Weather: Fair; Track: Icy

He gave up bobsledding six years ago. Then big, high-strung Bill Linney got the itch again and vowed he would become U.S. bobsled champion. An engineer by trade, he went about it with an engineer's eye for detail.

With his brother Bob, he built his own 507-lb. sled in a Republic Steel foundry --the only bobsled with all-steel runners, steel body and shock absorbers. He took a leave from his engineering job, spent weeks practicing. One week he thundered down Lake Placid's twisting mile of ice 31 times. He had cameras set up at each turn, at night studied the movies like a football coach looking for faults. The night before the A.A.U. four-man bobsled championship last week, he was at it until 10 p.m., walking the course, inspecting every angle, every little bump.

Driver Bill Linney, his two bobbers and his brakeman, could have run it with their eyes closed. His brakeman's carefully practiced pushoff (25% of a bobsled race) gave Linney's team a valuable one-tenth second. They rounded hairpin Shady Corner at approximately 57 m.p.h., zoomed around Zig Zag's treacherous S curve. (A General Electric eye timer clocked them doing 118 m.p.h. at the finish line.) Linney's final four-heat time--4:25.96--was 1.66 seconds short of the course record he set two weeks ago, but an impressive five seconds ahead of his chief rival, ex-Marine Jim Bickford, the prewar champ.

Nobody had come close to Linney's record all winter; he had won all but one race at Lake Placid. Some of those who tried, on too little practice, had landed in the hospital. The course, because of unusual weather, was icy and fast. One sled had failed to make Shady Corner, two had catapulted into space at Zig Zag (where the 1932 German Olympic team met disaster) and sent the bobbers to the hospital. In bobsledding, attention to detail is not only prizewinning but healthy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.