When you look back at the first version of any event, people are usually flying by the seat of their pants. For the first Winter Olympic bobsled (or bobsleigh, if you’re in certain parts of the world) competition at Chamonix 1924, it was that case literally and figuratively.
Bobsleigh was a relatively new sport at the time, with an international federation that was less than a year old. Like many sports of the time, mostly wealthy gentlemen competed in it, and bobsled had a certain partying element to it.
Still, the wild rides of 1924 set the course for a long and storied Olympic history. We’ve got the details in this episode of our Chamonix 1924 Games History Moment.
Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, keep the flame alive!
NOTE: An earlier version of this episode stated that Switzerland has the the most Olympic bobsled medals. That is incorrect. The episode has been edited to reflect that change.
TRANSCRIPT
Note: This is an uncorrected machine-generated transcript and may contain errors. Please check its accuracy against the audio. Do not quote from the transcript; use the audio as the record of note.
Chamonix 1924-Bobsleigh
Jill Jaracz: Hello, Olympics and Paralympics fans, and welcome to Keep the Flame Alive’s Games History Moment where we look at past editions of the Games. All year long, we’re looking at Chamonix 1924, which is billed as the first Winter Olympic Games and is celebrating its 100th anniversary in 2024. I am your host, Jill Jaracz, joined as always by my lovely co host, Alison Brown.
Alison, hello. How are you?
Alison Brown: I am fine, but no safety equipment is allowed on this show. Oh,
Jill Jaracz: okay. I guess we’ll
Alison Brown: find out why. We are talking bobsledding, and let’s just say bobsledding back in the day, not like bobsledding today.
Jill Jaracz: We’ve read about that in Speed Kings for Book Club not that long ago, so this will be fun to hear about because it was crazy, crazy
Alison Brown: days.
So, as we read about in Speed Kings, the first bobsled races were run in 1898 in San Maritz, Switzerland. By 1924, the sport was still pretty popular. pretty new and not terribly well organized. The International Federation for Bobsleigh and Tobogganing, which was the federation at the time, was only organized in November 1923, which is only a few months before the Olympics, uh, the Winter Olympics were going to start.
So according to the history section of the current federation, the International Bobsled and Skeleton Federation, bobsleigh races A bobsleigh racers did not train and they did not practice. The sport was a favorite of, quote, rich adventurers who liked to gather at alpine resorts for weekends of competitions and partying.
Jill Jaracz: So a hundred years ago, they would be into bobsleigh. Today they’re in about going to space. Like, these same people, right?
Alison Brown: Right. I think these are more the, uh, the playboy types as opposed to the, I want to gain power and control the world types. The feeling there was a lot of bobsledding and champagne happening at the same time, which actually sounds like fun.
Jill Jaracz: I could go for bobsledding and champagne myself.
Alison Brown: But you know what? Again, safety equipment, do not drink and bobsled. Uh, in Chamonix 1924, races ran over two days, February 2nd and 3rd, at the Piste des Babs les des Pérennilles. Uh, teams could either be four or five men, though only two of the eleven teams included five sledders, uh, one from Belgium and one from Italy.
Five countries sent two teams each, Switzerland, Great Britain, Belgium, France, and Italy. Hungary also sent two teams each. a team supposedly, but they did not start. We don’t know why they didn’t start, but there are no bobsledders listed among the entrants from Hungary in the official records. So what happened between when they left Hungary and arrived in France?
We don’t know, but Hungary did not have a sled as originally planned. Over 3, 000 spectators watched the sleds careen down the track, four runs each. Total time determined the medalists. The course ran 1, 370 meters with a 156 meter vertical drop and 19 curves. This should sound familiar. It’s not so different than what we do now.
Surprisingly, I was really surprised by how similar the track was then to what we do now. So for example, the Beijing track was 1, 376 meters, a vertical drop of 117 meters and included 16 curves.
Jill Jaracz: Huh. That’s really interesting that that element of the sport hasn’t changed so much.
Alison Brown: What has changed is how we make these tracks.
So the track in Chamonix was carved into the natural snow using stones to build up the walls. So you’d put the stones on, cover them with more snow to make the walls after you had carved it into the ice. They imported Italian
Jill Jaracz: I’m so sorry. I just think of A bobsleigh just careening down the track and hitting these stone walls and just head injuries everywhere.
