Emma John’s feature on cricket and the Cresta Run originally appeared in the 2025 edition of the Wisden Almanack.
The MCC women are padding up on the benches in the changing-rooms. They’re joking quietly, but the humour is forced and the air is strained and it’s obvious they’ve never faced anything like this before. Good news is, it’ll be over by lunch.
Lucy is first out, chasing it wide, missing the line. A soft exit. The others hang around longer, but they’re all back in the clubhouse within the quarter-hour. The same blank look of the shell-shocked. What just happened? It’s a long walk back, and they sit at the bar comparing bruises and scare stories, while the adrenalin leaks from them in a stream of instant reminiscence.
They’re experienced cricketers, but this isn’t cricket. They’ve swapped 22 yards of compacted grass for 974 yards of carved ice. And it’s not a white ball that’s travelling at 60mph, it’s their white-helmeted heads, hovering just seven inches above a track that drops, drops, drops beneath them, for 332ft. The Lord’s slope has nothing on this.
In February 2024, the four MCC women are taking on the Cresta Run, the first all-female team to compete in the inter-club tournament. They’re here because it’s never been done before. And because the St Moritz Tobogganing Club are almost the only sporting organisation in the world who have been more resistant to women than their own. It is only five years since the SMTC overturned a 90-year ban on women riders, the vote squeaking past the required two-thirds majority. Not many things can make MCC look progressive, but four of their women taking on a field of 62 men at a famously daredevil pursuit (as a fundraiser for girls’ cricket programmes) does just that. They are eager to check their practice times against the famous cricketers to have done the Cresta. David Gower’s debut run came in at 66.98 – Izzy, fastest of the four, has beaten that already. The comparative record is printed out for posterity.
Each March, Izzy attends St Moritz’s Cricket on Ice tournament, held on the lake in south-east Switzerland, and has ached for the chance to throw herself down the mountain. “It’s not about competing against the men,” she says. “It’s about competing with them.” She pauses. “But also against them.”
Izzy has a family connection with the run. A relative, Vivien Wrangham, was the last woman to ride the course before they were banned. So petite that she needed 30kg of lead strapped to her toboggan, Wrangham had completed the run several times before a couple of falls necessitated a medical check. “I knew this would happen sooner or later,” said the doctor, and shortly afterwards the club announced that the health risks to women would exclude them from participating. Experts had apparently assured the committee that lying face down on a toboggan could trigger breast cancer.
Practice ends at 1pm, when the ice becomes too soft for the heavy steel runners, and the riders repair to the terrace of the Kulm Hotel. The SMTC were founded here, and the Sunny Bar has become their social headquarters, its double-height walls stacked with black-and-white and sepia photography, its shelves gleaming with trophies. The MCC women arrive, and gasp with recognition. SMTC colours are everywhere, from the menus and the curtains to the daring stripe that runs across the baby grand in the corner. Members call them claret and gold, but they look suspiciously like egg and bacon.
Whether or not the SMTC borrowed the MCC colours, the Cresta Run’s association with cricket goes back a long way. To the start, in fact. The tobogganing craze that took off in Switzerland in the second half of the 19th century owed much to the sporting obsession the British were exporting across the globe, while the design of the course was the work of a first-class cricketer.
George Robertson, the son of a cattle farmer, was born in 1842 in Tasmania, but educated at Rugby and Oxford. Over six feet tall, he was a natural athlete, and his hitting all round the wicket drew admirers, particularly his stylish cover-drive. He was 23 when he played for Scotland in their official first match, a two-day game against Surrey at The Oval; he made a duck. That wasn’t the end of Robertson’s involvement. Seventeen behind on first innings, Scotland were 129-7 in their second when he joined fellow Tasmanian William Tennent. They added 90, with Robertson’s 38 proving the second-best score. Another Rugby man, David Buchanan, then took 6-25, as Surrey collapsed to 48 all out. Scotland won by 172 runs.
After gaining his Blue, Robertson returned to Australia, moving to Victoria and starting a family. When WG Grace brought an England team in 1873/74, Robertson captained the Victoria XVIII who met them off the ship from Ceylon, and defeated them by an innings in their Boxing Day game in front of a crowd of 40,000. They were the first colonial side to best an English XI but, perhaps more significantly, they were the first to respond to Grace’s many mitherings by chatting back: Robertson was there at the birth of Aussie sledging – appropriately, you might think, given what lay in store.
