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It is a good thing the Lake Placid Games were so athletically dramatic, because not since Napoleon's armies withdrew in frostbitten disarray from Russia have crowds in winter been handled in quite such fashion. Thousands who had made their expensive way to Lake Placid stared numbly down empty roads, waiting for buses in the Adirondack cold. The Rev. Bernard Fell, local chairman for the Games, was so frustrated by the wayward buses that at one point he actually suggested, somewhat facetiously, banning all spectators from the events so as not to overtax the transport system.
But in the end, the foul-ups seemed merely part of the freight to be paid for bringing the vast apparatus of a modern Olympics to a tiny upstate New York village. The skill of the athletes and their eagerness to excel made the Games exactly what all had hoped they would be: a splendid spectacle.
Nowhere was there more splendid evidence of that skill and desire than on the 400-meter skating oval. It was there that Eric Heiden, with his smooth, ferocious scissor steps, his trunk crouched double, long skate blades tearing minute excavations in the ice, stroked toward an astonishing procession of gold medals.
Heiden spent 25 min. 19.07 sec. at Lake Placid elevating himself to the company of the greatest Olympic athletes who ever lived. Along the way he kept shaving whole seconds off the existing Olympic records—in a sport where hundredths of a second can be crucial. In the 500-meter race, he cut 1.14 sec. from the Olympic mark; in the 1,000-meter, 4.14 sec.; in the 1,500-meter, 3.94 sec.; in the 5,000-meter, an incredible 22.19 sec.; in the 10,000-meter, 22.46 sec. (for good measure, he broke the world record for this grueling event by 6.2 sec.).
Heiden alone won more gold medals than any American team in any Winter Games since 1932, when the U.S. took six. No man had ever won more than three gold medals in a Winter Olympics, no woman more than four (Soviet Speed Skater Lydia Skoblikcva in 1964). The record holder for gold medals, winter or summer, is U.S. Swimmer Mark Spitz, who won seven in 1972. But three were for relays, and he was racing over short distances—100 and 200 meters.
What makes Eric's achievement all the more awesome is that he won at every distance, from the sprinter's 500 meters to the endurance man's 10,000 meters. It is this span that sets Heiden's feat apart from other great Olympic performances: Czechoslovakia's Emil Zatopek winning not only the 5,000-and 10,000-meter runs but also the marathon in 1952; Finland's Paavo Nurmi taking the 1,500-and 5,000-meter runs and the 10,000-meter cross-country in 1924.