Eric Heiden

High school

James Madison Memorial High School

College

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Hall of Fame

⭐ U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame

Eric Heiden was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and attended James Madison Memorial High School, where he and his sister Beth competed locally before both became world-class speed skaters. At the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics, Eric Heiden accomplished something never done before or since in Olympic history: he won all five individual speed skating events — the 500m, 1,000m, 1,500m, 5,000m, and 10,000m — setting an Olympic record in every event and a world record in the 10,000m. No Olympic athlete has ever dominated a single Games across such a span of distances in any sport. Despite his extraordinary fame, Heiden was notably uninterested in commercial celebrity and quickly retired from skating to pursue a career in professional cycling and then medicine. He became an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine. He was inducted into the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Hall of Fame in 1983 and remains the most dominant single-performance in Winter Olympic history.