Bad boy Billy twizzles his way to glory
Bomber: Don’t let Kim fool world
FOR years, British medals at the Winter Olympics were about as rare as snow in summer. When ice dancers Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean won gold in Sarajevo in 1984, they became household names and were the toast of the nation.
Now, with Great Britain enjoying its most successful Winter Games to date, the name Billy Morgan was yesterday added to our roll call of heroes.
The hard- partying former roofer from Southampton became the first British man to win an Olympic medal on snow – taking bronze in snowboarding’s ‘Big Air’ event.
As the name suggests, it involves a massive jump. In Morgan’s case, a jump he had never previously performed successfully in competition: a gravity- defying ‘ front- side 1440 triple with mute and tail-grab’.
As he later explained: ‘That’s four times round and upside-down three times. So it’s lots of spinning and twizzling around and you have to grab your board while you do it.’
It took Great Britain’s medals tally in Pyeongchang to five – beating the four won in 1924 and 2014 – and follows a skeleton gold for Lizzy Yarnold as well as bronze medals for Dom Parsons, Laura Deas and freestyle skier Izzy Atkin. Yesterday, the women’s curling team missed out on bronze with defeat to Japan.
Morgan, 28, who has broken several bones in pursuit of his dream, was pictured at the end of the 2014 Olympics at an all-night party dancing on a table with a toilet seat over his head.
‘If there’s a bunch of Brits in a room with bottles of vodka on tables, it’s going to end in tears – and it did,’ he explained.
Hamish McKnight, British snowboarding’s head coach, said: ‘Billy shows that you don’ t have to be a coldhearted machine to be an Olympic medallist.’
Yesterday, as he prepared another celebration, Morgan said: ‘ I started snowboarding at the dry slope in Southampton and I went out on the snow when I was 17 and have pretty much been living in the mountains since. I will keep pushing it for as long as I can. I’ve hit a few bumps in the road but I’m not going to stop yet.’
‘If there are Brits in a room with vodka it’ll end in tears’
A FORMER North Korean spy who blew up a plane killing 115 people has warned that tyrant Kim Jong Un’s charm offensive at the Winter Olympics is a cynical bid to divide his enemies.
Kim Hyon-hui says North Korea is using the Games as a ‘weapon’ to drive a wedge between South Korea and the US, and will never give up its nuclear programme.
Kim was brainwashed as a 19-year-old university student and sent on a mission to plant a bomb on a South Korean airliner in an attempt to derail the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul.
She was captured and sentenced to death for the outrage before being pardoned by South Korea, where she now lives in hiding, fearing assassination by North Korean agents. Speaking from a secret location, the softly spoken mother-of-two said: ‘North Korea is using the Olympics as a weapon. It is trying to escape sanctions by holding hands with South Korea.’
She described the joint Olympics team as ‘a publicity stunt’ for the dictator and said: ‘North Korea won’t give up its nuclear weapons. They are its lifeline.’
Pyongyang’s goal was to drive US troops out of South Korea, she said, predicting it will resume missile launches once the Games are over. Kim, now 56, was studying languages in the North Korean capital when she was hand-picked to be a spy and given seven years of training.
In 1987, she was sent with a male agent to plant a bomb hidden in a radio in the overhead compartment of a Korean Air flight from Baghdad to Seoul. The bombers got off the plane in Abu Dhabi and the plane then exploded over the Andaman Sea, killing all 104 passengers and 11 crew.
Kim and her colleague both swallowed cyanide pills when they were arrested in Bahrain as they tried to escape back to Pyongyang. The male agent died but Kim survived.