So grateful I had the chance to meet this innovator, icon, and legend! Rest in peace Bob Beattie? - Mikaela Shiffrin April 2, 2018 It's still going strong with stars such as Lindsey Vonn, Mikaela Shiffrin and Marcel Hirscher leading the way. In the mid-1960s, Beattie partnered with journalist Serge Lang and French coach Honore Bonnet to create the World Cup, with racers traveling the globe to compete.
Soon after, he went to Boulder, Colorado, to be an assistant football coach for the University of Colorado before taking over the ski program and turning it into a national power. He became the ski coach following his graduation, and the team finished third at the NCAA championships in 1956. He attended Middlebury College in Vermont, where he lettered in tennis, skiing, football and cross-country running. He brought an unbelievable excitement to it."īeattie also covered volleyball for ABC at the 1984 Summer Games and made other appearances for the network on "Wide World of Sports." He began hosting ESPN ski programs in 1985 and did play-by-play at the first Winter X Games in 1997. My job was almost like 'Monday Night Football,' identify the players and let him go. "They realized Bob Beattie and I had a peculiar way of calling it," the late Gifford once said in an interview with. He was paired with Frank Gifford to call one of the Winter Olympics' most famous ski races for ABC - Austrian great Franz Klammer's electric downhill run to capture gold in 1976.
We were a team."īeattie served as a commentator for ABC Sports coverage of alpine skiing at the Winter Olympics from 1976 to 1988. ski team historian Tom Kelly last summer. We had promised everything - rightfully or wrongfully - we had promised everyone the world," Beattie told U.S. coach from 1961 to 1969, Beattie - known as "Beats" or "Coach" to friends - helped Billy Kidd (silver) and Jimmie Heuga (bronze) to medals in the men's slalom at the 1964 Winter Olympics. And if you worked really hard at something and you did it as a team and not as an individual, you can pretty much do anything you ever wanted to do."Īs U.S. His whole world was about working really hard. "He never really thought about that too much. "He had a lot of friends, and they always came up to him and said, 'If it wasn't for you, I never would've accomplished whatever.' "Once he made up his mind something needed to happen, he would keep pounding away until he got it done," Zeno Beattie said. Bob Beattie had been dealing with a number of health issues. He was 85.īeattie's son Zeno told The Aspen Times that his father died Sunday in Fruita, Colorado. Bob Beattie, who coached the United States men's skiing team to its first Olympic medals in the 1960s, has died.