John Emery in Toronto on Feb. 10, 1964.Pat Bellingham/The Globe and Mail
As the last bobsled crossed the finish line, jubilant athletes hoisted Canadian rivals onto their shoulders to start a boozy party that lasted for hours.
In 1964, an unheralded team racing in an $800, second-hand bobsled stunned Europe’s traditional sliding powerhouses by winning the gold medal in Canada’s Olympic debut in bobsleigh.
The Canadian quartet triumphed even though there was not a single bobsled run in their vast land. Canadian officials had only reluctantly agreed to allow them to compete. The foursome even had to pay their own way to Austria to compete at the Winter Olympics.
American coach Stan Benham described their victory as “the greatest upset in bobsledding history.”
John Emery, who has died at 90, was shoehorned in the No. 3 spot in the Canadian bobsled, which was piloted by his younger brother, Victor Emery. Behind the driver crouched Douglas Anakin against whose back Dr. Emery tucked his helmeted head. Behind him was brakeman Peter Kirby. Dr. Emery and Mr. Anakin served as muscle for the push at the start before hopping into the sled to act as ballast.
Dr. Emery “was an accomplished bob pilot in his own right and was conscripted” into his brother’s sled, Victor Emery noted in a recent e-mail from Oslo, Norway. “He was needed to provide the thrust, speed and agility required from the awkward third-man slot.”
The team was known as the Playboy Sled, as the Canadian bachelors were as notorious for their postrace antics as for their downhill derring-do. They were also known as the Intellectual Sled, as the quartet counted 11 university degrees among them.
The tall, handsome and outgoing Dr. Emery later became a well-known cosmetic surgeon with a practice in San Francisco, appearing with his second wife, a model and beauty queen, on television talk shows to discuss his techniques with the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Joan Rivers, Phil Donahue and Maury Povich.
The death of a postoperative patient after a facelift in 1997 for which he admitted gross negligence at a medical hearing led to his medical licence being placed on probation for three years by the Medical Board of California.
He continued his practice with a clinic in Sonoma, Calif., where he owned a property with two private lakes and 30 acres of vineyards. He raised Arabian horses and launched his own Emery Estate wine label. The estate was sold in 2011 for a reported US$13.6-million.
John Edward Emery was born in Montreal on Jan. 4, 1932, the middle of three sons born to the former Phyllis Gwendolyn Young, a nurse, and Herbert James Emery, a twice-wounded First World War veteran who was a mining engineer. The senior Mr. Emery re-enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force early in the Second World War, serving as commanding officer of the No. 1 Initial Training School in Toronto. The family also lived in Winnipeg and Port Arthur (now Thunder Bay), Ont.
John Emery joined his father and both brothers in becoming an Old Boy of Trinity College School at Port Hope, Ont. He graduated with a medical degree from Queen’s University in Kingston before studying medicine at Oxford and in Glasgow, Scotland.
He was an exceptional athlete in rugby, tennis, football, swimming, and, notably, downhill skiing, whose athletic prowess as a naval cadet also earned him the John Stubbs Memorial Shield for athletic ability and sportsmanship in 1954. The shield was presented to him by Prince Philip in a ceremony attended by 5,000 people at the naval base at Esquimalt, B.C., outside Victoria.
The cadet spent that summer aboard HMCS New Glasgow, a wartime frigate recommissioned as an ocean escort. (The ship was used months later during the filming of the John Wayne movie The Sea Chase.) Joining him on board was Lamont (Monty) Gordon, who was a business classmate and fraternity brother of Vic Emery at the University of Western Ontario. The trio pledged to go to Europe after the end of classes in the spring of 1955.
The Emery brothers talked their way onto a European-bound freighter, the younger serving as a deckhand and the older as an assistant mechanic in the engine room. Mr. Gordon found work aboard a different freighter.
The Canadian four-man bob team who won the gold medal at the 1964 Winter Olympic Games in Innsbruck, on Feb. 7, 1964. From left: Douglas Anakin, John Emery, Peter Kirby and driver Victor Emery.The Associated Press
The trio travelled the continent, during which Mr. Gordon enjoyed a summer romance with an Italian countess, a heady affair for a dairy farmer’s son from rural Ontario. After John Emery returned to Canada to resume his studies, his brother met sportsman Gunter Sachs von Opel, a dashing playboy known as Sexy Sachs whose second wife would be Brigitte Bardot. Mr. Sachs, whose grandfather had launched car giant Opel, provided entrée into the rarefied world of daredevil European sliders.