Alison Brown: Yeah, so if you see the pictures. Um, after the Olympics and even modern pictures, you can still see the stones piled up along the sides, like a New England wall at the edge of a farm. Um, and they have held up because Italian masons were imported to build these tracks. Oh, wow. You got the good guys. You got the good stone masons coming in, making these things.
So the walls of the modern walls of modern bobsled tracks can reach 20 feet. We don’t have measurements of what shamany measured on the side. But when you look at the pictures, sometimes it looks like they’re two feet high. Sometimes it looks like they’re five feet high. Sometimes it looks like they’re maybe 10.
So it seems like the track was very inconsistent along its length.
It all depends on whether the person is standing in track for the picture. And there’s a lot of pictures of people standing on the track.
Jill Jaracz: I wonder if it was just a race, who could build the highest section of wall?
Alison Brown: You know, Giovanni and Giuseppe were yelling at each other, saying, I can put more stones on my side than you can.
And then Pietro would come in and throw a snowball at somebody and just mess everything up.
So here, in another quaint little twist, uh, sleds and riders were towed to the top of the course by a horse. And in one photo, there’s a dog running alongside the sled with the racer sitting on the sled. So this was a pretty casual affair.
Jill Jaracz: It’s like the track dog, how could you not have one?
Alison Brown: Of course there was a track dog. There actually, in a lot of pictures of Chamonix, there are dogs, which I’m totally here for. the Chaminards really do like their dogs and want them as part of their winter sports. Very nice. So fans and officials were very close and sometimes directly on the track during the races.
If you look at the photographs and the very grainy film, the officials stand on the track. One of the reasons they stand on the track is to stop the sled at the end of the run. So at the very end of the run, they made it a rocky surface. Sometimes that wasn’t enough. So officials would grab the sled to stop it.
If it just kept going.
Jill Jaracz: They needed one of those little runs like I saw at the Uh, Salt Lake City track that has never been used, but they had a little pull off point that you could just keep going and going until you slowed down. It sounded like they needed that, too, because they did not figure out that, do these sleds not have brakes?
They did not have brakes.
Alison Brown: They needed a net. They needed a crash pad. They needed a lot of things on this track that they did not have.
Jill Jaracz: And we, I’m guessing we have no statistics on how many shoulders were ripped out of sockets trying to stop sleds.
Alison Brown: We do not. We do have statistics on crashes, and we’re going to get to that.
But the sleds themselves were open frames with steering wheels or ropes. And that’s all you had to control it. There’s no helmets. There’s no special suits. The riders wore sweaters and woolly hats and hoped for the best. So the favorite going into the event was Swiss driver Charlie Stoffel and his sled, nicknamed Kismet.
Stoffel was also an accomplished equestrian and competed in eventing in the 1924 and 1928 Summer Olympics. Several bobsledders competed in other sports, even multiple events in Chamonix. Two of the riders in the Belgian sled also competed on the ice hockey team, and Frenchman George Andres won a bronze in curling.
Jill Jaracz: Whoa, this really sounds like, oh, I, you know, I am a gentleman. I have many interests and many pursuits. We go in winter in St. Moritz. There’s a lot of activity going on. Of course, you just don’t want to miss it. To pick up games and they happen to be the Olympic. Oh, just wait. Oh, I have some stories. Oh, yes
Alison Brown: So on the first run Kismet crashed hard and Staffel could not continue Three other sleds crashed on the first day of competition The other Swiss driver Edward Scherer had entered the Swiss qualifying event on a lark on a sled Nicknamed Acrobat that he had won in a raffle
Jill Jaracz: That is upwards of the meat raffles I have seen around here.
Alison Brown: I won, I won a bobsled. Okay, let’s go compete in the Olympics, why not? Scherer along with Alfred Niveau and brothers Alfred and Henrik Schlappi led the first three runs by a considerable margin and won the gold medal by over three seconds on his raffled This was the first of 31 Olympic medals in bobsled for Switzerland,
so there was also a Great Britain one sled. with four British soldiers. They won the final run, but they were too far behind to overtake the Swiss sled and they won silver. Belgium won with five riders, including the two hockey players, finished third on all four runs, winning bronze. The bronze medalists were 14 seconds behind the silver, silver medalists, but they were more than 20 seconds faster.
Then the fourth place finisher, one of the sleds from France. Can you imagine 20 seconds between finishers in a bobsled race now? Now it’s hundredths of a second.
