It was hard to escape the allure of bobsledding in the Morgan family.
When I was about four years old, my mother would ask us if we wanted to either go up to the bobsled track with our father or to the ski hill with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and .25 cents for hot chocolate. It was a lot more fun going to the bobsled track with the adults, watching the sleds go by and hanging out with the kids from other bobsled families. (It was also where I honed my skills in guessing run times — it started as a game, but in time, I was able to predict times down to the hundredth of a second.)
But our family’s connection to bobsledding started long before any of us were born. After my grandfather, Wilbur, took my father, Forrest "Dew Drop" Morgan, to the 1932 Winter Olympic Games bobsled competition, the seed was planted. And that’s how we all inherited the bobsled bug, starting with my big brother, Jim Morgan. Known to all of us 11 Morgan siblings as "Nitro," whatever you dared him to do, he would do it. A perfect mindset for intense competition.
Outside of the speed and athleticism and achievement that came with competing in the sport, bobsled also gave us a stronger sense of family — not just our own, but also the one we made within the bobsledding community, from Lake Placid, New York, to Cortina, Italy.
And as I prepare for my 12th Winter Olympic Games (my seventh straight for NBC) as a bobsled analyst in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, I’m excited about how Cortina will present the spirit and passion of bobsled to the world. But it will also be a full-circle moment returning to where I experienced one of the most transformative moments of my life.
My parents’ restaurant, The Dew Drop Inn, was the bobsled hangout in Saranac Lake, just 10 miles from Lake Placid. It was named after the nickname my father earned as a child — when he got on the school bus, the driver looked at his matted-down hair and said, "You’re as fresh as a dew drop." The moniker stuck.
Whenever the European teams were in town for the world championships (1961, 1969, 1973 and 1978), the Inn hosted a dinner for the competitors. My parents also had another evening at the Morgan House for the coaches and officials.
Since my uncle and father competed themselves — both were national champions in 1958 and 1959, respectively — they were invested in all aspects of bobsled. (When a bobsled track wasn’t built for the 1960 Olympics, I remember the heated exchanges and the petition pushing for Lake Placid to host the bobsled competition. All for naught. My father missed out on being on the Olympic team, and it was the only time bobsled was not contested at a Winter Olympics.)
Cortina and Lake Placid also had a sister city relationship through the sport.
- Lake Placid legend Stan Beneham won the World Championships in four-man bobsled in Cortina in 1950.
- Italian bobsled legend Eugenio Monti, the Babe Ruth of the sport, won the two-man and four-man at the 1961 World Championships in Lake Placid.
- In 1966, Sergio Zardini, who was from Cortina, lost his life in a bobsled accident in Lake Placid. (Zardini had won two silver medals at the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck. He was one of many great Italian pilots of that generation.
- Two years later, Monti won two gold medals at the 1968 Winter Olympics in Grenoble and became the sport's G.O.A.T. He returned to Lake Placid in 1969 for the World Championships, this time as coach of the Italian team, which took home three of the six medals, including gold in the two-man.
Monti also made many summer trips to Lake Placid and Vermont to buy snow guns for his ski business in Cortina. He was the toast of the town in Lake Placid, liked every place he went. He also became good friends with my dad during those visits.
That friendship would become even more important for me and my family a few years later.
It’s tough for younger brothers not to follow what the older brother asks them to do, especially when it comes to sports. And that was the case with me and Jim.
We entered our first bobsled races together as part of the local Pee Wee Bobsledding program in the late 1950s. Pee Wee Bobsledding in Lake Placid was a big weekend on the winter calendar for kids. It wasn’t Halloween or Christmas, but it seemed to be a bigger deal for the parents. We continued to compete at the local level and gained more valuable experience. Jim earned his "Nitro" nickname in high school because he was fearless.
He was also a naturally gifted athlete. Jim was able to pick things up quickly and succeed. He hardly ever trained, while my brothers and I had to work at it. He was cocky, handsome. He drove a Corvette. He was the pied piper of the family.
