by Carina Evans knows how to take a fall – but she’s never fallen like this. She loses control of her racing toboggan, flips head first into a barrier, spins and feeds down the outer wall. Her body is thrown back into the track to pinball her strong sides and when she finally stops, the crowd is screaming at her to move. A 100lb sled is chasing her on wicked blades: she curls into a ball as it slides past her.
“A hell of a smash,” is how Evans described her recovery two days later. The 46-year-old has escaped one of the Cresta Run’s most dramatic crashes of modern times without breaking a bone. Training for the Women’s Grand National, the first to be held on the famous St Moritz skeleton course for over a century, she was trying a different approach when she lost control.
“I broke out of the corner before, then I just stayed and flew out,” she says. “I had great protection and a new helmet, which I’m grateful for, but I still don’t know how I walked away.”
For more than a century, the three-quarter-mile Cresta Run, which drops 514 feet, and is rebuilt every year, was considered too dangerous for women. The St Moritz Tobogganing club’s ban on female riders, instituted in 1929, was only lifted six years ago. Evans grew up at this course – her father, Digby Willoughby, ran the club for 24 years – but until 2018 she was never allowed on its lower banks, and that was on the last day of the season, when the slushy and slow ice.
After waiting a lifetime to compete on equal terms, even Evans qualms. “Looking back, it seems ridiculous to say this, but we didn’t know if women could do it.”
Just one month after another, this season has been one of high emotion, unprecedented drama, and a barrage of women first. In January, Barbara Hosch became the first woman to wear the club’s colors when she won the Lorna Robertson Cup, a feat as remarkable as it was extraordinary: she was at her father’s funeral just 24 hours before the competition. “I can perform better,” Hosch reflects, two weeks later. “But he was good considering the circumstances.”
Her father, a Cresta rider and doctor, used to administer first aid after accidents on the track and created an X-ray composite – a skeleton with a broken neck and broken pelvis, among other gruesome injuries – that the club still uses. to warn beginners of its dangers. Banned by club rules, Hosch turned shuttlecock and represented Switzerland in two World Cups. But even as an international athlete, she had no experience of the rigors of the Cresta Run.
“It’s like skiing and cross-country skiing. Just because you’re wearing skis, it’s not the same sport,” says Hosch. “On the bob, you lie still all the way down – here you have to move and steer hard.” The fear factor is also higher. “I was never afraid of bob. But here I’m still struggling, I still don’t feel at ease, I’m nervous every time I’m up there. You can’t see where you’re going – the run pulls you in and pulls you down.”
The entire course is so extreme that riders must qualify to ride it by posting consistent fast times on the lower banks and passing a “rack test” that proves they can stop dead at speed. It usually takes multiple seasons to do it.
But even if you’re riding from a “Junction” – the halfway point where newbies start – titanium nerves are needed. This month, a group of MCC cricketers made history as the first all-female team to compete in the Inter-Club Challenge – a handicap invitational event that pits beginners against riders with years (or decades) of experience. “Standing and waiting to go down for the first time is scary,” says Amanda Pearce Higgins, “because even though you’ve been instructed, you still have no idea what to expect.
“It’s pure terror. At the end of my first run all I could think was, ‘What the hell has happened to me?'” The team took on the challenge to raise money for the MCC Foundation, whose projects support girls’ cricket in the Kingdom. United and the United Kingdom. abroad. They also wanted to break down gender barriers in the sport, which made it all the sweeter when Pearce placed Higgins fifth – out of a field of 68 – in the individual rankings.
Among those cheering them on was Bella Evans, Carina’s 18-year-old daughter, who that week was pursuing her own ambition to ride from Top. She failed her first racing test, then witnessed her mother’s dramatic crash from the control tower where she works. Two days later she achieved her goal: Bella and Carina are only the second mother-and-daughter Cresta Riders in history.
“Even the beginners are going 50mph, and they’re ten inches off the ice,” says Bella. “Oh Barr, you’re going 70mph. I live in the countryside – I rarely do that in my car.” Carina, who is proud of the young generation emerging to challenge for honors on the Run, is delighted: her main advice to her daughter is to enjoy it. “And if you don’t enjoy going fast, you won’t enjoy Cresta.”