Jill Jaracz: It’d be impressive if there were 20 seconds between first and last place.
Alison Brown: So speaking of that fourth place finisher, the French sled included the most interesting man in the world that was in this competition.
Marie, Quenon, Felix, Ghislaine, Falcois, Jean, Delacroix, Herod, de Soirese, Doulan. Thankfully, known as Jean Marquis de Suarez Delaune.
Jill Jaracz: That is a name. That is a name that parents could not agree on names to name their child, so they just picked them all.
Alison Brown: And to no surprise, along with the title, he had inherited a considerable fortune, making him one of the wealthiest men in Europe.
So he was big on the champagne bobsled circuit. He was also a champion swimmer and diver. He twice raced at Le Mans. He flew in air rallies across Europe and North Africa and competed in bobsled in three Olympics, though he never finished higher than the fourth place. He earned a Chamonix.
Oh, I’m not done with Jean. During the German occupation of France in World War II, the Marquis used his position as president of the Society of the Wines of Champagne to hide weapons for the resistance in his wine cellars. He escaped to North Africa and became a renowned fighter pilot. He was killed when his plane was shot down in October of 1944, and the Marquis was posthumously awarded the Military Cross and appointed Chevalier of the Legion of Honor.
Oh, we’re not done.
Jill Jaracz: Wow. With interesting
Alison Brown: people in this competition. So we’ve got two more. Two world, two more World War Two connections. The first one comes from the Italian sled that finished sixth, last among the sleds that competed all four runs. After the Olympics, Louis Trenker became an actor, starring in the 1926 film The Holy Mountain, Alongside a young German actress by the name of Leni Reifenstahl.
Trenker resisted attempts to co op his work in support of the Italian fascists, and he made an enemy of Joseph Goebbels.
He managed Oh, I was going to say that, that is not something you want to do. He managed to survive the war, though, and He became a successful documentary filmmaker, and he died in 1990 at the age of 97. Gerald Fairley, who finished fifth in the second Great Britain sled, sent his results while he was in Chamonix and other results and reports back to the UK that were published in the Times, and he became a full time reporter after the Olympics.
Fairley worked as a war correspondent in France during World War II. He was captured by the Germans. But he escaped and returned to France as an intelligence officer. He, uh, was twice awarded by France one of their highest honors, the Croix de Guerre, and he too became a filmmaker and also an author after the war, most famous for his private detective character, Bulldog Drummond.
love all these stories of what happened to these people after the Olympics because so many of them were kind of wealthy, kind of adventurers, doing all these interesting things. And so many of them were soldiers or became soldiers and of course, you’ve got France, you’ve got Germany, you’ve got the UK, you’ve got these countries who were so involved and doing these wild things and then, oh, yeah, I just became a filmmaker and created this famous private eye.
Jill Jaracz: it is mind blowing and Also impressive and inspirational at how people can reinvent themselves in a way or keep doing new things and achieving great things in many, many tasks or many occupations. and I realized that they had money and means and that helps a whole lot, but it is one of those like, Oh, Olympian.
Well, of course, look at all these other cool things.
Alison Brown: Of course, he was an Olympian who drank champagne and ran bobsleds.
Jill Jaracz: I honestly think that the Lake Placid bobsled experience should just offer the champagne run. It sounds fantastic.
Alison Brown: And speaking of Lake Placid You may have noticed I did not mention the United States as among the competitors in bobsled.
Yes. They did not compete. Really? They did not make that mistake again.
The United States team did not send a team to Chamonix, but they did send a team to 1928. That won, and the United States would medal in bobsled in every Winter Olympics through 1956. Wow. So they may have missed the first, but they got with the program, and we talked about Speed Kings. That was one of the big ones.
Jill Jaracz: Interesting. Interesting.
Alison Brown: So, references, olympics. com, olympedia, ibsf, nbc. com, the guardian, franzblue, britannica, and olymstats.
Jill Jaracz: All right, well, wild times, Vic and Chamonix, when your daredevil’s on the bobsled track. We have one more month of Chaminade so we’ll be back again next month with one last story.
if you do want to know about the early days of Bobsled, do check out our book club episode on Speed Kings, which is about those days. And that one looks more at the Lake Placid 1932 Olympic competition, but again, still wild, wild times in the sport. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, keep the flame alive.