"Hoch, Hoch, Hoch!"

As might be expected, the German bobsled team had everything worked out to a businesslike routine. At the starting bell, the driver had settled into place. The three other bobbers worked their sled back and forth along the ice to settle its runners into a groove. "Ein, swei, drei," they counted. Then the tail-end brakemen gave a great heave and grunted, "Auf geht's!" Pushing like mad, the bobbers galloped down the slick chute of the St. Moritz Bob-Bahn shouting, "Hoch, hoch, hoch!" Just before their sled hit the first curve they tumbled into their seats--off and running in the World Four-Man Bobsledding Championship.

A team of U.S. Air Force bobbers used a jivier rhythm: "O.K. now, no sweat, one! Let's do it easy, two! This is the big one! Three! Hit it!"

A brash British team, togged out in a wild assortment of jumpers and striped mufflers, did their best to act like casual beginners. "Now see here," said one bobber to another as they dashed down the chute, "do you jump in first, or do I?"

However they started, every one of the 21 teams from seven nations dropped down the same 1,750-yd. slide last week. They whisked through the same series of neck-snapping, bowl-banked curves, navigated the hairpin turn called Sunny Corner, swooped through the Horseshoe, rolled into "Shamrock" and "Devil's Dyke," slithered and bounced past the checkpoint called Tree, turned right to swing beneath a railway bridge and shot toward the finish line at better than 70 miles an hour. However their techniques varied, every team at St. Moritz had one thing more in common: they all rode sleds built by the defending bobsled champion, Switzerland's Fritz Feierabend, 47.

Older than international bobsledding itself, Feierabend sleds have been bobbing down the chutes for more than 50 years. First built by Fritz's father, Carl, a peppery little (110 Ib.) character who took his last bobsled ride ten years ago at the age of 68, the sleds are no more than a flexible framework of tubular steel mounted on two sets of strong steel runners. Just about the only way they differ is in the steering apparatus. Most drivers prefer a wheel. Ham-handed Fritz Feierabend uses short ropes hooked directly to the steering runners. "With ropes I can feel the ice," he explains. "I get much more sensitivity than with a wheel."

What a rope driver gains in sensitivity, he sometimes loses in control. But Feierabend had no trouble keeping his sled on course; he bobbed his four final runs in a total time of five minutes, 10.55 seconds. U.S. Bobber Lloyd Johnson, 40, the 1953 champion, had less luck. Experimenting with rope guides earlier this month at Garmisch, he had been flipped on his head and suffered a broken collar bone. At St. Moritz, the broken bone held rigid in a splint, Johnson could not hold his sled on the chute. It climbed the wall of Sunny Corner, tossed him and his teammates out of the running.

The champion's real competition came from one of his countrymen. Whistling downhill at a splendid clip, Franz Kapus, 45, a Zurich flour-mill mechanic, was clocked in five minutes. 10.52 seconds. Fritz Feierabend had lost his title to a Feierabend sled by a fleeting three hundredths of a second.

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