But then, he added, “Bill took his headset off and said, ‘That looks pretty serious to me.’ ” “He was like the 25th guy to crash that day, and the driver usually gets the worst of it,” Morgan said. Morgan said that he knew his brother had been hurt but did not recognize the gravity of the injury. “They were doing well, they were in the hunt, got high on the edge of the track and flipped over, left to right,” he said. Terry Jastrow, ABC’s producer that day, recalled on Sunday the fateful moment when Jimmy Morgan’s bobsled began racing down the track and lost control. “They never should have raced that day,” Morgan said. As John Morgan and Bill Flemming watched from ABC’s outdoor announcing position, one sled after another crashed. The 1981 championships took place on a warm morning in the Italian Alps, with ice and snow melting off the sidewalls, exposing the wood beneath. Other siblings competed, and their father, Forrest, managed the 1976 United States bobsled team. Jimmy Morgan had competed in two- and four-man bobsledding at the 1976 Winter Olympics and Jimmy, John and two other brothers had sought to qualify for the 1980 Winter Games in Lake Placid, N.Y., although they came up short after crashing in the trials. That two Morgan brothers were present that day seemed appropriate, because the Morgans are a large family with many links to sliding sports. 8, 1981, Morgan was on his first assignment for ABC Sports, helping provide taped coverage of the bobsled championships for “Wide World of Sports.” The event was being held in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, the site of the 1956 Winter Games, and Morgan’s older brother, Jimmy, was the driver of the No. “A lot of things turn around in your mind,” he said in an interview Sunday. For Morgan, Friday became a day that would not easily end. He had gone on the air that afternoon to talk about the death of the Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili on the Olympic sliding track, displaying the authority he had gained from a lifetime in the sliding sports.Īs he spoke, he seemed impassioned by emotions long stored inside him, having watched his brother die at the 1981 world bobsled championships in Italy. John Morgan, NBC’s bobsled analyst, did not sleep well Friday night.
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