In the French Alps

The Germans got back into top-rung international competition, for the first time since World War II, in the two-man world bobsled championships. But not without a preliminary hassle.

L'Alpe-d'Huez, scene of the championships, has a fine bobsled course; it also has vivid memories of 1944, when German occupation troops tricked French resistance groups into the open and mowed them down. It took a French Foreign Office check of the records--and the discovery that none of the German bobsledders ever served near L'Alpe-d'Huez--to reconcile French opinion. Even then, the German team decided not to fly the German flag from their hotel, not to wear insignia.

The Germans made up for this anonymity on the course. In four runs down the steep route (which drops 500 feet in less than a mile), they not only won the 1951 world title, but set a new course record: 1:15.9. Runners-up: the Americans and the Swiss.

"Wait until they hear about this in Munich!" said Lorenz Nieberl, brakeman of the German bob. "Too bad the German flag isn't here," said Driver Andreas Ostler.

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