![]() ![]() He’s the VIP this weekend, the celebrity guest star, another example of a picture being worth far more than 1,000 words. It’s a reunion of jumpers from past decades, promoting the cash-strapped sport and raising money to keep its already faint pulse beating.īogataj has donated three of his paintings for sale. Dinner Saturday night will be held at the Fireside Inn in West Lebanon. There’s a golf tournament at Eastman Golf Links in Grantham and an awards ceremony on Friday. To feature the man who stayed with many of us, after all these years. That was enough to put something together. Bogataj served as the starter for a Hastings event nearly 30 years ago. Also, Peter Graves of the Upper Valley serves as one of the central broadcasters on the World Cup circuit. The Granite State is home to Jeff Hastings and Mike Holland, two internationally known jumpers and perhaps the best New Hampshire has ever had. He enjoys it so much, in fact, that the ski-jumping community in Andover, Newport and Lebanon had enough connections to ask the infamous ski jumper to be their honored guest. He enjoys recalling what happened to him on March 7, 1970, in Oberstdorf, West Germany. Their English was solid. They live in Bled, with scenic views that resemble paintings, which is what Bogataj now does to make a living. They responded to me in English, which they began studying in fifth grade. This week Bogataj sat on a couch at Bill and Leci McCrillis’s Hopkinton home and relayed his thoughts to a computer screen, to his granddaughter Ziva Pintar, an 18-year-old high school student in Slovenia and her brother, Matevz, a 21-year-old college student there. Muhammad Ali was the asker, at an event 11 years after the jump. “Then afterward, it struck him later what a big deal that was,” Pintar said. “You have to be really famous, really like an important thing to get asked for his autograph.” “In real-time, he really didn’t realize at the moment initially what a big deal it was,” Matevz Pintar, a 21-year-old college student in Slovenia, said via Zoom, who was summarizing more than translating his grandfather’s thoughts from thousands of miles away in Hopkinton. Vinko Bogataj was used as the visual illustration for the agony of losing, which stuck in the collective minds of sports fans across the country. It became part of the introduction to ABC’s “Wide World of Sports.” Different versions over the years showed boxers with their arms raised or Mario Andretti spraying champagne after winning a race as part of the “The Thrill of Victory” section. The grainy footage from that crash made him famous. ![]() “The Agony of Defeat,” said “Wide World of Sports” sportscaster Jim McKay, labeling the action on a ski jump on that snowy, windy day in West Germany.Īre you with me? Are you seeing some poor guy turn into a rag doll on national television, an indelible image that came to represent the pain of losing, packing such a wallop that it remains with many of us today, dusting itself off and making an appearance now and then when someone mentions the phrase? For those old enough to remember, the vision of the dark, grainy figure seen tumbling through the air 52 years ago will last forever. ![]()
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