James Bond's Winter Olympics

During the 2012 London Olympics, I wondered which sports James Bond might have been tempted to watch after parachuting into the stadium. Based on what we know from the books and Fleming’s past, the list was a long one: judo, boxing, athletics (track and field), shooting, and swimming. James Bond is, of course, also a winter sportsman, and I imagine that he would be looking forward to catching up on some of the television coverage of the Winter Olympics in Sochi. Which sports would he be keen to watch, and which ones would he avoid?

Given his interest in skiing, James Bond is likely to enjoy the downhill events. Bond is no mean skier himself. We know from the novel On Her Majesty's Secret Service that he enjoyed some success on the slopes in Austria as a teenager at the Hannes Schneider School and the Kandahar Ski Club, winning his Golden K badge for achieving a good standard in ski racing and possibly entering the famous Arlberg-Kandahar Challenge Cup. On film, Bond has been a frequent visitor to the slopes (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, A View To A Kill, The Living Daylights, and The World Is Not Enough). But while Bond would doubtless admire the racers at Sochi, he might think wryly, “Yes, very good, but try doing it when someone's behind you on skis at 40 miles per hour trying to put a bullet in your back.”

Not all skiing events, though, are likely to hold as much appeal for Bond. Bond would be forgiven for wanted to avoid the biathlon. Last time he watched the event (For Your Eyes Only), one of the competitors try to kill him. Still, his escape and subsequent extended pursuit led to Bond performing a rather nice 360 twist that might have earned some high marks from the judges of the freestyle skiing.

And while Bond's thinking of events he might like to avoid, he might also prefer to give the ice hockey a miss. He was knocked about a bit last time he entered the arena (For Your Eyes Only), although he did manage to score three goals, albeit by unconventional means.

Then there's the ski jumping. Bond doesn't have a bad record in this event. When he attempted his jump in Cortina (For Your Eyes Only), he appeared to reach close to K or critical point, which is considered par. His distance wouldn't have won him any medals, but it's respectable nonetheless. 


 
When it comes to figure skating, Bond is strictly an observer. He professes some knowledge of figure skating, having seen Olympic champion Jacoba Brink skate many times (For Your Eyes Only), but he doesn't seem to skate himself. At both occasions where he's been at an ice rink, he's been without skates.

It's possible that James Bond would want to follow the snowboarding events. Indeed, it could be claimed that James Bond was a pioneer of snowboarding, particularly freestyle. Though snowboarding emerged in the late 1960s, it became an Olympic event as recently as 1998, thirteen years after Bond had demonstrated his freestyle skills (off and on the snow) in Siberia (A View To A Kill). His equipment then was rudimentary, and naturally Bond might be interested to see how the sport has developed, though will no doubt be thankful that bad Beach Boys' covers have not become an essential part of the sport's culture.


 
I'm not sure whether Bond would be keen on seeing the curling. He attempts the sport at Piz Gloria (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), but it’s a clumsy effort, Mr Bond, as he himself admits. Bond might be happy to not have to take part in the event himself, though perhaps would enjoy seeing the experts at work.

When it comes to the bobsleigh, James Bond has considerable experience, and would be keen to watch all the action. He piloted a two-man bobsleigh at Murren, Switzerland, and on skis followed a four-man crew in Italy (On Her Majesty's Secret Service and For Your Eyes Only). And he knows just what the competitors in the skeleton event will be feeling. Ian Fleming reveals in On Her Majesty's Secret Service that Bond attempted the Cresta Run and experienced sixty seconds of naked fear.

All in all, James Bond will probably be glued to the television over the next two weeks following all the Winter Olympic action. He might, however, be a little disappointed that the games are in Russia (too many bad memories), and wish that they – and he – were in Austria instead.

More on James Bond's Golden K

A day after posting my thoughts on the origins of James Bond's 'golden K', which he won as a teenager at the Hannes Schneider ski school (OHMSS, Chapter 12), I came across Arnold Lunn's book, The Story of Ski-ing (Eyre and Spottiswood, 1952). In it, I found this:

'Miss B E M Carroll was a consistently successful performer and, though she never won the A-K [Arlberg-Kandahar Challenge Cup], she is one of the three British racers who hold the Gold A-K badge, awarded to those who have won the silver A-K three times.' (p. 97)

So that confirms it. James Bond was a good enough skier to come second in the Arlberg-Kandahar Challenge Cup three times, and as a reward, gained his gold K badge, or rather his A-K badge.

How to ski like James Bond

In an earlier post, I speculated on the link between Ian Fleming (and in particularly From Russia, With Love) and Peter Lunn, the late Old Etonian, war-hero and cold-war spy chief. We can connect Fleming, Bond and Lunn in another way – through their shared interest in skiing.

