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LIVIN' ON THE SLEDGE

The Cresta Run, January 1998
Extract from "Rock & Hard Places"

THE Cresta Run is 1,212 metres of unforgiving ice, twisting and buckling downhill from the small, pretty Alpine resort of St Moritz to the small, pretty Alpine resort of Celerina. To stand on the footbridges that straddle the Run and look up the ice as riders on toboggans hurtle head-first beneath your feet at speeds of 120 km/h or better is to be awed by the boundlessness of human folly.
  To lie on one of the metal toboggans and look down the narrow white chute for the first time, your chin inches above the ice, waiting for the bell that signals your turn to go, is to feel as doomed and foolish as if you’ve spilt the Grim Reaper’s pint and told him his robe makes him look like a big girl.

THE riders of the Cresta Run have been keeping the accident and emergency departments of the Engadine Valley’s hospitals in steady business for more than a century. The Run was first built in 1885 by convalescent Englishmen whose physicians had sent them to this pristine corner of Switzerland as a rest cure. The motives of these first Cresta tobogganeers are lost to history, though if Switzerland then was a tedious as Switzerland is now, it’s not hard to imagine that a high-adrenaline sport with fatal possibilities held a certain appeal, and tobogganing cuts more of a dash than Russian Roulette. When The Cresta Run was first opened, riding it – aside from the only slightly less dicey option of jumping off a high building – was the fastest a human being could travel.
  The Cresta Run is still presided over by a resolutely British institution – the St Moritz Tobogganing Club, founded in 1887. The SMTC clubhouse next to the Run, an unprepossessing grey building with a control tower, was built in the 1960s. Inside the clubhouse, the atmosphere is a hangover from some point between those two dates: the membership is largely comprised of British military officers, minor members of royal families from those countries you only ever hear of when they’re getting beaten 17-0 by Germany in European Championship qualifiers, the idle, handsome sons of louche tycoons, and their idle, beautiful wives.
  One club member, a long-retired British army Colonel, takes me under his wing and buys me the gin and tonic which seems to be obligatory for clubhouse patrons even at this hour of a Saturday morning. After getting bored with making amiable sport of my characteristically dishevelled appearance (“I can lend you a razor, old boy, just say the word”), he points out a few of the other members.
  “Young chap over there,” he blusters, gesturing towards the panoramic windows with his drink. “Very good rider. You might recognise the name. Von Ribbentrop.”
  This has what was doubtless the desired effect: a mouthful of gin and tonic comes back out through my nose.
  “Yes, grandson of the war criminal. You’re not Jewish, are you?”
  He offers me a silk handkerchief from his breast pocket.
  “And that blonde woman over there. Distinguished-looking sort, sixty-ish, would you say? Well, her last name is Von Stauffenberg.”
  Presumably, unless I’m being led gently up the garden path, she is some relation to Lieutenant-Colonel Count Claus Schenk Von Stauffenberg, the German army officer who, on July 20, 1944, attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a briefcase bomb and was shot for his troubles hours later.
  “His daughter, I believe.”
  I wonder aloud if they ever sit her next to Von Ribbentrop at the annual dance.
  “D’you know,” he snorts delightedly, “I hadn’t thought of that.”
  My host is accosted by another red-nosed, white-whiskered, gin-and-tonic-swilling ex-army puffin, who teases him about the bright pink jumper he’s wearing.
  “I’ve turned queer, old boy. Thought I’d double my chances, what?”
  The clubhouse overlooks Junction, the lower of the two Cresta Run start lines (Top, further up the hill, is used less often, and only by experienced riders). This fine morning, riders are racing in the Curzon Cup, one of several annual trophies competed for by the St Moritz Toboggan Club’s members. There are two distinct types of Cresta rider: the serious ones, who wear all-in-one rubber racing suits over plastic body armour and ride sleek one-piece sleds; and the older or self-consciously eccentric younger ones, who favour the traditional Cresta garb of oversize SMTC cricket jumpers, plus fours, gaiters, leather elbow and kneepads, and ride the older-style toboggans – known as skeletons – which have a sliding platform on top that allows a rider to shift his weight back and forth for extra control.
  Even the latter look terrifyingly fast. Seconds after they’ve left Junction, they’re impossible to focus on. By the time they emerge from the covered right-hand Battledore corner and head for the infamous Shuttlecock left-hander, they’re enough of a blur that it’s difficult to discern rider from sled. When the unfortunates who misjudge Shuttlecock go flying over the lip and into the straw and snow piled up behind the corner, I feel sympathetic twinges in my elbows and knees. For the first time, the awful, ridiculous reality of my situation truly dawns on me. In just under 48 hours, I’m going to do this. I, whose sum experience of winter sports amounts to a couple of days’ cross-country skiing across flat, undemanding Australian snowfields, am going to ride a metal sled weighing 50 kilograms down a chute of frictionless ice at a speed that would get me a ticket if I did it in a car on most highways. I am going to die.

