Five is Such a Pretty Number – A Fortieth Anniversary Tribute to the Greatest U.S. Winter Olympian

📷: KSL.com

Raise your hand if you can name the only athlete ever to win five gold medals in a single Winter Olympic Games.

(Without Googling, that is.)

What about the only athlete in an endurance discipline to win gold at every Olympic distance?

Or the athlete who offered this pithy response to Cold War posturing around the Olympics:

“Sports and politics don’t mix.”

The answer?  Arguably the greatest U.S. Winter Olympian of all time, Eric Heiden.

📷: NYDailyNews.com

The year was 1980, at the height of the Cold War; the setting, Lake Placid, New York, host to the Winter Olympic Games.

Scant weeks later, on March 14, President Jimmy Carter would crush the Olympic dreams of many hundreds of young athletes by announcing the U.S. boycott of the upcoming Summer Games in Moscow.

But for the moment, for a fortnight in late February, a spotlight shone on the thrilling sports contested on snow and ice.

Largely lost to collective memory are the aspects of the 1980 Games that were unsurprising at the time: Soviet Bloc dominance of pairs figure skating and ice dancing, Alpine nation dominance (11 of 18 medals) in Alpine skiing, and an even split of Nordic (cross-country) skiing medals between Scandinavia and the Soviet Bloc.

Perhaps the hallmark moment of the 1980 Winter Games was the legendary Miracle on Ice — the men’s hockey semifinal game in which a spirited group of American college students attained a highly improbable victory over a team of Soviet professionals.  (The U.S. squad went on to win the 1980 gold medal.)

Watching the Miracle on Ice  from a seat in the raucous arena was speedskater Eric Heiden.  A native of Madison, Wisconsin, and winner already of four gold medals at the Lake Placid Games, the 21-year-old was scheduled to race in his fifth event of five on the following day.

Not surprisingly, the euphoric Heiden found sleep elusive that night.  Come morning, he missed his alarm.

Off he raced the track, a few pieces of bread in hand, his preparations truncated and pre-race routine abandoned.

At last he stepped to the mark on the Games’ outdoor racing track, his iconic muscular thighs aerodynamically encased in a yellow skinsuit, and awaited the starting pistol’s report.

📷: SI.com

In each of his previous four races at the Lake Placid Games, Heiden had set an Olympic record.  On this day, in speedskating’s longest, most grueling race – the 10,000 meters – he set not only an Olympic record but also a World record en route to his fifth gold medal.

“That’s the last world record I had ever expected to break.” – Eric Heiden

By the time the Lake Placid Olympic flame had been extinguished, Heiden was the most successful Winter Olympian of all time at a single Games.

Heiden had won speedskating Olympic gold at the following distances:

• 500 m (Olympic record)
• 1000 m (OR)
• 1500 m (OR)
• 5,000 m (OR)
• 10,000 m (World record, OR)

The American public was elated and proud.  Here was a humble, polite young man from the Midwest who had competed in five races and won them all.  Heiden was profiled in newspapers and magazines and appeared on the canonical Wheaties box.

The most successful individual athlete from the 1980 Winter Olympics patiently rode his short-lived wave of fame before fading, with a sigh of relief, from public consciousness.

Heiden left speedskating soon after Lake Placid and shifted his competitive focus to cycling.

“Maybe if things had stayed the way they were, and I could still be obscure in an obscure sport, I might want to keep skating.  I really liked it best when I was a nobody.” – Eric Heiden

Eric Heiden competed in the 1981 UCI Track Cycling World Championships before switching to road cycling and racing with the 7-Eleven Cycling Team.  In 1985, he won the U.S. Professional Cycling Championship. In 1986, he competed in the Tour de France but was knocked out by a bad crash five days before the finish.

After a year as a student at the University of Wisconsin, Heiden transferred to Stanford University to complete both a Bachelors degree and an MD.  He trained as an orthopedic surgeon (his father’s profession) and has since the mid-1990s enjoyed successful practices first in Sacramento, California, and then in Park City, Utah.

📷: SFGate.com

Now 61, Heiden has been married for a quarter-century to hand surgeon Dr. Karen Drews, with whom he has a daughter, Zoe, and a son, Connor.

Heiden has stayed in close touch with the Winter Olympics, providing TV commentary in 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1994, and serving as a team doctor to the U.S. speedskaters from 2002 through 2014.

📷: Wikipedia

He remains a legend within the world of speedskating.

But the magnitude of his Olympic achievement may not be sufficiently appreciated by the public at large.

Imagine a track athlete who runs and wins both the 100 meter dash and the 10,000 meter run as well as three races at intermediate distances.

Or a swimmer who wins the 50 meter sprint and the 1500 meter “marathon” as well as a 100, a 200, and a 400.

Or a cross-country skier, or a cyclist, who wins the sprints, the long distances, and the races in between.

No athlete does this.  Not one.

No athlete wins both the short races and the long races in the same Games, or even in different Olympic cycles.  In the 21st century, no runner, swimmer, or speedskater even attempts to compete in both the sprints and the long distances.

Eric Heiden did so on the Lake Placid outdoor racing oval in 1980, with stunning success.

Then he went on with his life.

📷: AthleteSpeakers.com

 

References:

Eric Heiden on Wikipedia

YouTube: Eric Heiden recalls oversleeping before his Olympic 10,000 meter race.

From SFGate.com: PROFILE / Eric Heiden, Olympic gold medalist / From skates to scalpel / Five-time gold medalist says career in medicine is his greatest achievement

From ESPN.com: Eric Heiden was a reluctant hero

From WSJ.com: Eric Heiden: Life After The Olympics

“Five is such a pretty number” is a line from a very old Sesame Street song (1970), copyright Children’s Television Workshop.