Snowy settings have become an essential Bondian landscape (a Bondscape, if you like), thanks to Fleming's Swiss-set On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963) and its film adaptation (1969). The book sees Bond put on a pair of skis for the first time since the war as he escapes Blofeld's henchmen in pursuit. Fleming's descriptions of Bond's skiing accord well with the techniques being taught in the 1930s when Bond learned to ski, as a read-through of Peter Lunn's skiing manual, A Ski-ing Primer (published by Methuen in 1948), reveals.

In Chapter 12 of OHMSS, we find out that Bond learnt to ski before the war as a teenager at the Hannes Schneider School at St Anton in the Arlberg, Austria. There Bond used steel-edged hickory skis, which by the time of his mission in the Swiss alps, were out of date, having been replaced by metal skis. Interestingly, Peter Lunn states that there had been earlier experiments with metal skis, but none had been successful, and when his book was published there was still no substitute for hickory, ash or birch.

Seeing the skiers on the Gloria run, Bond admires the art of Wedeln, with its use of the hips to effect turns. In his youth, there was much more shoulder work. Bond is referring to the style of turn called the downhill Christiana, which allows the skier to turn while keeping the skis parallel. Lunn explains exactly how to do it. As you face downslope in the travserse position, straighten up and start to rotate your intended inside shoulder. At the moment you feel like you are about to topple over, rotate both shoulders forcibly into the slope, while at the same time bending the knees. Bring your outside hand round with the knees and bring the inside ski forwards slightly. Press your knees into the slope, and resume the traverse position as you come out of the turn.

In terms of equipment, Lunn recommends the skis with the Marius Ericksen steel edges. In Blofeld's ski room, Bond chooses Master's with the Attenhofer Flex forward release. But then again, skis had moved on since 1948.

If you want to ski like James Bond, then, Peter Lunn's primer is an excellent place to start. And if you ever wondered what Bond's mysterious 'golden K' refers to (Bond won it while at the Schneider school), the primer may have the answer.

Arnold Lunn, Peter's father, founded the Kandahar Ski Club in 1924. In 1928, Arnold Lunn visited Hannes Schneider and the two of them set up the Arlberg-Kandahar Challenge Cup, which was awarded to the best skier in a combined slalom and downhill contest. The cup was held alternately at St Anton and Mürren (where the Kandahar club was based). Did Bond win the cup one year during the 1930s? And was he admitted to the Kandahar Ski Club? After all, the club's badge is a simple golden K.

Click here for more on Bond's golden K.

Bondscapes: setting the scene for James Bond

In June 2011, the Bilderberg Group, a conference of up to 150 of the world's leading politicians and business people, met at the ski resort of St Moritz, Switzerland. An article on the BBC news website suggested that the meeting was 'in the manner of a James Bond plot'. There seem to be two aspects or memes alluded to here. Firstly, in the secretive nature of the meeting, comprising delegates with the power to influence events on a global scale, there is something a little SPECTRE-like about it. We almost expect the conference to be chaired by Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Second, the location is straight out of a Bond film. There are some landscapes that are so strongly linked with Bond that the producers of the films return to them often, and audiences recognise them as part of the Bondian universe. Snow is one of these 'Bondscapes'; underwater is another.

A snow- (or ice-) covered landscape is used as a major location in seven films (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, A View to a Kill, The Living Daylights, The World is not Enough, and Day Another Day). The first film to show Bond on the slopes was On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969). In the film, Bond pursues (and is pursued by) Blofeld, whose dastardly plot to spread disease through crops and livestock is masterminded in his Alpine laboratory. The film closely follows the novel, and it is evident that the snowy landscape derives from the pages of Ian Fleming.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service was Fleming’s only snow-set novel (although the short story 'Octopussy' takes the reader to the Austrian mountains), but Fleming knew his subject well. Fleming, aged 21, learnt to ski to competitive standard during a year in Kitzbühel. He skied rarely in subsequent years, but summers were often spent walking in the Alps. He drew on his knowledge of the region to write On Her Majesty's Secret Service, and it is possible that he was also inspired by an Austrian-set spy novel, The Lifeline, written in 1946 by Phyllis Bottome. She had been Fleming's tutor in Kitzbühel and had encouraged Fleming to write.

Underwater scenes are as important as snow scenes in the film series, finding a place in the plots of six films (Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, For Your Eyes Only, A View to a Kill, Licence to Kill, and Tomorrow Never Dies). The first film to take Bond underwater was Thunderball, released in 1965, although there is a foretaste of the importance of the sea in Dr No (1962) with the eponymous villain’s submerged lair. As with the introduction of snow and skiing, the use of the seascape in Thunderball is direct from Fleming’s narrative.