After a year in college in the late 1960s, Jim went into the military and served in Vietnam. When he returned, Jim started racing again and emerged as the USA No. 1 driver by 1974. At the 1975 World Championships in Cervina, Italy, he finished 7th overall — the best USA finish of the decade in Europe. He went on to become USA No. 1 at the 1976 Innsbruck Olympics and our dad was the manager of the team. Those Games were the dawning of a new era in the sport — it was the first Olympics where bobsled and luge competitions were held on a refrigerated track. The emphasis on athleticism at the start of a run, along with the technology upgrades with the equipment, changed the sport from its early days. It was almost like BC to AD.
After the Games, where Jim finished 13th in the two- and four-man competitions, he went to Florida for a kind of retirement. But with the 1980 Olympics coming to Lake Placid, he came back for the 1979-80 season and lured three of his younger brothers — me, Sean and Bryan — to try out for the U.S. Olympic team, with him as our driver. Six Morgan kids tried out for those Games, with four of us in bobsled and sister, Bridget, and another brother, Terry, in luge. Bridget was in the Marine Core and basically a Military athlete.
As we prepared for the season, Jim had lost some weight after being diagnosed with a thyroid condition and did not look like the same athlete he was four years earlier. We competed but had poor results, including a spectacular crash on Jan 5, 1980, with the photo circulated around the world. Nitro’s attitude was, “If you cannot win, be spectacular.” We were, um, spectacular for sure. (Later that night, the four of us were together trying to fix the sled, including painting it and putting a new Budweiser sticker on it.) Bryan, the youngest of the group, said, “I’m done.” But Jim wouldn’t give up. He looked at us and said, “We’ve got to get this sled cleaned up. … There is another race in two days and we have to compete.”
We knew we had no chance, but the "Pied Piper" got us to the start line. After the meaningless slide down the track, Bryan said he had enough. But given that there was one more heat to go, we recruited our other brother Terry off the luge track and he took the open spot on The Morgan Brothers team for the final. Terry was 20 pounds heavier than Bryan, so we checked in overweight and were disqualified. It was inconsequential; for Jim, it was a matter of pride.
Bridget and Terry, meanwhile, tried out on the adjacent new luge track and finished just off the team. Terry dominated two of the three races for the Olympic selection in doubles luge and won five of the six heats, but a crash in one of those heats resulted in him not making the team. Out of all of us, Terry should have made the team. Six of us tried and none of us qualified. We were competitive athletes and we were very disappointed. We moved on and found a way to enjoy the 1980 Games. Our parents sold their famous restaurant the year before, but transitioned quickly and leased the restaurant at the bobsled track during the Games.
I was recruited to another team destined to crash. One of the first people to greet me as I was lying in the track was my big brother Jim. I was a little hyped up when I pointed at him and said, “The next time I crash, I will be driving and not a passenger.”
When the U.S. Olympic team was announced at the bobsled track the afternoon of my second crash in five days, I was despondent I didn’t make the cut, not even as an alternate. I was walking to my car in the parking lot, not in a very good mood, and maybe feeling like it was the worst defeat of my life.
For the months leading up to the games, I had a side project of publishing a bobsled/luge sports newspaper called Slider Side, which I produced around the Games and featured sliding sports stories, past and present. It was my start as a writer and marketer of the sport. I was approached by someone holding up a copy of the latest Slider Side and asked if I was the publisher. She told me she was working on bobsled coverage for ABC Sports and asked if I would like to be their researcher for the 1980 Games. Needless to say, my spirits were lifted.
By December 1980, I was contemplating going to bobsled driver's school in Oberhof, Germany, ABC Sports called and asked me if I was retired from bobsled. I asked why and they said, "If you are retired, we’d like to hire you as our commentator for the 1981 World Bobsled Championships in Cortina, Italy."
I immediately responded that I was retired.
Meanwhile, Jim returned to Florida in the spring and had his thyroid operation. He gained his weight back, returned to Lake Placid in December and emerged as the USA No. 1 in four-man after a strong resurgence at trials. The stage was set. Jim and I were off to Cortina — me as an ABC Sports commentator and Nitro as USA No. 1.
