Here were ABC’s cameras taking you to points on the globe that you’d only otherwise see in a James Bond film televising sports in prime-time, night after night, which was just bizarre. The Olympics, in the 1970s, were exotic and exhilarating.
#FRANZ KLAMMER 1976 INNSBRUCK MOVIE#
Maybe because no one ever made a movie about it. Televised sports had advanced by leaps and bounds in a decade but the age of round-the-clock coverage, of ESPN and CNN, was not yet upon us.Īll of which is a preamble for me to say this: for all of the sports I’ve witnessed, in person and on TV, and for as much as I love college athletics, if you ask me to name the two best goosebumps moments of sports I’ve seen, it’s a quick answer: the USA beating the USSR in hockey in 1980 (the “Miracle on Ice”), which everyone is familiar with and Franz Klammer’s gold-medal downhill run in Innsbruck, Austria, 1976, a moment that rarely gets mentioned.
![franz klammer 1976 innsbruck franz klammer 1976 innsbruck](https://www.skysportaustria.at/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/GEPA_full_6464_GEPA-B-II-379f1-627x413.jpg)
Ask Jordan Belfort.Īnyway, it was in those days, in my childhood, the Seventies, that the Olympics were at their zenith. Limits, at least when it comes to appetites, are usually a good thing. I like Beck Bennett, but “more is better” is not necessarily true.
![franz klammer 1976 innsbruck franz klammer 1976 innsbruck](https://stillmed.olympic.org/media/Images/OlympicOrg/News/2020/02/05/2020-02-05-Franz-Klammer-thumbnail.jpg)
But, as for nationally televised events, they were mostly one day per week. Sure, you could see your local pro teams on television - my Knicks were on WOR-TV, Channel 9, while Phil Rizzuto, Bill White and Frank Messer brought me the Yankees on WPIX-TV, Channel 11. No DirecTV, with “football on your phone.” And, of course, no ESPN.Īnd, so, in those Dark Ages before cable television, sporting events were exactly that: events.
![franz klammer 1976 innsbruck franz klammer 1976 innsbruck](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DtB5SW7HYyY/hqdefault.jpg)
Yes, it was an era in which skiers who did not look like Lindsay Vonn could actually garner the cover of Sports Illustrated.