Of the 1932 Lake Placid Olympic Bobsled Events

Racing with Death: The Not-So-Ordinary Happening? of the 1932 Lake Placid Olympic Bobsled Events P e te r M . HopsiCKERt Department o f Kinesiology The Pennsylvania State University, Altoona D uring the practice sessions fo r the 1932 Olympic bobsled events, Lake Placid) M t. Van Hoevenberg slide endured multiple crashes involving over a dozen athletes. An analysis o f the slide from inception to construction to competition as well as the resulting management o f the accidents produces significant historical insight into the administration o f the winter Olympic games. Using David Welky's paradigm suggesting that the analyses o f ordinary Olympic happenings can be used to probe larger issues, this analysis uses the “seemingly m undane” happening o f facility construction and competition to provide historical insight into an attempt to use the Olympics as a promotional springboard to a host city’s fu tu re commercial success. As the firs t sliding fa cility built in N orth America dedicated tc both an Olympic games and for future commercial programming, this analysis also provides significant historical insight into modem Olympic issues including the fiduciary conundrum o f building Olympic facilities with Correspondence to [email protected]. potentially limited post-Olympic commercial possibilities, the sometimes con tentious nature o f a host city’s environmental stewardship and the fin a l location of those facilities as it pertains to the facilities’ fu tu re commercial success, an d the nationalistic-laden gamesmanship that oft en plays out on these facilities during the administration o f practice sessions an d Olympic competition that can result in decision-making that potentially jeopardizes the safety o f the athlete. O n F e b ru a ry 2 ,1 9 3 2 , w h ile t r a i n i n g for the Lake Placid winter Olympic games, a German four-man bobsled team shot off the Mt. Van Hoevenberg bob-run at the noto riously tricky Shady Corner. The sled, driven by Capt. Fritz Grau, launched over Shady’s twenty-eight-foot-high wall of ice, “went hurtling into space” at an estimated speed of sixty-five miles-per-hour, fell eighty-five feet into a rock-strewn gully, rolled sixty-five feet farther into brambles and underbrush, and came to a stop near boulders, splintering on a cluster of rocks several feet from the athletes’ “broken and torn” bodies. Grau tumbled several feet further down the mountain than his teammates—far enough that it took rescuers several minutes just to find him. This crash, one o f eight accidents to occur during the pre-Olympic practice period and the second devastating mishap for the German Olym pic team, epitomized several questions nagging the Lake Placid Organizing Committee (LPOC) specific to the Mt. Van Hoevenberg bob-run1—questions of slide location and engineering, of future marketability and commercial success, of civic promotion and in ternational gamesmanship, and of excessive speeds and limited driver experience— ques tions that historian David Welky would suggest stem from the “ordinary” Olympic hap penings of facility construction and subsequent competition. In his article, “Viking Girls, Mermaids and Little Brown Men: U.S. Journalism and the 1932 Olympic Games,” Welky argues that modern Olympic scholarship often con centrates on extraordinary political happenings such as the Black Power demonstrations in 1968, the Munich terrorist attack in 1972, and the American boycott in 1980 (to name a few) and have “ignored the seemingly mundane” analyses of normal Olympic procedures and results. Welky suggests that his analysis of the media coverage of the 1932 summer games in Los Angeles “provides an example of how the ordinary in the Olympics can be used to probe larger issues.”2 The current article, while focusing perhaps on the seemingly “ordinary” Olympic happenings of facility construction and subsequent competition, simi larly provides an example o f how these “mundane” tasks reveal larger issues such as the cultural relationship between a host city’s environmental stewardship and the necessary construction of specific Olympic facilities, the political and fiduciary challenges of con structing these facilities for financial viability after the Closing Ceremonies, and the na tionalistic-laden gamesmanship that often plays out on these facilities during the adminis tration of practice sessions and Olympic competition. From this perspective, the Mt. Van Hoevenberg slide provides a unique historical precedent for investigating the larger issues inherent in the construction of facilities spe cifically for winter Olympic games a n d as perm anent facilities programmed for future commercial success. Its Olympics predecessors did not garner both o f these characteristics at their inception. The Piste de Bobsleigh des Pélerins was constructed for the 1924 Chamonix winter games, but the slide only hosted national events thereafter and closed in 1933. The St. Moritz Celerina Olympic bob-run, considered the oldest in the world, is still in