Vic Emery hitchhiked to the Italian Alps to watch the 1956 Olympic bobsleigh competition at Cortina d’Ampezzo.
After returning to Canada, he formed the Laurentian Bobsledding Association, the first of its kind in Canada. The brothers planned to compete in the 1960 Winter Olympics, only to have the organizing committee for those Games decline to build a bobsled run at the California resort that was to play host to the competition. The Emerys would have to wait another four years.
The brothers were introduced to the Canadian public in a two-page article by Andy O’Brien in Weekend Magazine, a newspaper supplement. The headline – “They risk their necks at their own expense” – captured the spirit of their quest.
They wore football helmets and ski goggles for protection, trained on borrowed bobsleds, and practised on a course at Lake Placid, N.Y., whenever they could.
They gained valuable experience competing in Europe at the world championships. Despite the doubts of Canadian officials, the bobsledders were quietly confident they would be competitive at the Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria.
Each Emery brother piloted a two-man sled in the competition in the Alpine resort village of Igls. Dr. Emery, joined by Gordon Currie as brakeman, made errors in the third corner of the first two of his four heats. His team finished 11th, while his brother, with Mr. Kirby as brakeman, just missed the podium by finishing fourth.
Six days later, the brothers were reunited in the four-man sled. With the pilot’s lucky beaver hat tucked under his seat, the foursome launched their sled down the treacherous, 1,506-metre run on the side of Patscherkofel mountain. They reached speeds greater than 100 kilometres an hour before Mr. Kirby applied the brake after they crossed the finish line just one minute, 2.99 seconds from the top, a course record.
The Canadian sled had the second-best time in both the second and third heats before once again setting the pace on the fourth and final run. Their total of 4:14.46 beat the runner-up Austrians by more than a full second, an eternity in a sport which measures hundredths of seconds. An Italian sled, piloted by the legendary Eugenio Monti, known as the Flying Redhead, claimed the bronze. Mr. Monti, a good friend of the Canadians, had helped them repair damage to their axle before the race.
The Canadians were hoisted onto the shoulders of the British bobsledders before all retreated for a champagne-soaked victory celebration at the chalet-style Sporthotel a few minutes away. The revelries were halted only for a medal ceremony at the hockey rink. The triumph would be Canada’s only gold medal at the 1964 Winter Games.
The quartet returned home as heroes. They dined with the governor-general at Rideau Hall and toured Canada with their bobsled, appearing at department stores and other venues.
In January, 1965, Dr. Emery had two bad spills while training on a famous course at St. Moritz, Switzerland. Both came on a curve known as the Devil’s Dike. He bruised both knees badly in the first wipeout in a two-man sled, then was again in the driver’s seat when his four-man team spilled at the same point. Immediately afterwards, he declared he would no longer be a driver.
“I have lost my confidence,” he told reporters. “Every time I come up to the Dike I am thinking about it all the time and wonder whether I will make it. It wouldn’t be fair to the others if I carry on piloting.”
His brother went on to win the four-man world championship days later with Gerald Presley, Michael Young and Mr. Kirby.
Dr. Emery moved to California, where he opened a practice in San Francisco.
In 1968, he served as Canada’s bobsleigh coach at the Olympics in Grenoble, France.
Two months after returning from France, he married Phyllis Wyant, a nurse and model who appeared in print advertising and television commercials brushing her teeth, puffing Alpine cigarettes, sipping Olympia beer and flying United Airlines. They divorced in 1979.
The Canadian four man bobsled team in the Winter Olympic event in the third run at Igls, Austria, on Feb. 6, 1964.The Canadian Press
In 1981, he married the former Deborah Nelson, a former Oakland Raiderette cheerleader, who was a mid-life contestant in the Mrs. United States beauty pageant. She survives Dr. Emery, who died on Feb. 21 after a long struggle with melanoma. He also leaves four children, four grandchildren, and his brother, Victor Emery. He was predeceased by brother David Emery, a geologist who died in 2015, aged 85.
Dr. Emery has been inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame. He remained a competitive athlete into middle age, running the Boston Marathon at age 47 and entering the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii the following year.
Among Dr. Emery’s many patients was his second wife, as they told television audiences, for whom he removed bags from beneath her eyes, sculpted her nose, and fixed upper and lower eyelids. Every eight months or so, he injected fat into her face to keep her skin looking “fresh and dewy.”