I SPEND Sunday morning at the clubhouse as well, watching more riders flinging themselves downhill from Junction, dwelling morbidly upon my looming ordeal. After a couple of gin and tonics, some faint resolve seizes me, and I get a bus across St Moritz to a mountain that has been converted into a sledge run. This is strictly kids’ stuff: the sledge I hire at the bottom of the mountain is the kind of thing that curmudgeonly grandfathers with hearts of gold make for their rosy-cheeked grandchildren in those old episodes of “The Waltons” that still get shown during peak hangover hours on Sunday mornings. But I figure that this will at least give me some frame of reference for the real thing, and that a leisurely glide down this course will permit me a small measure of confidence. I am aware that this is like training for cardiac surgery by putting a band-aid on a grazed knee, but by this point I’ll take what I can get.
  A funicular railway scales the mountain to the jumping-off point for the sledge run, which winds five kilometres downhill back to the railway terminus. Of that five kilometres, I spend maybe two on the sled, and the other three running after the bloody thing having fallen off it. When I am aboard and in some semblance of control, I suffer the acute embarassment of being overhauled around every corner by speeding Tyrolean toddlers, trailing plumes of powder snow from their dexterous little feet, shouting the German or Italian equivalents of “Out of the way, grand-dad!”.
  Inevitably, I react by trying to keep up with these preschool-age alpine Fangios and, equally inevitably, run the sled over a bump, or into a ditch, and go sailing face-first over the front of it. By the time I make it to the bottom, battered and humiliated, I’ve had more snow up my nose in five kilometres than Oasis manage in an entire tour. Tomorrow morning, I am going to ride the Cresta Run. I am going to die.
  In the restaurant of St Moritz’s Crystal Hotel that night, the condemned man could not be said to eat a hearty meal. I patter my spoon vaguely in the broth, barely tease the venison with my fork, and can only gaze balefully at the coffee. I try to take my mind off things by going to see the epically inane film “Titanic” at St Moritz’s only cinema, but all I can think as the shattered liner plunges beneath the Atlantic for the last time, hauling hundreds of anguished souls to a watery demise is, hey, they think they’ve got problems. I don’t sleep at all. I am going to die.

