The story of the British bobsleigh gold

Looking into the history of the Winter Olympics, my attention was drawn to the events of the bobsleigh in 1964. There was plenty of booze. There was some highly impressive sportsmanship. And, of course, there was a British gold medal…

Back then, the Winter Olympics – the ninth holding of the winter games – were held at Innsbruck in Austria. 1091 athletes from 36 nations took part (compare that, if you will, with the statistics for the 2018 games which tell us that 2952 athletes from 92 countries are participating). From a British perspective, 1964 was the first time the BBC opted to televise the Winter Olympics (improvements in TV technology presumably combining with the fact that the nation’s sporting schedules had been decimated the year before in the Big Freeze of ’63). Prior to the games, there were concerns about an unseasonal lack of snow, which resulted in the Austrian Army being called on to carry snow from the higher ground to the ski slopes. Sadly, tragedy struck before the games had even started, with two athletes – an Australian skier and a British luger – being killed on practice runs before the opening ceremony. The latter was a Polish-born ex-RAF pilot called Kazimierz Kay-Skrzyppecki; according to Wikipedia, he was in his fifties at the time. 

Then as now, particular attention was paid by the Beeb to any event in which the British might stand a chance of winning a medal (something that hadn’t been done by Great Britain at the Winter Olympics since 1952). Just one such event stood out – the bobsleigh, especially the two-man event in which Tony Nash and Robin Dixon had finished third at the previous year’s World Championships.

Bobsleigh, which had not featured at the 1960 Winter Olympics for the first and only time, was dominated in the Sixties by European nations, most notably Italy and Germany (there were two Germanies then, but prior to 1968 they competed jointly in the Olympics as the ‘United Team of Germany’), although the Austrian and Swiss teams were also much-fancied, as were those of Canada and the USA. Going into the 1964 games, the Italians were the reigning World Champions in both the two-man and four-man events (women’s bobsleigh would not become a Winter Olympic sport until 2002).

Both of the British bobsleighers had got into the sport via the British Army, albeit in very different ways. Amersham-born Nash had taken it up while doing his National Service and had kept involved afterwards, receiving financial backing from his father – he worked for his family’s brewing company – as part of a deal whereby he wouldn’t take up motor racing which Nash senior reckoned to be far too dangerous. Dixon, meanwhile, was an Old Etonian Grenadier Guards officer who had got into bobsleigh in 1957 following a chat about winter sports with his cousin, John Bingham, while on an Army skiing holiday in St Moritz. He had a go, and was hooked (both cousins, by the way, were sons of peers who would go on to inherit their fathers’ titles; Dixon as the third Baron Glentoran, Bingham as the seventh Earl of Lucan; yes, that one). They were originally part of a four-man team, but things changed in 1961 when the team’s pilot, Henry Taylor, was injured in an accident at the British Grand Prix (he was also a Formula One driver, although following said crash he went into rallying instead). From then on, Nash took over the piloting duties despite his short-sightedness which required him to wear glasses or contact lenses while competing, and they started to compete together in the two-man event while also making up half of the British four-man team.

This was a changing time for bobsleigh. Thanks largely to the Italians, the bobsleighs themselves were becoming more technologically advanced and, although it was still an amateur sport, it was beginning to get more professionally organised. There was also a conscious effort on the part of the Italians to get some of the non-alpine countries more involved; then as now, friendships developed among competitors, and in particular Nash’s growing friendship with the Italian pilot, Eugenio Monti, paid dividends. “In 1963, the Italians had built a new run in Cervinia very similar to the Olympic run in Innsbruck, with three very big S-curves,” Dixon later recalled. “Tony and I were in St Moritz and they invited us over to open the run with them ... a very good start to the season.” 1963 saw the British pair come third in the World Championship at Igls; the Italians took first and second. 

At the Innsbruck Winter Olympics, Dixon and Nash – part of a British contingent that consisted of 27 men and nine women – shared a room at the Olympic Village. They spent the evening before the first day of the bobsleigh competition listening to records and drinking whisky; different times, the Sixties.

Day one saw the first two runs, after which the British pair found themselves in the lead; they had not done the fastest run – Monti and his partner Sergio Siorpaes had done that – but it was the total time over all of the runs that counted. The final two runs would be held the following day, and it looked as though everyone was going to be slightly slower as there was a fresh fall of snow over the course overnight (“we didn’t drink too much whisky that night, I can tell you,” Dixon later admitted). After their first run on the second day, disaster loomed as they discovered that a rear axle bolt had sheared off; they didn’t have a spare, and if they couldn’t find one they wouldn’t be able to do their fourth run. It looked like their Olympic effort would end there and then, but salvation appeared in the unlikely form of one of their competitors – Nash’s friend, Eugenio Monti of Italy, offered to take the bolt from his bobsleigh after he’d competed his run and give it to them.

