Speed Kings by Andy Bull Page A

what made him such a great driver.
    Every bob course in the world is different. Each has its own personality. There aren’t really any hard-and-fast rules about, for instance, how to handle a corner, because each corner on each track is different from every other one. Some demand that you take the sled in low, some that you take it in high, some that you hold the line around the bend, some that you snap out of it before you’ve finished the corner. At the elite level—the level Billy was working at—the driver can control the position of the sled to within a margin of around three inches. And those three inches matter. Because every bob course has a perfect line. Steve Holcomb, the 2010 Olympic gold medalist in the four-man bob and the greatest pilot in the United States today, explains: “You could draw a line on the track. Follow it, and that would be the absolute fastest way down. And if you hit it the entire way, with a good push, you would destroy the track record. The catch is that you are never on that line; you are always changing. You can go into the firstcorner, the second, the third, maybe even six, seven, and still be on that perfect line. But to hit it the entire way down? That happens once, twice, in your entire career. I can think of runs where I was like, ‘Man, that was it.’ But, always, you can go back over it in your mind and be like, ‘Ah, I missed these little points.’ That perfect line is what everybody strives for.”
    The more familiar a pilot is with the course, the better he knows that line. So when Billy is described as “hard-working,” what that means is that he spent a lot of time learning the ins, outs, and twists of the course, calculating, to the nearest inch, where the sled needed to be at any one particular moment on the track. For an amateur, he practiced a lot. And that work ethic and quest for precision would come to characterize his racing. Billy’s friends recalled that later in his life, when he was racing a skeleton sled on the Cresta Run, he had a little party trick that proved how well he knew the course. He would stand, blindfolded, in the bar at the Palace Hotel, with a stopwatch. He would call “Start!” and click the watch, then count off the corners one by one, describing his run down the course yard by yard. And when he called “Finish!” and stopped the watch, the times for his imaginary runs would invariably be within a few tenths of his real ones.
    Hard work wasn’t the half of it. The second quality Billy had is captured in that word “intrepid.” Remember, a company of men who rode bobsleds for kicks singled him out for being particularly brave. They had all done the run themselves—all had their own scrapes and crashes. They were all brave. But the best were braver still. As Steve Holcomb explains: “There are a number of drivers who are great drivers, they are passionate, they love the sport, they know what they are doing. But they don’t want to take that risk. They don’t want to push it. I raced with a guy who was a phenomenal driver, but he was more worried about going over the edge than he was about winning. He would rather get down safely and successfully than actually push the speed of the sled. And you really have to push the speed. Because you know that somebody else out there—the guys you are racing against—has the guts to push it hard. So to be the best, you don’t just need the skill to drive the sled; you need to be prepared to take the risks. And that’s tough.” When Holcomb talks about “pushing it,” what he means is having the patience to wait, to let the sled run right up to the top of the bank before you steer it back; to let it veer right over on to its side, to the very point when it could be about to tip over, before you pull it around. All part of that never-ending quest to find the perfect line.
    Of course Billy