Word: feierabend
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...right to swing beneath a railway bridge and shot toward the finish line at better than 70 miles an hour. However their techniques varied, every team at St. Moritz had one thing more in common: they all rode sleds built by the defending bobsled champion, Switzerland's Fritz Feierabend...
Older than international bobsledding itself, Feierabend sleds have been bobbing down the chutes for more than 50 years. First built by Fritz's father, Carl, a peppery little (110 Ib.) character who took his last bobsled ride ten years ago at the age of 68, the sleds are no more than a flexible framework of tubular steel mounted on two sets of strong steel runners. Just about the only way they differ is in the steering apparatus. Most drivers prefer a wheel. Ham-handed Fritz Feierabend uses short ropes hooked directly to the steering runners. "With ropes...
What a rope driver gains in sensitivity, he sometimes loses in control. But Feierabend had no trouble keeping his sled on course; he bobbed his four final runs in a total time of five minutes, 10.55 seconds. U.S. Bobber Lloyd Johnson, 40, the 1953 champion, had less luck. Experimenting with rope guides earlier this month at Garmisch, he had been flipped on his head and suffered a broken collar bone. At St. Moritz, the broken bone held rigid in a splint, Johnson could not hold his sled on the chute. It climbed the wall of Sunny Corner, tossed...
...champion's real competition came from one of his countrymen. Whistling downhill at a splendid clip, Franz Kapus, 45, a Zurich flour-mill mechanic, was clocked in five minutes. 10.52 seconds. Fritz Feierabend had lost his title to a Feierabend sled by a fleeting three hundredths of a second...
With something to shoot at, the other bobbers went after Feierabend with a vengeance in the second heat. The proud Swiss had an answer for them when his turn came: he broke the record again with a clocking of 1: 18.07, which left him a full three seconds ahead of the runner-up, German Hans Rosch. "It's all over," conceded one German official. "All he has to do is appear here tomorrow, coast along at a conservative 1: 20, and we toast the name of Feierabend again." Next day, running almost as fast...