Bad to the Bones
The birthplace of the sled-riding sport called skeleton is built from scratch each winter, a mountain of snow pounded and molded into a U-shaped tunnel of blue ice that turns 10 corners from here to the neighboring village of Celerina.
This object of love, devotion--and perhaps a little madness--is a track about four feet wide and is among the world’s most famous winter-sports landmarks, even though it is relatively unknown in the United States.
The object is to navigate a specially designed sled, one used only on the Cresta, as fast as possible over the length of the run. The challenge: do it without injuring--or even killing--yourself.
It’s not easy. Four have died trying to conquer the Cresta; many others have suffered broken bones and other injuries.
Skeleton is making its first Olympic appearance in more than 50 years, and the two previous times it has been part of the Games, in 1928 and ‘48, it was held at the Cresta.
Otherwise the run, as it has for 115 years, has remained the passion of a private, British-founded, British-run club.
It attracts locals and foreigners, eccentrics and speed freaks, daredevils and those simply and desperately hoping to summon enough courage to prove they are man enough to rocket through the ice.
Any man can ride, providing he pays a fee of 450 Swiss francs--about $265--for five rides. However, joining the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, founded in the 1880s, is a rather exclusive privilege. The club has about 1,260 members.
Women are not permitted to join and, for all practical purposes, not allowed to ride, either. One day a year, certain women--typically the wives of members--get to go down the course.
The best riders compare a run down Cresta with the sensation of an intimate dance. “You want to ride it perfectly,” said Nico Baracchi, a Celerina local who is among the finest Cresta riders in history. “Sometimes it hurts us, punishes us. But riding it is an art.”
Added Clifton Wrottesley, a British lord and first-rate Cresta rider who will represent Ireland in the skeleton at the Salt Lake Games, “It’s a strange sort of mistress, the Cresta. You can be so close to success and lose it completely and literally in a fraction of a second with a slight lapse of judgment. Because at that speed you can’t account for it.”
The best Cresta riders reach top speeds of nearly 80 mph and average speeds in excess of 50 mph as they hurtle face-first over the length of the course. This in a sled weighing about 110 pounds that has no turning mechanism. Riders turn by shifting their body weight and break by grating the tops of spikes attached to the tips of special boots--or trying to, at any rate. The total drop is 514 feet, or about 50 stories. Heating or waxing the blades of the sled is forbidden.
Better riders start their run at Top, the beginning of the course at a hill above St. Moritz. Another starting point is called Junction, about a third of the way down.
Wrottesley described the Cresta experience this way: “Imagine going down a highway at about 90 mph. Open the car door. Stick your face about an inch or two from the tarmac. Then try to imagine you’re on an ice track with little else around you other than your skin suit, as it were, between you and the ice wall.”
The camaraderie experienced by Cresta riders has taken root in at least one Southern California contingent--Team L.A., they call themselves--that takes annual trips to challenge the run.
“Every time I go down it, it takes my breath away,” said Reese L. Milner II, a Los Angeles investment manager. “But I ask myself at the starting gate: Why?”
The answer to his question was provided by another Cresta rider, Los Angeles Philharmonic President John F. Hotchkis, 70, who said, “It’s a hell of a rush. You go like a shot. It’s huge speed.”
Scott Brittingham, 40, an investor and philanthropist and another member of the Southern California contingent, said the calculus of riding the Cresta has long been a club mantra: “In lay terms, if exhilaration is worth the fright, you do it.”
He added, “For a lot of us younger riders ... it feels a lot like boogie-boarding. There’s nowhere to fall; you’re already on the ground. You’re carving an edge. You’re holding an edge. You’re gaining a lot of speed.
“It is the obsessive pursuit of a high-risk leisure activity.”
To the untrained observer, Cresta riding and skeleton riding seem identical. Indeed, the basics are the same: a face-first sled ride down a hill.
Skeleton riders, however, go without rakes on the tips of their shoes. They also are professionals who race on an international circuit over dedicated bobsled runs; Cresta riders are amateurs and there is, after all, only the one Cresta.
Perhaps most important, the banks of the Cresta are convex, which is why riders shoot out of the corners and, all too frequently, get hurt. During the 2000-01 season, there were 615 “falls” in 10,772 starts--an injury rate of about 6%. Hotchkis had two ribs broken in one accident.
An out-of-control rider is all but certain to go out of the course at Shuttlecock, a hard left that is the most infamous corner of the run. Those who fall are dubbed members of the “Shuttlecock Club”--assuming they can move fingers and wrists well enough to put on a Shuttlecock tie.
The banks of the bob run are concave, leaving little chance, despite the great speeds skeleton riders attain, of shooting out of the run.
“The Cresta is designed to scare you witless,” Wrottesley said. “Skeleton is more about refining technique to the nth degree,” finding precisely the right line through the ice.
The differences between Cresta riding and skeleton riding as it will be seen at the Salt Lake Games are of prime importance to retired Lt. Col. Digby Willoughby, the secretary of the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club.
A veteran of the British Army’s famed Gurkha regiment, Willoughby earned his Military Cross for service in Borneo. He chain-smokes Silk Cut cigarettes, keeps bottles of Scotch on the window ledge by his office desk and is given to freely speaking his mind.
“We want nothing to do with the Olympics,” he said.
Nonetheless, there is great pride in the club in history--and the fact the Games--and skeleton--were twice held on the Cresta.
As Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, observed in the foreword to a 1975 book on the Cresta, “It seems to be a characteristic of the British to take a perfectly ordinary, even juvenile amusement and convert it into a highly organized, competitive sport or recreation.”
Despite the club’s British origins, Jennison Heaton of the U.S. won the 1928 race. His brother John took silver.
In 1948, Nino Bibbia of Italy won gold. John Heaton, then 39 years old, again won silver. In both Games, a British rider took third--David Northesk in ‘28; John Crammond in ’48.
Bibbia won more than 220 races on the Cresta. Billy Fiske, the first American killed in World War II, won a slew of Cresta races in the 1930s; he also won Olympic gold medals in bobsled in 1928 and 1932. Fiske’s red Cresta sled hangs in the bar at the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz, a couple floors above the Cresta offices in the basement, in what once was a hotel kitchen.
The origins of the name “skeleton” are lost in all that history. There are several theories, including one propounded in a Willoughby-produced fact sheet that it was the club nickname for toboggan. Another is that it is derived from the German word for sled, schlitten.
The 2002 Games will mark the first women’s skeleton event in Olympic history.
Asked why women aren’t allowed down the Cresta, Willoughby replied: “I love it when people come and ask me that question.
“Because we don’t want them here.... If the membership decides they would like to have women riding, I would send them down today.”
In the meantime, the run remains any man’s adrenaline rush, and an obsessive compulsion to many. “Bottom line,” Brittingham said, “at the end, you’re extremely drenched in sweat, and all you’ve done is lay down.”