operation. However, it originally opened in 1904, twenty-four years before it would host the winter Olympic games, and as it is constructed of exclusively snow and water, the “ice channels” engineering changes on an annual basis. It is technically not a permanent structure.3 Therefore, an analysis of the LPOC’s decisions pertaining to the design, con struction, and administration of Mt. Van Hoevenberg not only provides “an example of how the ordinary in the Olympics can be used to probe larger issues” but also provides a historic precedent o f the challenges faced by the host city when attem pting to balance the International Olympic Committee’s short-term prerequisite of specific Olympic facilities with strategically planning those facilities for long term, post-Olympic commercial possi bilities and how decisions to those ends can result in contesting conditions that may over look the safety of the athlete. Location. Location. Location. The inception of the Mt. Van Hoevenberg slide began in January of 1928 when the American Olympic Committee (AOC) asked Dr. Godfrey Dewey and the Lake Placid community to consider hosting the 1932 winter games.4 Dewey, president of the elite Lake Placid Club (LPC) and soon-to-be president of the III Olympic Winter Games Committee and member of the executive committee of the LPOC, initially scoffed at the idea citing the obstacles of funding and the difficulties of civic cooperation from various local, state, and national municipalities. Yet hosting the event fell in line with Deweys ultimate goal of making Lake Placid into “Americas St. Moritz” and promoting the LPC “into the premier winter sports center in the U.S. and rival any in Europe.”5 This larger plan took shape as early as 1905 when the LPC began winterizing its facilities. Over the next twenty-seven years, the Club developed a notable winter sports resort reputation by hosting national and international competitions in speed skating, figure skating, cross country skiing, and ski jumping. Hockey, dogsledding, and curling were also available. As George M. Lattimer, compiler of the III Olympic Winter Games Official Report, immod- esdy proclaimed, “Lake Placid suggests winter sports, and winter sports suggest Lake Placid. The two are synonymous.”6 With this long-term goal in mind, Dewey proceeded to “dominate” the administra tion of the III Olympic Winter Games “in the same way he dominated his own Lake Placid Club.”7 According to skiing historian E. John B. Allen, Deweys interest in the Olympics’ ability to generate future commercial prospects for Lake Placid, and more spe cifically the LPC, became the driving force for the hamlet securing the Games— not civic and municipal leaders, although they soon joined the process including Julian J. Reiss, president of the Chamber of Commerce; Willis Wells, supervisor of the Town of North Elba; EB. Guild, president of the Bank of Lake Placid; and William Burdet, prominent Lake Placid businessman and sportsman.8 Dewey quickly found a way to research the hosting of an Olympic games firsthand. He became manager of the U.S. ski team, an alternate on the bobsled team, and the official flag bearer at the Opening Ceremonies of the 1928 winter Olympics in St. Moritz, Switzerland. By the conclusion of this ten-week European research crip, Dewey exuded confidence that Lake Placid could host an Olym pic games whose quality would match any European event.9 Despite this optimism, securing funding for the construction of facilities constantly antagonized Dewey. In his opinion, Lake Placids existing amenities qualified the hamlet to host the Games although he admitted falling short on housing and an adequate bob run.10 This latter structure provided a moving target for Dewey until April of 1930. Un like modern sliding facilities, bobsled runs in the 1930s relied heavily on geographic con siderations. The proper construction site required a mountain slope with a northern or northeasterly exposure to help with snow preservation, as no artificial refrigeration existed for this type of facility at that time. It also required a downhill grade between 4 and 12 percent, with an average of 8 percent, and a total vertical drop of at least 200 meters over the one- to one-and-three-quarter mile-long chute. Speed-enticing straight-aways resembled narrow trenches simply dug into the mountains descending contour while speed-slowing curves were more manmade structures, considerably wider and banked, at times, perpen dicular to the ground. Excavated earth not only supported the curves’ nearly thirty-foot walls o f ice but also created a series o f “man-made ravines” in close proximity to the slide.1' The surrounding high peaks of the Adirondacks provided several possible construc tion sites. After consulting with Stanislaus Zentzytzki, a world famous bob-run engineer from Berlin, Dewey honed in on three—a “nameless mountain” in the Sentinel range four-and-a-half miles east of Lake Placid, Scarface Mountain about the same distance to the west, and M t.

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