The novel was not the first time that Bond had taken to the water. In Live and Let Die (1954), Bond swims underwater among the barracudas to reach Mr Big's hideout, and in the short story 'The Hildebrand Rarity', Bond snorkels in the waters off the Seychelles. The appearance of the sea reflects Fleming’s interests. He spent much of his time in Jamaica during the winter months exploring the waters around his home at Goldeneye, becoming something of an expert in sea life. He took part in a shark hunt, which he found immensely thrilling, and joined the underwater explorer Jacques Cousteau on a survey of the ocean floor.

We can see, then, how the snow-set and underwater scenes in the Bond films have a lineage that goes back to Ian Fleming's writing, and beyond to his experiences and interests. Each appearance of snow or water in a film increases the chance of these Bondscapes appearing again in a subsequent film, further strengthening their association with James Bond. And the producers of the films certainly know what makes those scenes so memorable: exciting ski chases, bizarre deaths, strange landscapes, sharks, and more sharks.

Reference:
Lycett, A, 1995 Ian Fleming: The man behind James Bond, Turner Publishing

James Bond’s sporting life

In between his secret missions, James Bond has time for some sport. We know from his high-stakes match with Goldfinger that he is a keen golfer, but he also skis, which was very useful when he had to escape Blofeld’s clutches in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Bond is a strong swimmer, as we learn in Live and Let Die, and Bond reveals in Thunderball (chapter 22) that skin-diving is one of his hobbies. Bond was sporty in his youth as well. His obituary in You Only Live Twice (chapter 21) tells us that at school Bond was an athlete and a boxer, and that he also established a judo class.

As with so much of his biography, Bond enjoys the same sports practised by his creator, Ian Fleming. Fleming took up golf at an early age. He was introduced to the game aged 8 at his preparatory school at Durnford, although only learnt to play properly when he was 15. From then on he played frequently throughout his life. Fleming learnt to ski in his teens in Switzerland. By the age of 21 he was sufficiently proficient to ski competitively, and he took regular skiing holidays in Kitzbühel during the 1930s. Already a keen swimmer, Fleming discovered diving when he built his house, Goldeneye, in Jamaica after the war. He accompanied Jacques Cousteau on a dive to explore the wreck of an ancient Greek vessel in the Mediterranean in 1953, and his time at Goldeneye was often spent swimming in the waters close to his home.

Like Bond, Fleming excelled at athletics at school. At Eton, he won a long-jump competition and a hurdles title, and he achieved the very rare feat of becoming champion athlete or victor ludorum two years in a row.

It is a fair assumption that James Bond equalled Fleming in terms of his sporting abilities. But just how good is Bond? In his book, Bounce: How champions are made, Matthew Syed exposes the myth that the achievements of top sportsmen and women derive from innate ‘god-given’ talent. Instead, success at sport (and most other things) is a matter of practice – lots of it. It is estimated that champions are made after some 10,000 hours of practice. How close is Bond to this figure?

Like Fleming, Bond learnt to ski during his teens, though in Austria under Hannes Oberhauser, rather than Switzerland (see OHMSS). Let us assume that Bond was 13 when he learnt to ski, and that he spent two weeks of every winter holiday, plus a week during half term, skiing in Austria. We know from his obituary that Bond left school at 17. This gives us 21 days skiing a year for four years. If he spent five hours on the slopes each day, we have a figure of 420 hours. In Bond’s words, a pretty good skier, and had the war then his career not intruded, Bond might have been well on the way to becoming an expert (his musings in OHMSS suggest that he had not been skiing since the start of the war).

What about golf? James Bond was also introduced to golf in his youth. In Goldfinger (chapter 8) we learn that Bond ‘was quite useful when he was a boy’. In Diamonds are Forever (chapter 7), Bond reveals that he shoots a round in the mid eighties – a respectable score that would, I understand, win Bond some low-ranking club tournaments. If we assumed that Bond started playing aged 8 and spent four hours each week playing golf, then by the time he reached 35, he would have clocked up 5,616 hours. Half way there, and a figure that certainly explains his round score. The figure, however, is probably much less than this. A round of golf each week is optimistic (and unlikely during the war years), and in any case Bond may have only started to play seriously in his teens. If Bond’s mid-eighties score actually reflects Fleming’s own abilities, then it is reasonable to suggest that Bond’s claim is unrealistic. Give Bond another 10 years or so (Fleming was 48 when he wrote Diamonds are Forever), and after many more hours of practice, the score might be more accurate.

Reference:
Lycett, A, 1995 Ian Fleming: the man behind James Bond, Turner Publishing, Atlanta