Upon my arrival, Jim visited me at my first-class ABC Sports hotel. Since he was not doing any sliding the first week, he figured out how to charge food and drinks to my room.
At one point he said to me, “Don’t get too comfy in that TV chair, John … Someday, I am going to be the commentator.”
Training for the four-man competition started the following week and Jim was doing decent, especially when considering he had very few practice runs in Lake Placid before coming to Cortina. That Friday, we had a great dinner at the Montis with Eugenio, his wife, Linda, and Eugenio’s 1968 gold medal-winning breakman, Lucino de Paulis. It must have been the fourth or fifth visit to their home over the two weeks and we had another great meal.
Jim drew the No. 1 start position for the race and was in 7th place after Heat 1. He dropped back in Heat 2, but was the last person down in Sunday’s first heat (the third of competition). Warm winds came into Cortina overnight and the temperatures were in the 40s. The track, which was not refrigerated, was really soft and conditions were borderline (other locations, like Innsbruck and Oberhof, had refrigerated tracks). Before the race, I saw Eugenio from my commentary booth. He was serving as president of the race organizing committee, he was very concerned about the track holding up under the weather conditions.
When I went back to the booth, I noticed pilots struggling to get sleds safely down the track. As Jim headed into the finish curve, I repeated during the broadcast, “Get off the finish. Get off the finish,” but Jim crashed on the exit of the curve, just like the other 25 sleds had done over the previous two weeks of training and competition. My broadcast partner, the legendary Bill Flemming, said the accident looked serious. I made the on-air observation that usually the driver gets the worst of the force in that situation — “Let’s make sure we see a bunch of heads getting up.”
Bill turned our mics off and said to me that it looked bad for Jim. I didn’t think so, since no one had been hurt after all the other crashes over the past two weeks.
I immediately left the booth to check things out.
It took me about four minutes to get to where the crash was just below our booth. There were several people around the sled, which was on its side away from me as I got closer. When I saw a doctor injecting Jimmy with something, that’s when I knew something was wrong.
I could see a lot of blood. Jeff Jost, the No. 2 man in the sled who was a state policeman by trade, had a look in his eyes that made me realize something was very wrong. I walked around the sled and immediately put my finger on Jimmy’s pulse. There was nothing. Emergency crews then came with a stretcher and I rode with Jimmy in the back of the ambulance for the short ride to the hospital. After about 15 minutes of waiting by the hospital entrance, the doctor came out to tell me Jimmy had passed from severe head and neck injuries he suffered when he hit the wall of the track.
But I already knew that. Among the group gathered there with me: Eugenio Monti.
I needed to get to a phone to call home, so we went to Eugenio’s house. Ron Keough, my cousin-in-law who was the county coroner and lived across the street from our church, went to get the priest en route to my parents’ house.
(I found out recently through conversation that Ron also called our sisters Kelly and Colleen and they headed over to the Morgan House. My two youngest siblings, my late sister Casey and brother Dermott, were still in high school, but they were all together to wake my sleeping parents and deliver the news.)
We also got a message to Terry and Bridget, who were up in Sweden competing for the United States at the World Luge Championships. They found out the news just before they were set to attend the Closing Ceremony, and they decided to still participate. About an hour later, my parents called Eugenio’s home phone (remember, no cell phones back then) and we spoke for about 10 minutes.
I don’t remember much of that conversation. I do remember having to leave and just get outside.
I climbed about 100 yards up a hill behind Eugenio’s house. The sun was bright and the temps climbed to about 55 degrees. I could hear the PA call of the bobsled awards ceremony, and it was strange to think the race had gone on after Jim’s accident. (I remembered that when West German bobsledder Toni Pensberger lost his life in a four-man accident at the 1966 World Championships in Cortina, organizers canceled the event and gave gold medals to his family and teammates.
It was a pretty lonely feeling. I was up there for about an hour before Eugenio joined me. His English was minimal as was my Italian, but we were still able to communicate. By the time we went back down to the house, many cars started pulling up and I was immediately embraced and consoled by the Cortina bobsledding family.
