrees above zero. Events have been postponed, then postponed again.
Now the bobsleigh race, planned over four runs, has been cut to two.
At the top of the run waits a long sled built for five men. Once aboard, they will not sit up. They will lie flat, one behind another, heads forward, faces close to the ice.
The man at the front holds a steering wheel, like the wheel of a car. He is the lightest man on his sled. And he is sixteen years old. His name is Billy Fiske.
His sled has a name too. It is called Satan.
This is Slidensa — stories of ice, gravity and speed.
Billy Fiske won that race. He became the youngest Olympic champion in the history of bobsleigh, a record he still holds.
Twelve years later, he died, aged twenty-nine, from burns suffered flying with the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain. An American, in a war his own country had not yet joined.
Those two facts have been told together ever since, often with a great deal added in between.
So this episode asks two questions.
First: what had to be true of Billy Fiske, and of bobsleigh in 1928, for a sixteen-year-old to win Olympic gold?
And second: how did his death in 1940 change the way that victory was remembered?
The answers are less like a legend, and more interesting.
A boy between two continents
William Fiske was born in Chicago, on the fourth of June 1911. Everyone called him Billy.
His family had money. In Chicago, according to the historian Andy Bull, who worked through the family’s scrapbooks, they lived with a cook, a servant and a nurse.
And the family had Europe. His father was a banker, and in 1924 he was chosen to run the European business of a New York bank. The family sailed that spring. In Paris they took a house on the Avenue Bugeaud, and later, Bull writes, a château near Biarritz.
Billy was sent to boarding school in England, near Oxford. He later called it a somewhat unorthodox school.
Bull says that at fifteen, his father sent him, with a chaperone, to spend a summer working on a sheep farm outside Buenos Aires. My first real trip by myself, he called it.
His father also made both his children an offer, according to Bull. A thousand dollars each, if they stayed away from drink and tobacco until they were twenty-one. His sister turned it down. Billy took the money.
So by fifteen, he was an American boy living between Paris and an English school, in a family that could take its holidays wherever it liked.
In January 1927, it took them to St. Moritz.
St. Moritz was the place where the sport’s first bobsleigh club had been founded, thirty years before. It had a famous run, built from snow and water every winter, about a mile long, with curves that had names.
In 1928, a reporter described them. Sunny Corner, a very sharp and high turn of solid ice. Then the Horseshoe. And the Shamrock, he added, the turn at which the King of the Belgians had come to grief.
Billy Fiske was fifteen. And according to Bull, who has also worked through the St. Moritz club’s records, those January days were his first runs.
He started in a small two-man sled, a boblet. On the eleventh of January 1927, Bull writes, he recorded the fastest boblet time of the whole season.
The club’s logbook, as Bull quotes it, soon had two words for the schoolboy steerer. Intrepid. And hard-working.
In those days, very few people could afford a bobsleigh of their own. When the president of the St. Moritz club ordered new sleds from a maker in Davos, Billy, Bull writes, talked his father into buying him one.
He gave it a name: Satan.
He was not the only one with a sense of humour. His friend and rival, an American named Jennison Heaton, called his own sled Hell.
Bull also says he won the St. Moritz Derby that first winter, at his first attempt. No newspaper report of that win has turned up yet, so treat it as Bull’s account.
By the next winter, he was certainly racing. In January 1928, the Paris Herald reported a race called the Netherlands Cup. It was won, the paper said, by an American bob bearing the suggestive name of Satan. Its steerer was Mr W. Fiske. One of his crew was Miss Fiske, his sister. In February 1928, just before the Olympics, the Associated Press reported that year’s St. Moritz Derby. It had forty-four entries, from twenty-two countries. Heaton won it, on Hell. A Belgian came second. Fiske came third, on Satan.
An Englishman, the reporter wrote, asked how anyone was supposed to beat such a diabolical combination.
So here is the first thing that had to be true. The boy at the front of the Olympic sled was young. But he was not new. By the day of the race, he had been driving on that run for about thirteen months, across two winters, on a sled of his own.
And he had been able to do that because his family could put him there.
Raising a crew
A bobsleigh in 1928 needed more than a driver. The Olympic race was for crews of five. And the United States did not have a team.
It had a man. Jay O’Brien was an American sportsman living in Europe, and an official of the international bobsleigh federation. He set about organising two American sleds for the Games.
By December 1927, a Paris sports column reported, he had the bobs, and the steerers, and the brakesmen for two crews. What he lacked was a few heavy members, men of about two hundred pounds, to ballast the bobs.