“Eugenio was on the line about to do his run," Dixon later recalled, “but he came across and said: 'Don't worry. Send an Englishman down to meet me and you can have mine'." Monti's lending of a vital component to a serious competitor would go down in legend as one of the most selfless acts in Winter Olympic, indeed in sporting, history. However, it was not until many years later that it became known that Monti's bolt was not actually used on the British bobsleigh; after finishing his run he did indeed remove it from his own bobsleigh and send it up to the start for Dixon and Nash to use, but by the time it got there they had managed to find another one.

By this time, the snow that had fallen on the course was turning to slush and the British pair were unhappy with their final descent. Convinced that they'd blown their chances, the did what any self-respecting amateur sportsmen (and quite a few professional sportsmen for that matter) would do and went off to drown their sorrows. "We went to a hut near the finish and had a coffee and schnapps and thought, 'well played, but not well played'," recalled Dixon. "Then various people found us to say the world's press were looking for us. The race track had softened and nobody could overtake us." Over the four runs, they'd been 0.12 of a second faster than their nearest competitors, the Italian 'second' team of Sergio Zardini and Romano Bonagura. Monti and Siorpaes were third. The British pair duly switched from schapps to champagne.

That evening, there were a couple of final hurdles for them - getting interviewed by a characteristically overly-excited David Coleman, and getting into the medal presentation ceremony. As far as the latter was concerned, security was tight and they couldn't find a way in. Then they saw someone they knew - Lord Exeter, at the time the Vice-President of the International Olympic Committee (back in the 1928 summer games, he'd won gold for Great Britain in the men's 400-metre hurdles). "Don't worry, chaps," he assured them. "They can't start without us. You're getting the medals, and I'm giving them to you."

Having collected his bronze medal, Monti faced heavy criticism from the Italian press for his sportsmanship; his response was very much in keeping with his actions: "Nash didn't win because I gave him the bolt. He won because he had the fastest run." His generosity on this occasion was by no means a one-off. In the four-man event, he and his mechanics helped to fix a damaged axle on the Canadian bobsleigh; the Canadians went on to win gold in that event, with Monti and his team taking the bronze (the British four-man team, which included Nash and Dixon, came in twelfth). Monti's sportsmanship did not go unrecognised by the IOC, for in addition to his medals at the 1964 games he was also awarded the then newly-inaugurated Pierre de Coubertin Medal for those whose sportsmanship exemplifies the Olympic ideal. He was the first living person to be so honoured. 

Dixon and Nash, who like all British gold medal-winning Olympians were subsequently awarded MBEs as well, would go on to win the World Championship the following year at St Moritz. They also competed at the 1968 Winter Olympics, finishing fifth with Monti getting the gold (after four runs it was actually a dead heat between the Italians and the West Germans for first place; initially it was decided to give both teams the gold, as would later happen in 1998 and as has happened in 2018, but this was later changed, with the Italians being given first place on the grounds that they’d done the quickest single run). Eugenio Monti, who died in 2003, is now remembered not just as a true sportsman but as one of the most successful bobsleighers ever, with six Olympic medals (two of each colour) and nine World Championship wins to his name.

Sources: BBC, Wikipedia

The Lady Vanishes, or Hitchcock's take on Appeasement

An old black-and-white movie was on the telly the other day – a vintage Hitchcock film from the Thirties, made just before he moved to the States. The film in question is his thriller The Lady Vanishes, and it’s great to watch even now, some 78 years after it was released. Yes, parts of it are faintly ridiculous to modern eyes, but it’s a lot of fun that’s still, well, thrilling.

(A warning: As I’m going to discuss key plot points of said movie, you may wish to avoid the rest of this blog-post if you haven’t seen it yet. Can’t believe that I’ve just done a spoiler alert for a blog-post about a film that was made in 1938, but there you go.)

The plot, based on a long-forgotten novel, is this: A group of British tourists are stranded in the mountainous (and fictional) central European country of Bandrika – an avalanche has meant that their train is delayed. Among them is Iris (Margaret Lockwood), a pretty English girl who’s heading back home to get married; while waiting for the train in the local guest-house, she meets with two fellow-Britons – an older English lady called Miss Froy (Dame May Whitty), who she gets on well with, and a debonair musician called Gilbert (Michael Redgrave) who winds her up the wrong way. Also waiting for the train are a lawyer who doesn’t want to draw attention to himself because the woman he’s with isn’t his wife, and Charters and Caldicott, a pair of avid cricket fans who are desperate to get back to London because there’s a Test match going on and they want to see the final day’s play. As well as some misunderstandings with the guest-house staff due to their inability to talk the local language, they endeavour, with no success, to find out the latest score (these two are very much the comic Englishmen abroad). Outside, a lone violinist plays a local folk-tune and is quietly strangled.