But it still hadn’t sunk in that Jimmy was gone.
Since we were shipping his body back to the United States, we had to go to the morgue. We signed paperwork and put it into the casket, where a person then welded a metal plate in place. We signed a second set of papers, put that in place, and then another plate was welded to the casket. Shipping bodies out of Italy posed some challenges.
I was almost too busy to think about what had happened, but more reality started to set in when we drove up to the USA Team hotel. It was awkward and somber — some of the most stoic of people I knew were in tears and many didn’t know what to say. I could empathize with them.
When we headed back to the Montis home, Linda suggested we go to church. It was dark then. It was Eugenio, Linda, their two kids, Amanda and Alex, and myself all walked to the Catholic church, which was in the center of Cortina.
I thought we were just going down to light some candles and speak to a priest. But when I walked into this beautiful old church, it was full. That’s when it all really hit me. All of them came to honor my brother. I walked down the aisle to the front pew with the Monti family and I felt like I was walking in slow motion. It was a full-blown Catholic mass, and when it ended, I received many hugs from the bobsledding family. It was surreal.
I spent the night at the Monti house and I surprisingly had a decent night’s sleep.
I landed in Venice a few days ago to begin my latest assignment as Olympic bobsled analyst for NBC Sports. It is the 15th time I’ve made the trip to Cortina — I returned with my father for the 1989 World Championships and we had a great reunion with the Monti family and the Cortina people. But the karmic alignment of this particular visit was not something I could have imagined.
My friend, Diego Menardi, wanted to organize a mass for Jim during this trip. Turns out, the mass would be held on Sunday, Feb. 8, in the same Cortina church where we honored Jim 45 years earlier, on the exact day of Jim’s accident.
As I look back on Jim’s accident, it sometimes seems like it didn’t happen. It seems there were many bizarre twists and turns. Terry and Bridget being at the World Luge Championships in Sweden that same day; me being in the commentary booth for the event; the Cortina-Lake Placid relationship with Cortina losing one of its sons, Sergio Zardini, in Lake Placid; and Lake Placid losing one of its own in Cortina with Jim. Then, I think of other racing families who have lost family — the Allisons or the Pettys or Dale Earnhardt, Jr. losing his father in a race in which he was also competing.
There is one thing in common here: none of these racing families quit racing after tragedy befell them.
And the members of my bobsled family who turned out for Jim’s mass on Sunday were proof of that. About 30 people came out, some of whom were officials who came down from the Olympic venue in between luge heats to pay their respects. The mass was in Italian, but the priest made a point to say in English that the service was in memory of “James Partick.” They left off “Morgan,” but we all knew.
Outside the church, Diego introduced me to a woman who wanted to meet me. With the help of Diego’s translation, she relayed to me how she was working the start line during Jimmy’s competition day and told me how she remembered Jimmy doing the sign of the cross before he did his run.
A handful of us, including U.S. coaches Tuffy Latour, Dennis Marineas, Curt Tomasevicz and Brian Shimer, then went on to Ristorante Pizzeria al Passetto, a local hangout filled with Eugenio Monti memorabilia, to toast Jimmy and talk all things bobsledding. I went to pay the bill and the owner of the pizzeria, Georgio Gedhini (the Gedhinis are another Cortina bobsled family), recognized my name from the credit card — “I was with you at the Montis house after the accident.” We exchanged phone numbers and promised to meet up later in the Games.
After dinner, I wasn’t ready to head home just yet and was drawn to some music in the middle of the square. A band was playing inside the Slovenia House and I decided to go in and have a beer. I sat down and started talking to a few of the people who were not dancing and they were amazed at how many times I have been to Cortina.
In recalling those memories and taking in the sights and sounds of the room (John Denver’s “West Virginia” was blaring at one point), it gave me a chance to reflect. It was the perfect environment with beautiful people in one of the most magical places I know.
It was quite the day. And it’s been quite the journey.
