Victorian tourists in St. Moritz invented bobsleigh thrills
Bobsleigh sends one to four athletes down iced, banked tracks in a gravity sled. Late-nineteenth-century British guests at Caspar Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in St. Moritz adapted boys’ delivery sleds into the sport. The name recalls riders bobbing to coax more speed.
Badrutt, who lived from 1848 to 1904, was tired of an empty hotel every winter, so he persuaded wealthy English regulars to stay through the cold months and kept them busy with food, drink and diversions. When their sleds began slamming into pedestrians in the icy lanes, the guests bolted two skeleton sleds to a board with steering at the front, allowing longer and faster runs. Complaints forced the racing off public roads. Formal contests began on the natural-ice Cresta Run in 1884, which still operates without refrigeration and hosted Olympic skeleton in 1928 and 1948. The first club formed in 1897, and the first track built only for bobsleds opened in 1902.
The governing federation dates from 1923. Four-man bobsleigh featured at the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix in 1924 and has appeared at every Games since except 1960 in Squaw Valley, where organisers declined to build a track. The two-man race joined in 1932, two-woman bobsleigh debuted in 2002, and women's monobob was added for 2022 to balance the programme. Germany and Switzerland lead historically, with Germans dominant since the 1990s.
Crews once numbered five or six but were cut to two or four in the 1930s: a pilot, a brakeman and pushers. Weight limits arrived in 1952 because teams had been piling on bulk; a four-man sled with crew may now weigh 630 kilograms at most. The pilot steers with two rings working pulleys to the front runners, and only small inputs are safe at speed. The reported record is 157.06 kilometres per hour, set at Whistler on 3 March 2019.
Modern concrete tracks, ideally 1,200 to 1,300 metres long with at least fifteen curves, must include a labyrinth of three turns in quick succession, and some bends pull 5 g. Times are recorded to hundredths of a second, and championship results combine four heats.
Source: Bobsleigh
