LAKE PLACID — Like every winter Olympic Games since 1984, North Country native John Morgan will be on the call for NBC’s broadcasts of bobsled events at the Beijing 2022 Winter Games.

Morgan, a native of Saranac Lake and Lake Placid, has had bobsledding in his blood from a young age, with his viewings at the bobsled run as a kid morphing into eventually competing in the sport.

“I’d go to the bobsled run, then when the runs were over around noon you’d go to some restaurant or bar, and I’d end up playing pool and hanging out with the adults all day,” Morgan said.

He, along with other relatives, tried out to make the U.S. Olympic team for the 1980 Winter Olympic squad, but did not make the cut.

“Timing is everything, and it just wasn’t our time,” Morgan said.

–

Start with ABC

–

Or was it Morgan’s time?

Being left off the team along with having created and locally circulated “Slider Side,” a bobsled and luge newspaper, combined to give him a start down his Olympic path.

“When I didn’t make the team I was devastated, and was walking around the park when a woman chased me down and said, ‘John, John, are you John Morgan?'” Morgan said. “I didn’t want to talk to anybody, but she held up the newspaper and said, ‘Is this your magazine?’ I said yeah, and she said, ‘Well we’d like to discuss hiring you as a researcher for the Olympics.’ What a break.”

For a guy who had spent his life immersed in the Olympic atmosphere of Lake Placid, the job made too much sense.

“I was a historian of the sport already,” Morgan said. “Nobody knows much about the sport now, with the internet, in 1980 there wasn’t the internet, it was all printed documents and books. I had it all in my head.”

He then got an on-air gig with ABC a year later, commentating the 1981 World Bobsled Championships, an event he’s done 30 more times since, before going on-air for his first Olympics in 1984 at the Sarajevo Winter games.

Next were the 1988 games in Calgary, again with ABC, before CBS got the telecast rights for the winter games and Morgan commentated bobsled events at the 1992, 1994 and 1998 games in Albertville, Lillehammer and Nagano, respectively.

He stuck on through another rights holder change, commentating for NBC in Salt Lake City in 2002, Torino in 2006, Vancouver in 2010, Sochi in 2014 and PyeongChang in 2018.

–

Beijing 2022

–

The Beijing games will mark his 11th-straight Winter Olympic games commentating bobsled competition.

These experiences, along with his decades of work with the World Bobsled Championships have allowed for memories that Morgan will always be grateful for.

“I’ve never had a dull moment, I’ll say that,” Morgan said.

But the stringent COVID-19 protocols in place at the ongoing games in Beijing means he’s not too broken up about continuing his more recent trend of commentating the events’ broadcasts remotely.

“I’ve done the travel,” Morgan said. “I don’t wanna be over there with the COVID bubble.”

So, like he has for several recent international bobsledding events, he’ll be working the games from stateside, this time at NBC Stamford in Connecticut.

“For the last two years, I’ve been doing broadcasts remotely while my broadcast partner would be in Manchester, England, and we’d be commentating on events in Europe,” Morgan said. “It would be three in the morning here and people were emailing me, ‘Are you over there?’ No, I’m in my bedroom slippers in my house.”

That’s not to say he won’t be missing the advantages that commentating in-person provides.

This will be the first time he’ll be working events for a track he’s never actually been to, Morgan said, though he’s heard good things about the track at Yanqing National Sliding Center designed by track architect Uwe Deyle.

“He got sick of building these cookie-cutter tracks where everybody goes in the same spot, and it just comes down to the people with the best start time, best equipment,” Morgan said. “He’s designed a track with a thousand and one different ways to get down it. Big, wide-open curves, it’s going to be challenging.”

And he misses the person-to-person interaction that going to events allows.

It was something he was reminded of when he went to St. Moritz, Switzerland, for some of the final international races before the Olympics, weeks before the games.

“I was over there and it was like a lightning rod; I had athletes going, ‘John my push times haven’t been that good, I have a bad hamstring, John I had back surgery in July and haven’t been able to train, John I got married in the summer,” Morgan said. “I get all that inside information, and I miss that. You can get all the social media, but it isn’t like talking.”

–

Bobsled events

–

The luge and skeleton events are well underway, but the men’s and women’s bobsled teams have only gotten in training heats so far.

The first competition heats begin with women’s monobob at 8:30 p.m. tonight.

Morgan’s voice will get onto the airwaves on Monday with the start of the Two-Man Bobsled heats, as he is only covering the two- and four-man men’s events for these Olympics, slightly scaled back from his past workloads at the games.

Among those men’s team members will be Cadyville native Hunter Church, who will be competing in both the two- and four-man events.

While remotely commentating on events at an unfamiliar track will be a challenge, it’s a challenge that Morgan is excited for.

“It’s going to detract my ability to rely on my instincts, but I’ll still be able to present more than anybody else, my knowledge will still be there,” Morgan said. “But it’s definitely going to challenge my inner instinct that I usually bring forward.”

And he’s happy to see commentators like Bree Schaaf, a former U.S. skeleton and bobsled racer, take over some of the women’s events after watching her grow into her new role following her career as a competitor.

But more than anything, he’s just glad that he gets to keep making memories in the world of the sport that he loves.

“I’m pretty fortunate, at my age, to be able to keep doing what I’m doing; who knows where it’s going,” Morgan said. “I tell people I can’t retire, I’ve never had a job.”