Just Short of Disaster

From all the things sportswriters say about him, Eugenio Monti sounds somewhat bigger than life. He is forever being called "incredible," "dynamite," "the bomb," and "the master." He has "icy blue eyes," "iron hands," and he has survived "countless brushes with death." Actually, in his only major accident so far, in 1958, he got off with a badly broken nose. The real Eugenio Monti is a short, slight, 38-year-old Italian who prefers Coca-Cola to Chianti, goes to bed at 9, earns his living as a ski-lift operator, and hasn't any idea how he happens to be the world's best bobsledder. "I cannot explain it," he says. "I can only do it."

Monti is a bobber mostly by mischance. Skiing was his game until he ripped the ligaments in both knees practicing for the 1952 Olympics; he tried his hand briefly at auto racing (too expensive) before turning to bobsledding at the late age of 25. With speeds up to 70 m.p.h. on the straightaways, and G forces up to six times gravity on the turns, bobbing is one of the world's most exacting sports. The trick is to stay just short of disaster, taking the steeply banked turns as high as possible (so as to pick up speed on the way down), threading an absolutely straight course through the narrow straightaways, where a momentary miscalculation will slam the sled into a solid wall of ice.

Like a Jockey. Monti scored the use of brakes ("They are only good for stopping at the end") or a steering wheel (he preferred to use reins, like a jockey), told his crewmen to "sit quiet and close your eyes if you want." He won six two-man world championships, plus two world titles in four-man sleds. The streak came to an end at the 1964 Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, when Britain's Tony Nash won the two-man race in a damaged sled that Monti had helped repair. Monti decided to retire to his ski lifts at Cortina d'Ampezzo in the Dolomites.

Then the International Bobsledding and Tobogganing Federation chose Cortina's twisting (twelve curves) Ronco run as the site for last week's 1966 championships. Monti could not bear the thought of standing around as a spectator while Nash or somebody else won the race on his own home course. Besides, Brakeman Sergio Siorpaes had designed a faster, more maneuverable sled with motorcycle shock absorbers and a central pivot that permitted both sets of runners to bank independently on curves. "I have never felt more like racing," said Monti after testing the sled. Even a crash failed to dampen his enthusiasm: during practice last month, he was clattering through Cortina's Curva di Arrive at 65 m.p.h. when the new sled hit a hidden crevice and stopped dead. Brakeman Siorpaes was hurled clear and knocked cold. Monti smacked into the front of the bob, cracking a rib and opening a jagged three-inch cut on his forehead.

In a Corset. For last week's world championship race, doctors taped Monti's ribs, fitted him out with an elastic corset, shot him full of novocain. The pain was still so great that he nearly blacked out on the curves. But he steered his bright red sled through four absolutely perfect one-mile runs--one of them in 1 min. 16.36 sec., only .01 sec. off the course record. The two-man race was all one man. Beating fellow Italian Gianfranco Gaspari by 21 seconds (and third-place Nash by more than five seconds), Monti had his ninth world championship.

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