The problem was money. In December 1927, a sports column in the Paris Herald, the European edition of an American newspaper, explained it. The United States Olympic Committee, the column said, considered the ocean fare too expensive for just a bobsleigh competition.
So the crews would have to be found in Europe.
The column put out a call. It wanted young American men, already in Europe. They had to weigh at least a hundred and ninety pounds. They had to be free for about five weeks in Switzerland. And they had to be strict amateurs.
Six were needed, the column said. Five days later it was still asking. There was still an opening, it said, for two or three more two-hundred-pounders.
Why so heavy? Bob crews treated extra weight as an advantage. The forces slowing a sled did not rise as quickly as its mass, so more weight could mean less speed lost. For these Games, the sled itself could weigh up to two hundred and fifty kilograms. And the sleds were lighter than before, the paper said, so O’Brien wanted heavier ballast men.
The men behind the driver were often called ballast.
The entry list that the column printed in January gave their weights. One of the American ballast men weighed two hundred and fifteen pounds. Another, two hundred and seven.
And the driver was the lightest of them all. On the same list, Billy Fiske weighed a hundred and forty-five pounds.
The crew that formed around him was a mix.
Clifford Gray, known as Tippy, was thirty-six, and born in Chicago. He was an experienced bobsledder. The papers that winter called him very experienced, and he had been braking sleds before the Games. He is sometimes confused with an English songwriter of the same name. He was a different man.
The Olympic historians at Olympedia have traced the others. Richard Parke was thirty-four. He had served as an infantry officer in the First World War, and he had spent a holiday in St. Moritz almost every winter since.
Nion Tucker was the oldest, at forty-two: an investment broker from San Francisco, who would later help to found United Airlines.
And Geoffrey Mason was twenty-five, a graduate student in Germany who later became a teacher of Latin and German. According to Olympedia, he answered that newspaper call. His whole career in bobsleigh lasted about a month. It ended with a gold medal.
O’Brien planned two weeks of coaching before the Games. By January, the column reported that the American crews were hard at work under his watchful eye. Some of the ballast men, it added, were new at the game, and a few weeks’ practice would do the rookies good.
You may have heard a different story: that none of Fiske’s crew had ever seen a bobsleigh before that winter. It is a good story. It appears in books about the Olympics written decades later.
But the papers of 1928 do not support it. They say only that some of the ballast men were new.
In January, Gray wrote a letter about their practice runs, and the Paris column printed it. We took Sunny Corner, he wrote, at close to fifty miles an hour. That was his own estimate. But it gives the feeling of the place.
The column had got one thing wrong, though. It had reported Tippy as the steerer. Gray wrote back to correct it. It was Billy Fiske, he said, who had that important position. Tippy had the honour to act as brake.
The same column described the riders and their kit, that week. The crews wore elbow and knee pads, and steel plates on the backs of their hands.
And it described how a sled started. The steerer lay flat, head foremost. The brakesman, at the back, pushed the sled for about twenty-five yards, and then jumped on. About thirty yards down the run, a fine thread stretched across the ice. When the sled broke it, the clock started.
A game has to start a bobsleigh too. In Slidensa, the push is played: each input stands for one running step, and the crew push for about four seconds and thirty metres before they jump aboard.
There is one difference. In 1928, the clock started at the thread, after most of the push. In the game, the clock starts at the start gate, while the crew are still running. Same idea. Different timing.
The race
The second Winter Olympics opened at St. Moritz on the eleventh of February 1928. Then the weather turned.
The organisers had chosen those dates carefully. Weather records going back twenty-five years said the second week of February was the safest. It went, as the official report put it, against the forecasts of all the meteorologists.
On the fourteenth, the long-distance speed-skating race was stopped, as the ice softened. That evening, it began to rain. The next day, the report says, rain fell from morning till night, and the temperature reached ten degrees above zero.
The organising committee met in an emergency session. Events were postponed, to the first fine day, or the return of the cold. Nobody, said one French writer, could remember a thaw like it at St. Moritz in February.
The bobsleigh race had been planned as four runs. The federation cut it to two.
Twenty-three crews started, from thirteen countries. The experts, the Paris column said, appeared to favour the American bobs, either Hell or Satan.
A customary pilot run preceded the timed race each morning. The report does not say who rode it.
On Saturday the eighteenth of February, each crew made its first competition run. Fiske’s sled, Satan, entered the books as USA II. It came down in a minute, thirty-eight seconds and nine tenths. No one went faster that day. A Belgian crew was nearly a second behind, and a crew from Argentina was third. The Belgians would fall to sixth after a slow second run.
