In more ways than one it was hard to envision a path to bobsleigh glory when Tony Nash took up the sport. One problem was that Britain had no track, and scant funding. Another was that he was “blind as a bat”.
Nash’s glasses fogged over as he put on his goggles at the beginning of each run. Experiments with a visor failed to forestall the mist and trying to sleigh without his spectacles proved virtually suicidal. The solution was contact lenses but in the Fifties and Sixties they were hard and uncomfortable. Nash decided it was worth the hassle as he set his sights on becoming an Olympic champion driver.
“Tony was as blind as a bat,” his brakeman, Robin Dixon, recalled, adding that Nash kept losing or dropping the contacts. “But I was never worried when we were on the bobsleigh. I had absolute confidence in him.”
Sturdy of frame, the balding, 5ft 7in, 14-stone Nash had strength, sharp reflexes, a calm personality and an appetite for risk. Dixon, now Lord Glentoran, his slender partner in the two-man sled, could sprint 100 yards in 10.3 seconds, helping them get off to a fast start.
Targeting gold in the 1964 Winter Olympics, Nash seized his chance to become the leading British driver when the first choice, Henry Taylor, was gravely injured while racing in the 1961 British Formula One Grand Prix at Aintree. He teamed up with Dixon and they became Britain’s top pair, also competing in the four-man event.
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The season was brief in the days before artificially refrigerated tracks but Nash kept in shape playing rugby, sailing, rowing and working long days on a farm. “You get really fit shovelling 50 tons of manure before breakfast or loading 28 trailers of hay,” he remarked. Nash and Dixon would go shooting in the autumn and agree on tactics and schedules, then drive a Land Rover to the Alps in January for training.
Long before the phrase “marginal gains” entered the sporting lexicon, Nash paid close attention to details. He visited Innsbruck on a reconnaissance mission months before the Games, scouted opponents and fine-tuned his equipment using engineering know-how gleaned from working in his uncle’s cigarette machine factory. Since warmer blades zip faster across ice, he wrapped sled runners with tea towels and warm blankets and heated them on radiators. But schnapps was as important as science.
Fraternising with rivals at courses and in bars aided the underdogs. Nash nurtured close relationships with other racers, especially the highly rated and well-funded Italians. They shared equipment and knowledge and invited the British pair to their training camp in 1963 even though it was clear they would be medal contenders.
The star Italian pair of Eugenio Monti and Sergio Siorpaes were favourites for gold in Austria. Nash and Dixon, their nerves calmed with a whisky or two before bedtime, posted the second-fastest run in the opening heat, much to their delight. “When the Brits’ splendid time was announced [Nash] bounded out of the sled, rushed up to a pretty girl he didn’t even know and kissed her,” the author Brian Belton wrote in his 2010 account of the competition, Olympic Gold Run.
That heady optimism evaporated shortly before the second heat, when they discovered that a bolt had broken on the sled’s rear axle and there was not enough time to source a replacement from the Olympic Village. Monti found out and offered to let the British team use a bolt from his sled as soon as the Italians had finished their second run. Siorpaes quickly removed the bolt and handed it to a British team member who rushed back up to the start. With the sled duly repaired, Nash and Dixon made another quick run and moved into the lead.
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Seeking to highlight the kindness of their friend, Nash told reporters about Monti’s extraordinary act of sportsmanship and credited him with saving their medal hopes. The tale passed into Olympic folklore and the Italian was awarded the inaugural Pierre de Coubertin Fair Play Trophy the following year. Nash and Dixon did not publicly admit until they spoke to Belton more than four decades later that they had not used Monti’s bolt because they had already sourced another. Monti, who died in 2003, was also unaware of the truth.
The next day the British pair slipped to second overall after a mediocre third heat. Their final run also underwhelmed, as they misjudged a bend known as the “witches’ cauldron” and the sled lost time when it bumped off the side wall. Expecting only the bronze and feeling dejected, Nash and Dixon headed to a café at the bottom of the track.
