Two Men Against The World

St. Moritz

On the eve of the 1955 World Bobsled Championships here Dick Severino, captain and driver of the U.S. first team, was asked who he thought was going to win. Without hesitation he named the Swiss. "Taking on the old Swiss pros at St. Moritz is roughly equivalent to playing the Yanks in Yankee Stadium," he said.

Captain Severino had the situation precisely analyzed. The championships last weekend turned into a personal duel between two great Swiss drivers, Franz Kapus and Fritz Feierabend, with the 11 visiting crews fighting it out for third place.

Kapus and Feierabend represented the expert elite in 1955's main event of this dangerous and breath-taking pastime. In the end it was Kapus, a big, phlegmatic man with the nerves of a block of ice, who won, beating Feierabend by exactly three one-hundredths of a second after four runs down the one-mile track. But Kapus didn't get his win until he'd been through one of the most exciting, slam-bang, hell-for-leather battles in the history of winter sports.

Fritz Feierabend, a thin fellow with enormously powerful hands and back muscles like iron bands, is now 47, and this was his 23rd (counting two- and four-man events) championship. He has never finished worse than fourth and six times he's won. He was four-man champion at Cortina in 1939, at St. Moritz in 1947 and again at Cortina last year. He won the two-man event at St. Moritz in 1947, at Cortina in 1950 and again here at St. Moritz last week. He rode his first bobsled 37 years ago. His father, Carl Feierabend, a tiny little man now 78, was Swiss champion for years, drove his last race when he was 67. The Feierabends, father and son, in one sense couldn't lose at St. Moritz this weekend because no matter who won he would be driving a Feierabend sled. Carl started making bobsleds half a century ago. Since the 1932 Olympics, the Feierabend shop in Engelberg, near Lucerne, has had a virtual monopoly in championship sleds. Every one of the 13 sleds that started here was a Feierabend, each representing $1,400 in the family bank account. The Feierabends also make plumbing fixtures in their small shop.

Franz Kapus is also a mechanic. Now 45, he works in a Zurich flour mill when not careening around ice banks at 70 mph. Before Sunday he was known as one of the best drivers in the business but always seemed to miss. A 10-year veteran, Kapus was fifth in the 1948 Olympics, Swiss champion in 1949 and 1955, third at Cortina in 1950, fourth in the 1952 Olympics. Last year at Cortina was supposed to have been Kapus' year. He had a beautifully drilled team and a fine sled, one of the best the Feierabends had ever turned out. But in practice he went over a curve and was so badly injured he had to withdraw. Fritz Feierabend took over his undamaged sled and crew and won. It was a bitter experience for Kapus, who spent the next 12 months brooding and planning.

Feierabend and Kapus, who are coolly polite to each other, came to St. Moritz playing for keeps. Both men knew the beautiful run intimately. It's the kind of run which puts a premium on precise driving. It's not so fast as Cortina, Oslo or Lake Placid but its terrifying Horse Shoe Curve, one of the tightest in the business, can baffle the most experienced driver. Only 50 feet from entrance to exit, it whips a sled (weighing 507 pounds and carrying a crew and ballast weighing another 880 pounds), zipping along at about 65 miles an hour, around a full 180�. If you want to know why there is a sign reading "Insurance against accidents can be contracted here" at the start of the St. Moritz run, go watch a bob slam through Horse Shoe like an express train hitting a tunnel.

Switzerland's two old pros were at each other immediately in the first two heats run off Saturday afternoon. Feierabend opened with a run of one minute, 18 and one-tenth seconds. Kapus replied with a 1:18.17 descent. Kapus' second run was 1:18.29 and Feierabend, driving in the growing darkness, came home in 1:18.11 on his second run, during which his sled rammed into an ice hole on Horse Shoe and ruined the front-runner assembly and the housing of the left rear runner.

Saturday night Feierabend led by one quarter of a second, but his sled was in no condition to continue. The U.S. Air Force, in a fine piece of sportsmanship, stepped up and loaned Feierabend the front assembly and rear housings from its No. 2 sled. Saturday night, as Feierabend nursed a terrible headache brought on by the jolt, Kapus and his tightly knit crew (a 28-year-old Zurich advertising copy writer, a 28-year-old Montreux policeman and a 39-year-old butcher who used to be Switzerland's wrestling champion) talked it over. Horse Shoe was bad. They would have to ride high enough to miss the soft spot that nearly got Feierabend. Maintenance crews worked through the night getting Horse Shoe and the rest of the run in shape for Sunday morning.

Kapus ran first in the third heat. Crowds at the start and lining the run gasped when his time was announced: 1:16.76! This was a quarter of a second over the track record (held jointly by the U.S.'s Donna Fox and Jack Heaton, who both did 1:16.5 in 1937), set in the days when there was no weight limit on sleds and crews.