He represented Victoria in a number of fixtures, and his fielding was considered excellent, with a quick arm from cover or long leg. But a decade later he was struggling with his health, probably tuberculosis. He travelled to Switzerland for a rest cure, where physicians liked to prescribe light exercise; tobogganing was a popular option. For a man as competitive as Robertson, it soon became more serious than the doctors intended.
In 1883, he was part of a small group who established the first international toboggan race in Davos. He came in joint-first with the local postman (to whom he cheerfully donated his share of the prize money). A year later, visiting St Moritz with his wife, he was disappointed there was no suitable road to convert into a downhill run. So he joined the “outdoor amusements committee” at the Kulm Hotel, and started building one.
The “breakneck” course he mapped out followed a steep footpath linking the church of St Moritz with the village of Cresta, 600ft below. It curved, swung and bobbled. A couple of genuine jumps prompted him to name the inaugural race the Grand National, a title still in use. Danger was part of the deal: one of the first competitors was knocked unconscious when he hit a wooden fence post on the way down.
Since then, the run has been rebuilt from scratch every year, while evolving into one of the most terrifying things you can do, short of being fired out of a cannon into a cage of tigers. One current Cresta rider is a fighter pilot who loves the sport because it gives him a rush he can’t get from his day job. The full three-quarters of a mile run from Top is so dangerous it is open only to those who have achieved constantly fast times from Junction, the lower start point – and that usually takes at least a couple of seasons.
The inter-club tournament in which the MCC quartet are competing is a time trial from Junction, with a handicap system to help level the field across a range of entrants from the experienced to the novice. On race day, the women cluster by a window, eyeing the ice. Lucy is wearing body armour that makes her look like a Ninja Turtle. Izzy is sharing last night’s anxiety dream, in which she overslept and missed her start time. They’re sitting on a bench with the team from the Cavalry and Guards, three of whom are also novices.
One is a descendant of Vernon Royle, a Test cricketer on Lord Harris’s 1878/79 tour of Australia, and known as a fearsome cover point. Royle, later a reverend, is one of the reasons Hamish is here. “Supposedly he did the Cresta when he came to St Moritz in the late 1880s,” he says. “So it’s become a bit of a family tradition.”
Teams are disqualified if two or more riders fall at the infamous Shuttlecock bend. The shallow pan is designed to spit out anyone who has lost control, and most find themselves deposited in its straw-strewn snow bank at some stage of their career. But few realise it was named after the petticoated women of the 19th century, who would disappear as if launched across a badminton court. One by one, the MCC women head down to the ice. There’s no chance to cheat, as Allan Lamb once did, by heating up his runners to make them slide faster. A local priest who serves as the club chaplain has also shown up, “for emergencies”. He looks old enough to have been here back in the early 1990s, when Simon Hughes broke his collarbone barely 15 seconds into his first attempt. The injury cost him half a season and, ultimately, his Middlesex contract; Hughes maintains the experience was “far more terrifying than facing Malcolm Marshall or Allan Donald”.
Izzy crashes out on her first run. Cora puts in a personal-best, prompting the commentator to declare it her “best knock yet”, while Amanda’s handicapped times are so good “Soul Limbo” is played on the PA system. A second fall scratches them from the team competition, but Amanda comes fifth out of 68 in the individual rankings. It raises the loudest cheer at the prize-giving.
George Robertson would, by the way, be proud. Annie, his wife, competed on the Cresta several times and, five years after his death from throat cancer in 1895, she brought their 19-year-old daughter, Lorna, to St Moritz. Fearlessly adopting the headfirst skeleton position in an ankle-length skirt and long gauntlet gloves, she won club colours in her first, mixed-gender race. She took part in multiple Grand Nationals, and won the Ladies title every time. In 2019, a women’s event was inaugurated in her honour: the Lorna Robertson Cup.
Over dinner, meanwhile, the MCC women are addressing the kinks in their technique. Three days ago, they were at the start line, wishing they were anywhere else, but that’s the Cresta for you: dopamine 1, terror 0. They’re already booking their accommodation for next year, already strategising about their handicaps. Already picturing the moment they beat the guys.
Emma John is a sportswriter for The Guardian and the author of Following On: A Memoir of Teenage Obsession and Terrible Cricket.
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