Iris and Miss Froy adopt each other as travelling-companions for the journey home, although it’s clear to the viewer that someone’s out to get the latter – at the station, Iris receives a bump on the head from a falling pot-plant that was meant for Miss Froy. As a result, Iris passes out after tea, and she’s in for a nasty shock when she awakes as Miss Froy has vanished – and, what’s worse, everyone who’s encountered her denies having done so (cleverly, Hitchcock has them deny this for different reasons – the lawyer doesn’t want to draw attention to himself because he’s with his mistress, Charters and Caldicott think that if Iris’s talk of a missing woman is taken seriously the train will be stopped and then they’ll never get to the Test match, and the various foreigners have, well, somewhat more nefarious reasons for keeping their mouths shut). Was she hallucinating about Miss Froy? Dr Hartz, a brain surgeon who’s also on the train, thinks she might be. Only Gilbert believes her story, and they set out to look for the vanished lady.

In the goods carriage, they’re attacked by one of the foreign passengers who turns out to be a knife-wielding magician in a scene which may well have inspired part of the circus train sequence in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They then figure out that the doc is a wrong ’un who has captured Miss Froy, disguising her as a bandage-covered patient in his care. Far from being the mild-mannered governess she claimed to be, Miss Froy is actually a British secret agent who’s taking a vital message (memorised, in the coded form of a folk-tune she’d heard the late violinist playing earlier) back to the Foreign Office. Dr Hartz is of course trying to stop her – although his co-conspirator, a nun who isn’t really a nun, turns out to be English and is, therefore, appalled when she realises that she’s in a conspiracy against a fellow-Englishwoman; this, clearly, was not what she signed up for. So she switches sides and helps Iris and Gilbert.

As the train reaches the frontier, the doc realises that the pesky Brits have rescued the British spy, and he arranges with the Bandrikan (?) military to have the train uncoupled and shunted to a siding so he can recapture the now-unbandaged Miss Froy. Unfortunately for him, but hilariously for the viewer, it’s tea-time and the part of the train he’s moved to the siding includes the restaurant car, which contains all of the train’s British passengers who are (of course) taking tea. They’re not best pleased about their journey home being interrupted.

As the movie nears its climax, the train is surrounded by soldiers intent of capturing Miss Froy; the plucky Brits – Charters, Caldicott and the nun-who-isn’t-really-a-nun as well as Iris and Gilbert – realise that the only solution is to fight their way out with the two pistols they happen to have between them. The only one who disagrees is the lawyer, who thinks he can negotiate with the baddies; it doesn’t end well for him. Even though the country they’re trying to get out of is fictional, the politics of the time – this was 1938, the year of the Munich crisis when war loomed inexorably on the horizon – are inescapable (coincidentally, the film was released just over a week after Neville Chamberlain waved his piece of paper after flying home from Germany). The message is quite clear: Even though they’re out-gunned and the situation looks hopeless, the best thing the British can do is show a stiff upper lip (naturally, this is a film where, if you get shot in the hand, you calmly borrow your friend’s pocket-square to use as a makeshift bandage), crack a few jokes about the government and fight on in the hope of eventually winning through. I never thought of Alfred Hitchcock as being a critic of Appeasement, but on this evidence, he quite clearly was.

This is really superb stuff from Hitchcock – a train journey where nothing is quite what it seems (he was very good at those) leading onto an attempted kidnapping, tales of espionage and a shoot-out interspersed with some cricket banter. No wonder this was the best British film in 1938! There are some great stand-out performances although as with so many films the show is, of course, almost stolen by the comic relief. Charters and Caldicott proved so popular with audiences that they returned in various not-Hitchcock films made by the same studio like Night Train to Munich (more or less a remake of The Lady Vanishes – it even had Margaret Lockwood in it, playing a similar role). Even after the actors who played them were banned from playing characters called Charters and Caldicott (following a dispute with the studio over how big a role they should have in a movie that they ended up not starring in) they still turned up as similar, cricket-mad characters in a few films (the Ealing comedy Passport to Pimlico, for example, as well as a film called It’s Not Cricket which I now need to find because, let’s face it, there aren’t that many films about cricket).

Hitchcock himself, by the way, makes his trademark appearance in the crowd at Victoria station towards the end; it was only later that he got into the habit of appearing early on in his films in order to avoid detracting attention from the plot, as audiences used to cheer when they saw him.