EARLY Monday morning, I arrive at the clubhouse with the rest of today’s intake of beginners. While proper membership of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club is the preserve of people with too much money, too many surnames and not enough chins, it is possible for anyone to have a go at the Cresta, provided they’re over 18, male (women were banned in 1929, because of prevailing medical opinion that the downward pressure on the breasts may contribute to the development of cancer) and can spare 450 Swiss francs for the five-ride introductory package. In the dressing-room on the ground floor of the clubhouse, none of us speak as we fidget with our leather knee and elbow pads, the unwieldy leather boots tipped with metal rakes, the leather-and-metal hand guards and the helmets. We are going to die.
  Upstairs in the clubhouse, we novices are handed a letter that welcomes us to the Run and reminds us, as if it were necessary, of its dangers. We also get a pocket-sized scarlet pamphlet titled “Hints To Beginners On The Cresta”. This contains such cheery admonishments as “The Cresta is not a Slide. It is a Run and wants Riding. A curling stone will not go to the bottom by itself, nor will you, if you don’t do something on the way” and “If you are hurt, remain where you are and you will be looked after. If you fall within the Run, do all you can to ensure that your skeleton is in front of you. If it should overtake you it will in all likelihood injure you”. As we sit nervously in our ungainly protective equipment, studying these and other exemplary samples of British understatement in our little red books, we look like a mission briefing of some Kamikaze Toboggan Cavalry platoon of Mao’s Peoples’ Liberation Army.
  Fittingly, our instructor is a military man. Lieutenant Colonel Digby Willoughby, the club secretary, is a gruff, irritable cove of whom it can be imagined that the great regret of his service career was that he joined up too late to be allowed to shoot deserters. He barks about the perils of flaunting club protocol or ignoring the advice of the instructors (“This is a dangerous sport. People have been killed”) and refers to a most effective prop to illustrate his grisly warnings. Hanging behind him is a picture of a human body, made up of X-rays of various bits of various members of the club’s committee. Every joint is pinned or bolted, and several of the limbs are held together with metal plates and screws.
  “And these metal bars here,” concludes the Colonel, gesturing at the neck, “are the ones which, since an accident in 1990, have connected my head to my shoulders. Does anyone have any questions?”
  There are noisier morgues.
  “Right. Now, I’ll just do a quick call of the roll. . . “
  Colonel Willoughby rattles our names off in a stentorian parade-ground roar, pausing every so often to castigate one of us about our handwriting (“What is going on in our schools?”). “Bingham?” he asks, about halfway down. “John Bingham?”
  “Erm, yes,” says someone.
  “Didn’t I know your father?” asks the Colonel.
  “Erm,” says the same someone, much more quietly.
  I don’t know how many John Binghams there are in the world, but one of them merits a footnote in Cresta Run folklore, having finished fourth in the 1963 Fairchilds McCarthy Cup. That John Bingham was better known as celebrity fugitive murder suspect Lord Lucan. I forget what his son was called, so I don’t know if Lucan and the chap sitting behind me now are related – and I’m not sure how I’d go about asking – but I wonder, for one appalled moment, whether the Colonel is going to ask him if he’s heard from the old man lately.
  The Colonel continues.
  “Andrew. . . Mutter? Mauler? What on earth does this say? And you write for a living, for God’s sake. . .”
  With a final disgusted sigh, Colonel Willoughby hands us over to our instructor, a softly-spoken teutonic sort of aristocratic mien. He is known within the club as Guru, a nickname which not only reflects his Cresta Run expertise, but saves people having to remember the surname Von Bohlen und Halbach. He runs through a few final instructions, and walks us down to the start line at Junction. He shows us how the skeletons work, how to steer them by shifting our weight and how to control their speed by using our boot-mounted rakes, and after that briefs each rider individually again as they wait for their turn.
  I’m the last of the 32 beginners. We have been told by the Colonel that a time of 70 seconds from Junction to finish is a respectable yet prudent time for novices – the club’s top riders can do it in just under 42. Of the 31 before me, a few bold cavaliers break the 60-second barrier, one hapless soul – who will be announced as “Speedy Gonzales” for all his subsequent runs – takes 120 seconds, and four exit the run at Shuttlecock, sailing in strangely graceful cartwheels and swan-dives into the straw and snow. Each crash is signalled by three bells from the clubhouse watchtower, followed by a snippet of Bobby McFerrin’s annoying hit “Don’t Worry Be Happy” when the faller stands up and waves his arms to indicate that they’re still attached. All four fallers are unhurt, and all, almost enviably, are now permitted to wear the tie of the Shuttlecock Club, the St Moritz Tobogganing Club’s rather less exclusive – pun unintended but unavoidable – offshoot.
 