The second run was held the next morning, Sunday the nineteenth, from eight o’clock. The starting order was reversed.
The going, one paper reported, was not any too good.
Heaton, on Hell, now drove the fastest run of the competition. The day before, he had also won the Olympic skeleton race on the Cresta Run. That race is a story for a coming episode. His sled had been well down after the first day. Now it came climbing back.
Fiske’s second run was slower. Only the fifth-fastest. But his lead from the first day was enough.
When the two runs were added together, USA II had won, by half a second, over USA I. Hell had beaten Satan in the Derby. A week later, Satan beat Hell for Olympic gold.
Germany II, driven by Hanns Kilian, finished third, a second and four tenths behind Fiske.
The race had its trouble. An Austrian crew lost a man on the way down and was disqualified. But the official report says that there was no serious accident at those Games.
The American journalist William Shirer, years before he became famous for his history of Nazi Germany, was reporting from St. Moritz that week. St. Moritz was an expensive place, and the Games had run long. Most of the athletes and spectators who were not broke, Shirer wrote, quietly slipped out of town that night. The rest spent the evening at the village telegraph office, trying to get in touch with their bank rolls.
All the Americans, he added, departed in very low spirits, with one exception: the members of the bobsleigh team.
Fiske’s parents were there. Two of the happiest people at St. Moritz, the Paris column reported, were the parents of Billy Fiske.
Tippy Gray came to the column afterwards to show off his reward: two beautiful models, his reward for what the paper called Satan’s daring dashes.
And he gave the paper his verdict on the driver. Fiske, he said, is not yet seventeen years of age. But he is there with the nerve of a fully matured man.
The Associated Press had its own way of describing the two Americans on the run. Fiske and Heaton, it said, took chances that made a man smoking a cigarette over a powder magazine look like a safe insurance risk.
Now, the age.
Because the thaw pushed the second run into Sunday, the gold was decided when Fiske was sixteen years and two hundred and sixty days old.
That made him the youngest man ever to win a Winter Olympic title. He held that distinction for sixty-four years. In 1992, a Finnish ski jumper, Toni Nieminen, took it from him, by a single day.
But Fiske remains the youngest Olympic champion in bobsleigh.
He was not the youngest champion at those Games, though. In the same week, at St. Moritz, a Norwegian figure skater named Sonja Henie won her first Olympic gold. She was fifteen.
Who does what
What did a sixteen-year-old actually do on that sled?
Start with what the rules allowed. For the 1928 Games, the federation let each country enter two sleds, with four or five men each. Sleds could be made of iron or of wood, as the crews chose. And the riders could sit up, or lie flat on their stomachs. That was their choice too.
He steered. In 1928, the driver lay flat on his stomach, head first, with a steering wheel in front of him that turned the front runners. Episode three of this series told how steering on ice works. In 1928 it was done face down, at speeds Gray estimated at close to fifty miles an hour.
The rest of the crew had their own jobs. Behind him, the others lay flat too, keeping the sled low and adding their weight. At the back, the brakesman pushed the start, rode the run, and was responsible for slowing the sled down after the finish.
Riding flat like that was allowed in 1928, and almost every crew did it. It was banned a few years later. Episode one told that story.
So the gold medal was not a boy’s alone. It was a driver’s skill and nerve, on top of four other men, a strong push, and a sled built to carry them.
A game has to decide who does what. In Slidensa, once the crew are aboard, the player becomes the pilot. The other athletes lean and sway with the sled, and react to every jolt. But those movements are for the eye only. They never reach the simulation.
In 1928, the weight behind the driver and the push at the start were part of the result.
What followed
That autumn, Billy Fiske went to Cambridge, to Trinity Hall, to study economics and history.
He kept driving. In 1932, at Lake Placid in the United States, he carried the American flag at the opening ceremony. Then he won Olympic gold again, this time in a four-man sled. The crew he drove that winter is a story for a coming episode.
He also took up the other great sliding challenge of St. Moritz: the Cresta Run, ridden head first on a skeleton sled, which episode four of this series followed.
He was very good at it. He won the Curzon Cup, one of the run’s two great races, in 1935 and 1937. He won the other, the Grand National, in 1936 and 1938. For a time he held the run’s records from both of its starting points. The Olympic historians at Olympedia go so far as to call him possibly the greatest rider in the Cresta’s history. That is their judgement. The wins are fact. Bull adds a story from early 1938: a rival broke Fiske’s record from the top of the run, and Fiske, he writes, took it back within the hour.
