Billy Morgan: The serendipitous snowboarder who grabbed his place in British Olympic history with both hands

Billy Morgan is hunched forwards in his chair, chin resting on his knuckles, remembering how his gripping Olympic story played out. After qualifying for the fiercely competitive big air final in Pyeongchang, the snowboarder had three attempts to land two different tricks. When he failed to land his usually-reliable opener and slid down the mountain on his backside, he thought it was all over.

“I was devastated,” Morgan says. “The plan was to land the first one because I’d done hundreds of them, then have two goes at the second one, hope to land it and get a good score. That went out the window when I fell.”

His goal shifted to simply saving face in front of friends and family, watching at home in Southampton on a big screen at the local dry-slope. Morgan remembers standing at the top of his final jump, wondering how he was going to pull off his adaptation of the enormously difficult front-side 1440 triple, featuring a complex double grab, in only one attempt.

“I’d done it maybe two or three times in practice – to learn a trick we normally say you need at least 20 goes, and 50 before it’s consistent. It was such a gamble, especially after not landing it that morning. I’d had a right mare.”

His coach told him he needed to slow down, and watching it back you see Morgan check slightly before he hits the upslope, rotates through the air with two hands gripped on his board, and pulls off the jump of his life. “No way!” was his first thought as he landed, his expression somewhere between excitement and astonishment. But he still had a nervous wait as he sat on the third-place ‘bubble’, expecting it to burst at any moment.

Riders came and went, swaying, falling, crashing out. Gradually an unlikely Olympic bronze medal was becoming a reality. The last to go was Canadian star Max Parrot, who had already won silver in slopestyle. “As I waited for Max I thought, ‘Hang on, if he falls I get a medal’. But he lands everything.” Parrot made a rare misjudgement, tumbling on to his chest, and sealing Morgan’s fate as the first British man to win an Olympic medal on snow.

What was so distinctive about the 28-year-old’s success was his wide-eyed bewilderment on the podium, as if his number had been pulled out of a raffle. That reaction was in part because this was not the fulfilment of some burning Olympic dream; events like big air and slopestyle didn’t exist at the Games when a 14-year-old Morgan first swapped acrobatics for snowboarding at his local dry-slope – the Olympics was something he later stumbled upon.

His clearest memories of the euphoria afterwards are seeing the deluge of messages on his phone from friends back home, and phoning his mum, who cried. Most professional snowboarders become disconnected from home as they immerse themselves in the nomadic lifestyle, but Morgan began late, turning professional at 22, and so the friends who he grew up with still make up his closest support.

Morgan doesn’t take life too seriously, a trait displayed to the world as Britain's flag-bearer at the closing ceremony when he balanced the Union Jack’s pole on his chin. He ended his celebratory night out being pushed home in a luggage trolley, and tells a story from the Games in which he got lost with friends in the backstreets of Seoul. “We ate the most heinous food we could find,” he says with a wince. “I don’t even know what it was, all sorts of tentacles, eels, weird fish. We ended up in a tent in the middle of nowhere with these two old Korean dudes and a table of uncooked miscellaneous meat. They cooked it up right in front of us, which was pretty cool.”

Given his laid-back nature, it is a surprise that Morgan is something of a divisive figure in the snowboarding community. Three years ago he pulled off the world’s first quadruple cork, a mesmerising and slightly mad feat, but it brought a backlash from those who believe stunts are not what snowboarding should be about, and not what makes it cool. Stunts, though, are what Morgan lives for, and what drive him to push his own limitations.

Did the criticism affect him? “The quad was years of pushing myself to that point. It’s not the best feeling when people say ‘Oh, this is shit’, but it’s just what I’ve always done. I got grief at school when I was back-flipping around, so I’ve been used to it all my life. It’s just what I happen to like in snowboarding. Me and my friends enjoy doing the hardest tricks we can do, because you get an awesome feeling.”

Morgan also reveals his mellow side. He has been reminded of his relatively old age so much in the wake of his triumph that perhaps it is getting hard to ignore. He paints a picture of life after snowboarding: becoming a coach, taking his own kids to the slopes one day. Life has already changed, he admits, now he is an Olympic medallist. “Regardless of what I do from now on, I’ll hopefully have more credibility in sport. Hopefully it makes me a little more successful in whatever I chose to do.”

He is not finished just yet, and Beijing 2022 is in his sights before he steps back from competing. “There’s no reason why I can’t go to the next Olympics, if the kids haven’t pushed the limits too far. It depends how my fear levels go. As you get older you break more, you don’t have rubber bones like you used to. Falling out of the sky hurts.”

More often than not Morgan falls on his feet, and you sense he will never get tired of pushing his limits. He is the serendipitous snowboarder who came across a chance to take his place in British Olympic history, and grabbed it with both hands.

To find out more about Billy Morgan go to RedBull.com.