AFTER what feels like weeks, Guru signals me to the line. I am going to die. I lie on the skeleton, gripping the runners with hopelessly trembling hands, while Guru holds me in place with one foot. “Just relax,” he says, softly, to which I can only reply with a guttural gurgle, something like the death throes of a harpooned seal. “Rake as hard as you can all the way down, and you’ll be okay.” The clubhouse bell rings. Guru steps backwards. I’m off. I am going to die.
  The terrible, nauseating thing is just how quickly the damn thing accelerates. The determination with which I am raking the spikes on my boots would, on dry land, reduce a team of charging stagecoach ponies to an ineffectual flailing of hooves, but the skeleton just goes faster and faster and faster and faster. By the time I get round the right-handers of Rise and Battledore, it seems incredible to me that I haven’t taken flight, and then as Shuttlecock looms I’m convinced I’m about to. Of course, by Cresta Run standards, I’m dawdling, and I whirl low round Shuttlecock, hardly getting up onto the bank.
  The relief of surviving Shuttlecock is brief, swiftly supplanted by an even greater psychosis: an almost overwhelming desire, as I head, ever faster, into Straight and towards Road Bridge, to get off the skeleton. Every reflex I own is screaming in horrified unison, demanding that I put a stop to this nonsense. It’s all I can do to keep a grip on the thing – my hands are held in place only by the knowledge that if I do let go, I will continue down the Run on my own, as will the skeleton, and when the skeleton reaches the hill that slows the sleds down before the finish without the weight of a rider on it, it will slide backwards. While I never paid much attention during physics classes at school, I can take a wild guess at what results when a shrieking idiot travelling at 70 kilometres an hour in one direction collides with a metal toboggan doing a solid 50 in the other.
  However, once past Road Bridge and through the slight right-hander of Bulpetts and under Railway Bridge, terror gives way to euphoria, possibly because it occurs to me for the first time that I might actually walk again. With about 10 seconds to go, I’m enjoying myself. As the toboggan surges down the final plummet of Cresta Leap, and then cruises back up the incline before the finish, I become dimly aware, as if hearing it from three rooms away, that I’m screaming my head off, with total, incredulous, unfettered joy. I can’t even properly make the words out - which is weird, seeing as how it’s me who is shouting them - but it sounds something like “YEESSSSYOUUUBLOODDYYYRIPPPEERRRR”. After eight years away from Australia, it feels good to know that I still revert to type under stress.
  In the truck waiting for a lift back up to Junction, I am breathless, sweating waterfalls under my clothes, gibbering more or less at random, grinning as wide as my helmet visor. My heart is pounding against my ribcage like a prisoner with a grudge, and I wonder if this is what cocaine is like. “Mueller,” booms the Colonel’s voice on the clubhouse Tannoy, “79.46 seconds. . . not bad, not good.”

EARLIER in the morning, while we stood at Junction and watched my 31 predecessors head down the Cresta, Guru had remarked that it’s common for riders to go off on their second attempt. “They do it once,” he smiled, “and they think they know everything.” Naturally, this does not apply to me. My decision not to bother raking or trying to slow myself at all as I head down the Run the second time is no conceited foolishness, but the calculated risk of a natural born rider. It is an informed and considered judgement. It is also, I reflect, as I whizz out of Ride and Battledore like a pinball, hit the Shuttlecock bank at warp speed and climb, and climb, and climb, a lousy one.
  I dig my rakes in furiously. Too late – at this speed, it’s approximately as effective as scattering thumbtacks in front of advancing armour. My life flashes before my eyes as far back as my tenth birthday. I shift all my weight over to the left side of the skeleton, willing the thing to abandon this disastrous trajectory and return to somewhere near the correct racing line. The right-hand runner peeks above the lip of the curve, and my head fills with the orchestral swell from “Space Oddity” and David Bowie singing “Check ignition and may God’s love go with you. . .”. I shut my eyes and prepare for liftoff. Bowie’s voice is replaced in my head by the Colonel’s: “If you come off the Run, get rid of the skeleton at all costs, you don’t want it landing on you”.
  When my eyes open again, they’re still looking over the front of the skeleton. Miraculously, the thing has retreated from the top of the curve, and I’m still on the Run, if hopelessly off course. I hurtle down the far side of Shuttlecock so quickly I’ve no time to pull myself back into the centre of the skeleton before I hit the wall of the right-hander at Stream far, far harder than you’re supposed to.
  Shocked half-numb with the pain of the impact, yet positively delirious with relief, I lift my rakes again for the glorious plummet down Straight and beneath the two bridges. This time, I haul myself forward on the skeleton’s moving platform, so that from the chest up, I am over the front of it, holding onto the runners with my hands near my hips. All I can see now is featureless ice, flying beneath and beside me at what seems, from six inches away, like a speed that would make light look a real slouch. I can hear nothing but the runners hissing against the ice, like cold water steaming off a hot pan. It’s just that little bit better than the best thing ever. I don’t ever want it to end.
  It does, in 68.14 seconds.
  “A sensible time,” approves the Colonel on the tannoy.

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