Friends remembered how he drove a car, too. At Cambridge he had a supercharged Bentley, painted British racing green. The golf writer Henry Longhurst, a fellow student, rode with him to play golf. In his memoirs, as Bull quotes them, Longhurst remembered Fiske taking the same road the same way every day, and changing down at exactly the same speed each time. Fiske, he wrote, had an uncanny eye for speed. Longhurst remembered one run to the golf course, about twenty-one miles, taking around nineteen minutes. On the straight, he wrote, the needle sat between a hundred and ten and a hundred and twenty miles an hour.
After Cambridge, he worked for his father’s bank, in Europe and at its London office. Then he tried the film business in California, with little success.
In 1936, he went into business in Colorado. With three partners, he formed a company that built the Aspen area’s first ski lodge, the Highland Bavarian. A local paper that November introduced one of the partners as William Fiske, of Hollywood. The lodge opened at the end of December 1936. A later account in the local paper says three hundred and fifty people came to its dedication. A 1940 Aspen Times obituary, quoted by the Colorado Encyclopedia, said that without him Aspen would still be back in the hills. Aspen later put him in its hall of fame. Aspen became one of the most famous ski resorts in the world. Fiske did not found Aspen skiing. But his company was near the start of its commercial ski development.
That same year, he did not go to the Winter Olympics in Germany. Why not is unclear. The accounts conflict. One, in Bull’s book, says he was named to the team, wrote back that he would see them there, and never came. The team reached Germany still waiting for word. Another says officials dropped him after a dispute over selection. A friend later said he refused to go to Nazi Germany. But no explanation from Fiske himself has been found.
In September 1938, in England, he married Rose Bingham. She had been married to the Earl of Warwick, and was formerly the Countess of Warwick. According to Bull, it was a quiet ceremony at a register office in Maidenhead, with no guests and no press. A society magazine later printed a photograph of the couple setting off by air for a honeymoon in France.
There are other stories about Fiske from these years. That he raced at Le Mans. That his family came over on the Mayflower. That he swung from chandeliers. None of them has a reliable source, and some are simply wrong.
What the record does show is a young man with money, talent and a taste for fast things on ice, living between America and Europe.
And then the war came.
1940
In 1939, Britain went to war with Germany. The United States stayed neutral.
Fiske had come back to England a few days before the war began. He wanted to fly. The historian Alex Kershaw has quoted a line from Fiske’s diary. I believe, he wrote, I can lay claim to being the first United States citizen to join the RAF in England after the outbreak of hostilities. It was his own claim, and it was about joining, not dying.
His commission took effect on the twenty-third of March 1940. He became an acting pilot officer in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. The London Gazette published the appointment on the sixteenth of April. The entry gives no nationality.
He is often said to have joined by claiming to be Canadian. That story is repeated widely. No document proving it has been found.
The RAF Museum says friends in the Auxiliary Air Force had encouraged him to learn to fly before the war. Some of them belonged to Number 601, a part-time squadron associated with wealthy London clubmen.
He trained as a fighter pilot, at airfields in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire. In July 1940 he joined that squadron. It was based at Tangmere, an airfield near Chichester, on the south coast.
The squadron had a nickname: the Millionaires’ Squadron.
The Battle of Britain was beginning. Historians date its start to the tenth of July. The German air force was trying to destroy the Royal Air Force before an invasion.
Fiske flew his first patrols with the squadron on the twentieth of July. The RAF Museum, which displays his logbook, counts forty-two operational sorties in the twenty-seven days that followed. On one day, the eighth of August, he flew four, covering convoys in the Channel. He filed combat reports on two of his sorties. What exactly he claimed against German aircraft differs from one account to another, so we will not give a score.
On the sixteenth of August 1940, German dive-bombers attacked Tangmere. The squadron was sent up to meet them. It was Fiske’s second sortie of the day.
Tangmere took heavy damage that day.
His Hurricane was hit, probably by return fire from one of the bombers. With his engine stopped, he glided back to the airfield while it was under attack, and landed with his wheels up. The aircraft caught fire. Accounts differ on whether the fire began as he came in, or just after he touched down. He was badly burned.
The station’s own doctor had just been injured when the sick quarters were hit. So two medical orderlies, Corporal Jones and Aircraftman Faulkner, drove an ambulance across the airfield during the raid, lifted him out, and put out his burning clothes. Both were later awarded the Military Medal.
