For John Morton, the story still brings tears.

It was 1992. Albertville, France. The Winter Olympics. Morton, now 63, was team leader for the United States biathlon team. He was standing in the Nordic competition area, helping his athletes prepare for the day's events, a crowd of the world's best cross-country skiers and biathletes surrounding them. A coach and a skier came running into the U.S. camp. They spoke broken English and looked desperate.

"They were Latvian," Morton said. "They had nothing."

It was just a year before when the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania broke free from Soviet control and re-established sovereign nations. With that, they earned the right to send athletes to the Olympic Games -- the first time since 1936.

"But these teams didn't even have jackets," Morton said. "They were using old, beat-up equipment. The coach was asking for wax for his athlete's skis. But no one else was helping them out. I asked one of our coaches if we had any to spare."

They quickly handed a can to the man, just minutes before the race. The Latvian athlete who competed in the 50-kilometer Nordic event didn't win a medal that day. But after the race, he tracked Morton and his men down, acting as if he had.

"He came running up to us, hugging us and crying," he said. "He was so proud that he could just compete for his country. It was the first race in his life as a Latvian. He wasn't the Latvian on the Soviet team anymore. This is what the Olympic spirit is all about."

For Morton, of Thetford, Vt., his Olympic memories span seven of the Games -- from Sapporo, Japan, in 1972 to Salt Lake City in 2002. His skiing career started in the late 1960s when he was a member of the Middlebury College ski team, where he won the Eastern Intercollegiate Cross-Country Championship in 1966 and was runner-up in the 1968 NCAA Championships. Morton served a four-year assignment at the U.S. Biathlon Training Center at Fort Richardson, Alaska. His tenure there was interrupted by a tour of duty in South Vietnam as a mobile advisory team leader.

He competed in the 1972 Olympics in Sapporo, a competition Morton described as "nothing to brag about," which was the same he said about his results at the 1976 Games in Innsbruck, Austria. He failed to qualify for the biathlon finals in the 1972 Games but helped Team USA finish 11th in the 1976 biathlon relay. That was Morton's best Olympic finish. He later was named head coach of men's skiing at Dartmouth College, a job he held for 11 years, and has since been involved in every Olympic U.S. biathlon team either as a coach, team leader or chief of course, a position he served at the Salt Lake City Winter Games in 2002.

He also designs cross-country skiing courses around the world, including the one at Hilltop Orchards in Richmond.

Morton said his Olympic experiences are memorable on many levels. The competition. The friendships. The 4,000 calorie-a-day diets. The training. The intense schedules. The media hype.

"Trying to go to sleep at 9 p.m. the night before a big race," he said. "Impossible. Anyone who participates in the Olympics knows it's the toughest thing to try and have your best day on the one day it really counts. The pressure is incredibly difficult."

"For three years and 11 months, no one knows you," Morton said. "Then you get to the Olympics and everyone wants an interview."

He made friends with fellow biathletes from the Soviet Union, East Germany and Britain. He was in the stands for the "Miracle on Ice" U.S. hockey team's win over the Soviet Union in Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1980. And he was in Nagano, Japan, in 1998, when officials accidentally seated a Serbian coach next to a Croatian coach -- both their countries at war. The room went silent. Then, the Croatian coach turned to the crowd and said, "At home, we're at war. Here, we play games."

"It's not about winning," Morton said. "It's about the experiences."

This article first ran in the Berkshire Eagle. Reproduced here with author's permission.