Speed Kings by Andy Bull Page B

wasn’t the only talented pilot in town. There were theHeaton brothers, for a start, especially the younger pair, his good friends Jack and Jennison. The three of them would run around town together, along with Billy’s sister, Peggy. She and Jennison were falling in love. Then there were the British, the best of them Martineau’s young son Henry, and Cecil Pim, a captain in the Scots Guards. The Belgian Ernest Casimir-Lambert, whom everyone called “Henri,” was so brave they thought him a fool. “He was always a source of tremendous danger to the other riders,” remembered Martineau. He recalled the day when Lambert arrived, “late as usual,” for a competition on the Cresta Run sled track. The organizer, Frank Curzon, was so angry that as Lambert set off on his run, he shouted out, “You ought to go down on your knees!” Lambert didn’t realize it was a figure of speech and set off crouching on his sled. “Frank was in a terrible state,” Martineau wrote. “He was calling out, ‘He’s going to kill himself! He’s going to kill himself!’” And then there was the “hot-blooded Argentine” Arturo Gramajo, the man who had unmasked Mademoiselle Krasnowski at that SMBC prize ceremony. “[He was] one of a number of Argentinians who frequented Paris and St. Moritz during those years,” said Martineau. “They were all good sportsmen, as well as having the necessary cash; consequently they were popular wherever they went.”
    The blue riband race of the season, the one they all wanted to win, was the Bobsleigh Derby Cup. The prize was a silver cup that had been presented to the club by John Jacob Astor back in 1899—a gift from one of the richest men in the world, thirteen years before he went down with the
Titanic
. It went to whoever could put together the four fastest runs over two days of competition. Few gave Billy, the new boy, much of a chance. But he was confident. He had five yellow polo-neck sweaters made up for his team, each with “Satan” stitched across the front. His father had faith too. The club used to run what they called a “Calcutta auction,” with bidders competing to buy the rights to the racers in a sweepstake. Billy’s father paid 550 francs to get his son’s ticket for the derby.
    And he collected on it. Billy didn’t just win the Derby Cup; he took another prize, too, the Olavegoya Cup, for the single fastest run over the course of the two days. And two days later he won more silverware, the St. Leger Trophy. So in his very first few weeks as a bobsledder, the fifteen-year-old Billy Fiske won three trophies, one of them the single most prestigious pot on offer in St. Moritz.
    Billy’s victories barely made the papers in either Britain or the United States, which seems surprising: you’d think that even by the more reserved standards of the day, a fifteen-year-old winning the biggest bobsled race of the season in St. Moritz might have merited more than a passing mention. But Billydidn’t make much of a fuss about his age. In fact, few of his fellow racers knew just how young he was. And besides, by then St. Moritz was only one of a series of Swiss bobsled tracks, and while the races there may have been more prestigious than some of the others simply by dint of their history, the papers now took reports from the rival runs at Davos and Interlaken. The SMBC was particularly worried about the development of a run in nearby Celerina, “which, as far as one can see, will sound the death knell of the SMBC.” Martineau considered it “an ominous black cloud in the sky which, if it bursts, will mean the flooding and disappearance of the SMBC run.” The St. Moritz run was aging, and seemed a little slow and decrepit in comparison with some of these newer courses at rival resorts, which were thought to provide better sport. St. Moritz needed a major event,