His flight commander, Archibald Hope, reached him soon afterwards. Hope later described the scene. The rescuers did not know how to take off his parachute, he said, so he showed them. Billy was burnt about the hands and ankles. Hope told him not to worry, that he would be all right.
Fiske was taken to a hospital in Chichester, a few miles away.
That evening, Hope remembered, Billy was sitting up in bed, perky as hell.
The next thing they heard, he was dead.
He died on the seventeenth of August 1940, of shock from his burns. He was twenty-nine.
Later accounts have added things. That the fuel tank exploded. That he chose to stay with his aircraft to save it, instead of bailing out. Neither is supported by the evidence. The RAF Museum says his Hurricane was repaired and flying again within days. And nobody knows what he was thinking as he glided in.
On the twentieth of August, he was buried in the churchyard at Boxgrove, near Tangmere. The pilots of his squadron were flying, so ground crew carried his coffin. It was covered with two flags: the British and the American.
His headstone says: He died for England.
How he was remembered
Almost at once, Billy Fiske became more than a man.
A family history preserves a newspaper tribute from Lord Brabazon, a government minister who had ridden the Cresta himself. He thanked America, he wrote, for sending them the perfect sportsman.
He is often called the first American to die in the Second World War. That is not true. Americans had died at sea in 1939.
And there was another American pilot. Jimmy Davies was born in New Jersey. He was killed flying for the Royal Air Force at the end of June 1940, seven weeks before Fiske.
The RAF Museum remembers Fiske as the first American citizen to die in RAF service in the war. The museum also warns that the category is not clean: many Americans passed as Canadians, so an exact count is impossible. And Davies had been killed just before the official start of the Battle of Britain.
There is one more trace of that uncertainty. Fiske’s name is also written in Canada’s book of remembrance for the Second World War. It does not say why.
What is certain is what happened next.
It was the fourth of July 1941: American Independence Day. In the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, in London, a memorial tablet was unveiled. The man who unveiled it was Sir Archibald Sinclair, Britain’s minister for air.
Sinclair spoke about Fiske.
Here was a young man for whom life held much, he said. Under no kind of compulsion, he came to fight for Britain. He came, and he fought, and he died.
The tablet’s words were shorter still.
An American citizen, who died that England might live.
The United States was still neutral. It would enter the war five months later, after Pearl Harbor. A later Observer account read the Independence Day ceremony as a political message across the Atlantic. That is an interpretation. What is beyond doubt is the date, the place and the sentence on the wall.
The headstone at Boxgrove was replaced in 2002. In 2008, a memorial window was dedicated in the church there, and his green Bentley was brought along for the occasion.
The squadron remembered something smaller, and closer.
His flight commander, Archibald Hope, had flown with him through those last weeks. Hope later called Fiske, unquestionably, the best pilot he had ever known, and said he was terribly nice and extraordinarily modest. On the twenty-third of August, the squadron’s adjutant wrote to his widow that the time Billy was with them was when the squadron was at its peak.
The boy at the front
So, what had to be true for a sixteen-year-old to win Olympic gold?
He had to be there. A banker’s family in Paris, a holiday in St. Moritz, a sled of his own. He had to be good: thirteen months of driving, two winters, a third place in the Derby, a logbook that called him intrepid and hard-working.
He needed a crew. O’Brien found American men in Europe, because the Olympic committee considered the ocean passage too expensive for bobsleigh. Gray was an experienced brakesman; some of the others learned in weeks. The thaw then cut four scheduled runs to two. Fiske built the lead on Saturday, and held it on Sunday.
None of that makes the victory smaller. A boy did not win by magic. Money and access put him on the run. Practice made him a driver. Four other men supplied weight, a push and a brake. When those things lined up, he was skilled and steady enough to use them.
And how did 1940 change the story?
After his death, the Olympic victory and his RAF service were increasingly told as one heroic life. Later retellings also gathered simpler details: a crew that had never seen a sled, an uncontested first American, a known reason for landing instead of jumping. The sources do not show that all those details grew in the same way.
The memorial story was simpler than the record. The record is enough.
Go back to St. Moritz, on the morning of Sunday the nineteenth of February 1928. The rain has stopped. Five men lie flat on a sled called Satan. The lightest of them, at the front, has his hands on the wheel.
He is sixteen. And he has done this before.
Sources, a transcript and the project are at slidensa.com.
Slidensa is an independent game about bobsleigh, luge and skeleton.