Profile | Winter Olympics: Eric Heiden, the greatest of all time, ‘imagine Usain Bolt winning the 200m, middle distances and 10,000m in a single Games’
- At the 1980 Winter Olympics, the 21-year-old American speed skater made a historic clean sweep of five track gold medals in a performance yet to be matched
- He went on to pursue a successful career as a cyclist before entering Stanford University and qualifying as a medical doctor
Post-punk and potentially pre-apocalyptic, that was pretty much the state of play in 1980 as Eric Heiden travelled to Lake Placid to make Winter Olympics history. The Cold War had reached freezing point and the world was skating on thin ice over a potential world war.
For young American skater Heiden, his battle was of different kind.
The tall, well-educated and humble speed skater was heading into his second Olympics. First time around he had been a comparative outsider in a sport dominated by northern European nations. But by 1980, he truly made his mark in the sport even before the Olympics, having won several world titles.
What he was about to achieve during those following 14 days was pure sporting history. That feat had never been accomplished before – or since. Heiden won gold in every one of the five skating events he entered, which firmly labelled him as one of the greatest athletes of all time.
To put this into perspective, imagine Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt winning the 200m, the middle distance races and the 10,000m on the running track in a singles Games.
Did Heiden honestly believe this was possible at the time? “Leading up to those Olympics in 1980 I had already proven I had the abilities to will all of those races,” Heiden told the Post. “I’d won the world sprint championships three or four times, I’d won the all-round championships, I think three times.”
He knew it was a huge ask but he also knew his intense training regimes were feared by his teammates. “Physically, I think if you looked at my make-up I was probably a good power sprint athlete,” he said. “The easiest races for me were the 1,000 and 1,500 metres, which were basically one to two-minute races.
“It was mentally tough when it came to the training; I knew what I had to train for being good at the 5,000 and the 10,000.”
Being an outdoor sport in the midst of winter lays you open to the wrath of nature. And at one point, during the 1,500m event, the world gasped as Heiden fell and the gold sweep was under threat.
However, he delved into his ice hockey background, grasping on to the mentality that when you’re down, you get straight back up.
“The ice conditions have to be right,” Heiden said. “You have to be sure you don’t get sick, all of those things can play into your results. Let me tell you, I walked into those Olympics and was pretty confident that I could be successful.
“I had a big slip. It was at a good point in the race, after about 500 -600 metres. I was not so fatigued that I could not catch my balance. Growing up in the sport of ice hockey – if you slip and go down you get up. Its just part of the sport.
“If I’d just grown up as a speed skater I’d probably have thought it was a big mistake and gone down. Also the rhythm of the race, the strokes – it did not interrupt the race. It was one complete cycle of the gaiting stroke and I was back at it again.
“My biggest concern was hitting my competitor who was in the outside lane. If you fall down there’s a good chance you’re going take him down, and I didn’t want to do that. He was a good skater and a good friend of mine.”
During his two-week gold rush he became a national and global sporting hero. As he continued to collect gold medals, he had an inkling that his name was being spoken around the world, even in places where winter sports was not mainstream.
The pressure to win five was intense, but it mostly came from himself. “I guess I kind of grew in to it. I never believed that it would get to me, and I never really let it get to me, or appreciated the pressure from the press or the public,” Heiden said.
“I put a lot of pressure on myself. Every time I skated I wanted to skate well, and if I did not skate well or if I felt I’d left something behind on the ice I was tough on myself. I’d tell myself that I‘m never going to let that happen again.
“I’d done that once, a few years before in the world championships. I’d skated in the 10,000m. It was enough for the press and the public, but deep inside I felt I‘d let myself down.
“When I skated and did the best I could and it was good enough to win then it was great. If it was not good enough to win it was OK. At least I knew that all of the hard work, all of the team support I had – I did not want to let anybody down.”
The opportunity to cash in on his success was huge, and he could have been a rich man at the time. He chose not to do that. “I had plans, things I wanted to do after skating and I felt that taking up some of those opportunities would interfere with those plans; things I’d been looking forward to getting back in to for many years.”
These plans included attempting a completely different sport as well studying to become a medical doctor. “I wanted to get into cycling,” Heiden said. “If you start doing a lot of PR and promotion that really cuts into your time to train. The second was school. I wanted to get back to school, and I knew that I couldn’t have a lot of distractions.
“When I was 13 going on 14 they had the Olympics in Sapporo. That was in 1972, and I can remember thinking to myself that there were two things I wanted to accomplish in life; one was being a doctor [like my father] and the other was to be in the Olympics.”
His commitment to the Olympic quest often bemused his peers. Such aspirations are often pipe dreams of wide-eyed budding youngsters but Heiden knew what he wanted, even though he admitted to a measure of doubt.
“I can remember when I was in high school and was 17 years old and a friend asked why I spent so much time being a speed skater,” he said. “I looked at them and said I wanted to be the world champion at speed skating, because I had the ability. I can remember [the next year] accomplishing that. I thought that being world champion was something I’d never be able to accomplish.
“I was from America, I was a young kid, and we didn’t have the heritage [in skating]. I figured that was an easy thing to say because it was never going to happen, and that it would allow me to continue to push towards that goal.
“Sometimes you have to change what you think you’re capable of. That was a point where I had step back and think just how far I wanted to push things.”
Heiden harboured Olympic aspirations since he was 14 and his continued success meant was now a genuine contender on the global stage.
“The next thing was; gosh – that thing I was thinking about when I was 14. Being in the Olympics; being Olympic Champion. I wanted to go forward,” he said.
“It was a good two weeks in Lake Placid. It was stressful, and I knew it was going to be stressful. But it was also a good experience. I’m a hockey fan, and I got to watch the US ice hockey team chase their dreams of winning a gold medal.
“Yeah, I would say it lived up to my dreams and expectations. Speed skating in general, when I look back, I had a lot of fun doing it. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
After retiring from skating Eric became a professional cyclist, and was part of the first-ever American team to ride in the Tour de France (1986), although he still stuck to his life plan.
“I was slowly working my way through under graduate studies,” Heiden said. “In 1985-86 I graduated from university, and at that point I took another year off to participate in the Tour. But, medical school was going to take over. That was going to be a full-time commitment.”
Are there any regrets in how he played his career? “I don’t think I missed out on much. I had a good career as a young person. I made smart long-term decisions as regards to the opportunities that were given to me,” he said.
“One of things I’m happiest with, with speed skating, was stepping away when I did, at the pinnacle of my career. I have fond memories, it’s not like I dragged on and it became more of a burden.
“I had the opportunity to race as a bicycle racer. I can remember when I was 15 years old and got my first bike, I thought that was the coolest thing. I got to study in some of the finest universities in the world. I got my undergraduate at Stanford, and did a fellowship with two of the premier sports medicine doctors in the world.
“Theses are opportunities that came my way because of what I did earlier in my life.”
That said, there is still one niggle he left at the roadside. “My biggest regret is that I had other things I was doing at school, so I never really had the opportunity to see how good I could have possibly been at cycling. It’s a biggish regret.”
