Three quarters of a mile of natural ice at St Moritz, ridden face down at eighty miles an hour
The Cresta Run is a natural ice course at St Moritz, owned and operated by the St Moritz Tobogganing Club, which British officers founded in 1885. It descends a steep ravine towards Celerina, and it is not a permanent structure: the whole course is rebuilt from packed ice and banked earth at the start of every winter and melts at the end of it.
Riders go head first on a skeleton sled. Average speed is above fifty miles an hour, and an experienced rider leaving the course from Top exits at more than eighty. The head of the run sits beneath the remains of a twelfth-century church demolished in 1890, still known as the Leaning Tower.
The modern Cresta is not shared with the bobsleigh, and it is not an Olympic venue in any current sense — though the track carried the skeleton event at both the 1928 and 1948 Winter Olympics, the only two Games to include the discipline until 2002.
There are two entrances. Junction, next to the clubhouse, sits about a third of the way down and is where every rider starts. Top is earned. The club also has a history it is now open about: women were excluded from the course from 1929 until December 2018, on reasoning that does not survive daylight.
The sled is a steel skeleton with no brakes and no steering in any conventional sense. Direction comes from shifting weight and from rakes on the toes of the boots, dragged into the ice to slow a corner. The rider lies face down with their chin a hand’s width above a surface moving at eighty miles an hour, which is the detail that decides whether someone wants to do it at all.
Protection is a helmet, elbow and knee pads and a set of rakes. The corners have names that describe what they do — Church Leap, Battledore, Shuttlecock — and Shuttlecock is where most riders leave the track, into a bank of straw, which the club treats as an initiation rather than a failure. There is a club tie for it.
Tell us which winter you are thinking of and we will arrange the run and the week around it
The run occupies twenty minutes of a day and the rest of it belongs to the valley. St Moritz sits at 1,800 metres with two separate ski areas, a lake that freezes hard enough to carry events and a hotel scene that has been doing this since Johannes Badrutt talked his first English guests into spending a winter here in the 1860s.
January and February are the season, which is also when the lake holds Snow Polo, The Ice and White Turf. A week built around any one of them can take in the Cresta Run on a morning, and most of our members treat the Engadin winter as a season rather than a single date.
At St Moritz in the Engadin valley, running down a ravine towards Celerina.
Yes. The St Moritz Tobogganing Club takes a limited number of visiting riders each season, arranged through the club.
Above fifty miles an hour on average, and more than eighty at the finish for an experienced rider starting from Top.
Junction is beside the clubhouse, about a third of the way down, and is where all riders start. Top is the full course and is ridden only once the club permits it.
Through the winter season. The course is built from natural ice each year and melts in spring.
A steel skeleton sled with no brakes, ridden face down. Direction comes from body weight and from rakes on the boots. Protection is a helmet with elbow and knee pads.
The corner where most riders leave the course, into straw bales. The club marks it with a tie rather than treating it as a failure.
It is ridden head first at eighty miles an hour on natural ice. The club manages it carefully and starts everyone at Junction, but nobody should be under the impression that it is a fairground ride.