The weather came to their rescue while they sipped coffee with schnapps. As they drank they were interrupted by journalists who urged them to return and watch the closing stages. The rising temperature softened and slowed the track for the fourth runs of the two Italian teams. They posted sluggish times and Dixon and Nash took gold by 0.12 seconds.
Celebratory fizz flowed at the team hotel; Nash claimed that the British contingent drank 64 bottles of champagne. The driver, who took four baths over the course of the day in an attempt to sober up, was unsurprisingly effervescent when interviewed by the BBC presenter David Coleman that evening. The broadcast over, Coleman whipped out a bottle of whisky and a glass for Nash from under the studio’s table.
The medal ceremony was unexpectedly stressful: the winners could not find the right way into the stadium. “The Austrians had policemen everywhere but they were very Germanic and uncooperative,” Nash told the BBC. “We saw another chap we knew [the Marquess of Exeter] milling about and said to him, ‘Excuse me, sir, where do we get in?’ He said, ‘Don’t worry chaps, they can’t start without us. You’re getting the medals and I’m giving them to you’.”
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Back at home in Little Missenden, Buckinghamshire, Nash was honoured with a party in the village hall.
It was Britain’s first medal at a winter Olympics since 1952; the next did not arrive until 1976. Joy was not unconfined, however. Nash noted that after spending weeks overseas for training and competition he was “£500 out of pocket” (about £11,000 today) because of meagre financial support from the British Olympic Association.
Anthony James Dillon Nash was born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, in 1936, to James and Gladys (née Dillon Bell). His father ran breweries; his grandfather, Francis Bell, was briefly prime minister of New Zealand in 1925.
Nash excelled in heavyweight boxing at Harrow then entered the army for his National Service. On his return he worked in the family brewery. After it was sold he went to work for his uncle, who had a factory near High Wycombe that made light machinery. He was introduced to bobsleigh aged 19 when he visited St Moritz, Switzerland, on leave while stationed in West Germany. The teenager was hooked, seduced by the adrenalin rush and the alcoholfuelled camaraderie of the cosmopolitan crowd. “If you needed someone for a four-man bob in those days you got him pretty drunk the night beforehand, then the next day you’d insist that he’d given his word to go on the sled — cannon fodder,” Nash told Belton.
Noting Nash’s history of speed-related car crashes, his father offered to bankroll his son’s alpine pursuits on the condition that he abandon any motor-racing ambitions, though bobsleigh, its participants sliding down sinuous icy inclines at 80mph, was hardly any safer. Sergio Zardini, an Italian who won the silver medal in the two-man event in 1964, was killed at Lake Placid two years later when he lost control on a turn and his head was crushed by a retaining wall.
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Dixon, an Old Etonian officer in the Grenadier Guards who was in St Moritz on a ski trip in 1957, had never even seen a bobsleigh before he was recruited to the British squad over breakfast in his hotel by a cousin, Richard John Bingham, better known as Lord Lucan.
In 1966 Nash married Sue, an international skier he met at a dance in Dorking, Surrey. The union ended in divorce. He remarried three years later, in 1992, to Pam, a dressage competitor and former British Airways flight attendant. She survives him along with two children from his first marriage, James, who is self-employed, and Annabel, an equestrian event organiser and former international luge racer.
Strange but true, in 1965 Nash took the equally short-sighted John Lennon for a bobsleigh ride, the two having bumped into one another in St Moritz and fallen into conversation about their respective careers.
That year Dixon and Nash won gold in the world championships in the Swiss resort, adding to their bronze at Innsbruck in the 1963 event. They also came third in Cortina in 1966. When they retired after the 1968 Olympics they were each appointed MBE.
Nash moved to Devon, where he owned a timber yard in the Tiverton area and became a stamp collector and dealer. The inability of subsequent generations of British bobsleighers to equal his success only burnished his legend.
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“A few years ago I got a postcard from the organisers of a bobsleighing event in Canada,” he told Belton. “It was addressed to ‘Tony Nash, Olympic Gold Medallist, England’, and it got to me!”
Tony Nash MBE, bobsleigh champion, was born on March 18, 1936. He died in his sleep on March 17, 2022, aged 85