From Olympic gold to the Berkeley Hills: Eric Heiden's cycling career

At the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, Heiden won all five men's long track speed skating events: the 500, 1,000, 1,500, 5,000 and 10,000 meters, setting four Olympic records and a world record in the 10,000.

For cyclists, that's something like winning every track event from the sprint to the longest pursuit at one Games. Between 1977 and 1980 he also won three world allround and four world sprint speed skating titles.

After 1980 Heiden turned to cycling. In 1981 Jim Ochowicz, a former U.S. Olympic cyclist, founded the 7-Eleven team as an amateur squad, with Heiden as its captain and best-known rider.

Olympic gold didn't make him a bike racer overnight. At the 1981 track world championships he finished last in the individual pursuit. He kept racing, on the road, through the early 1980s.

Heiden won the Berkeley Hills Road Race in 1983, four years after Jonathan Boyer, the first American to start the Tour de France. The race's winners list doesn't record his team that day, and no results from that era are online, so we don't know how the race was won or whether he raced here in other years.

Every winner since 1957 →

In 1985 7-Eleven turned professional and was invited to the Giro d'Italia, one of cycling's three Grand Tours. Heiden rode it and finished. The next year 7-Eleven became the first American team at the Tour de France; Heiden crashed and didn't finish.

On June 23, 1985, Heiden won the first U.S. Professional Road Race Championship, in Philadelphia, and the stars-and-stripes jersey that came with it.

Heiden earned his medical degree at Stanford and became an orthopedic surgeon. He was team physician for the U.S. Olympic speed skating team at four Winter Olympics, from 2002 to 2014.

Berkeley didn't make Heiden an athlete: he arrived as a five-time Olympic champion. His 1983 win is part of a long record of riders from very different backgrounds testing themselves on the Three Bears.

Jonathan Boyer, the 1979 winner →