wn, which seems to have been very annoying for the townspeople and great fun for the tourists.
“Of all the varied kinds of sport which men in their incessant search after amusement have discovered, those which have taken the most lasting hold, and attained the greatest perfection, appear to be the various forms of rapid motion, upon earth or water, in which one man’s strength or skill can be tested against another’s,” writes Theodore Andrea Cook in the other 1894 book, Notes on Tobogganing at St. Moritz. St. Moritz is probably the birthplace of the lineage that gave us luge. According to some accounts, it was in Davos that toboggan races had been held to the great entertainment of tourists in the early 1880s. Hotel operators in nearby St. Moritz took notice, and according to the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club, in the winter of 1884 through 1885, five guests at the Kulm Hotel formed an “outdoor amusements committee,” and built a sled-racing course to compete with Davos.
This course was known as the Cresta Run. As a matter of fact, it still is. The English private-school vibe is obvious in the names within this curvy downhill track. Features of the course had names like Shuttlecock, the Battledore, and the Terrace. The Cresta Run was a phenomenal success. Every season, in the early years, four men would link arms and walk through the deep, powdery snow along a predetermined path. Then they’d go back, stomp the snow flat, craft tall banks astride the curves, and clear rubble out of the way. Initially the competitors rode what they called “Swiss” sleds, with wooden runners, on which the rider sits comfortably upright. They dutifully recorded times, awarded prizes, and probably got very drunk.
But soon there was a desire to go faster, and faster still. Here’s where we get into some heavily disputed stuff. The sleds almost immediately began to evolve, with metal runners being the biggest improvement. There is no apparent consensus about who actually created or introduced metal runners, metal frames, movable seats, different steering mechanisms, and all the other improvements. The English writers from 1894 do acknowledge that some Americans had brought a metal-runner sled, which became known as the “America,” but the names of those Americans are not always the same. This is also right around the time of the invention of the Flexible Flyer sled in Philadelphia, so it seems clear that the United States and its wealthy tourists were involved in the speed improvements.
One of the authors, Gibson, was sort of scornful of the New World sledders, despite their technological skill and the fact that the word “toboggan” came from natives of North America. “It is only fair to add,” he writes, “that I have met Canadians whose idea of real tobogganing was to start from the top of any convenient mountain and slide forthwith to the bottom, if Providence were kind enough not to stop progress on the way.”
The Cresta Run was initially a sledding run, but it became so popular that it soon changed. Cook writes: “Machines going at an ever-increasing rapidity were found to wear away the banks too fast; little by little the run became not merely iced but actual ice.” And that meant more speed and consistency. Soon all sled runs were constructed of ice, which was celebrated by speed junkies, and mourned by those who noted that a hilarious spill into pillowy snow is more fun than a crash on unforgiving ice.
All sorts of sled-type sports were created in these resort towns. Skeleton, which is essentially head-first luge, was just one possible way of riding a toboggan at the Cresta Run: Some sat upright, some weirdly lay on their sides, and some led with their heads. Bobsled, or bobsleigh, came about when one competitor showed up with two regular sleds hammered together to make a super-sled. Skeleton, bobsled, and luge evolved, within a few years, into separate disciplines.
The sport gained further popularity, as rich men (and some women) from all over Europe, North America, and even Australia began showing up at St. Moritz, Davos, and what became a host of 