Speed Kings by Andy Bull

“All (except the spectators) shut their eyes here. At Horseshoe, a good driver needed to turn late, to gain height as easily and effortlessly as is possible. You need to be brave enough to let the sled run right up to the lip before pulling it back down out of the bend.” From there, the sled went into Devil’s Dyke. “I don’t remember going through that,” Webster wrote. “Think we leaped it.” Then it was on into the straight, under the railway bridge. “This,” Webster continued, “is supposed to last five seconds but not one member of the crew would be surprised if he found himself in a different climate” by the time it was over. Officially, Webster noted, the course was just under a mile. “But I thought it was never going to finish.”
    Billy was a natural. On January 11 he completed a boblet run in 1:47.5, the single fastest time of the season. He loved the sport so much that when Martineau purchased five new bobsleds for the club from a manufacturer in Davos, Billy persuaded his father to buy one for him. He was lucky: “In the gay old days,” Martineau wrote, “few people could afford to buy their own bobs.” Back then the bobs all had their own names. In fact, they would be listed first in the results; the steerer’s name came second, out of courtesy, so it seemed as though it was the bob that won the race. “Every bob thereby acquired a character of its own,” Martineau wrote. “They became personalized. And when it changed hands, one had the impression of a race-horse being bought-and-sold.” Billy called his “Satan.” His good friend Jennison Heaton bought another and named it “Hell.” The names led one Englishman, often beaten by both of them, to wonder how “any one was expected to beat such a diabolical combination as that.”
    You would scarcely recognize Satan as a sled today. It looked a little like a camp bed with a steering wheel where the pillow ought to be. It was a long, flatframe spanned by a series of metal bars with two long rails on either side and metal runners underneath. There was a brake at the back, though it was considered a sin to use it during the run, since its metal teeth cut up the ice. And at the front, flat down, parallel to the ground, was the little wheel. Back then they were still bobbing in the ventre à terre style: the pilot got on first and lay along the sled, his feet pointing toward the brake; the second rider lay between the pilot’s legs, his chest overlapping with the pilot’s back; the third was flat on top of the second, a little farther back; and so on, right back to the brake. Only the steerer saw the course; the crew behind him buried their faces in the backs of the person in front and weren’t supposed to glance left or right for even a fraction of a second during the run. They were, in effect, a deadweight, remaining motionless until the steerer called out “Left!” or “Right!”—when they would all lean over to that side. The only exception was the brake, who was allowed to get up on his knees before the corners and bob back and forth to help the sled build up speed. Leaning meant that the sled took the corner without any loss of speed, and made it easier to steer. And good bobbing, that back-and-forth motion, made a real difference to the speed of the sled. Ventre à terre was pretty much foolproof in that while a bad or rookie crew wouldn’t help the sled speed along, they couldn’t cause it to crash so long as they made sure to just stay still. This meant that the onus was entirely on the steerer and, to a much lesser extent, the brakeman.
    That first year, the logbook of the St. Moritz Bobsleigh Club singled out two qualities in Billy’s driving: “W. Fiske,” as they called him then, was an “intrepid” and “hard-working” steerer. And here we get the first two clues about