Precious Medals

Three Olympic medalists with an Adirondack connection describe their journeys to glory

Story by Benjamin Pomerance

The mission began with a note. Just a note, a young teenager’s quiet musings. On a piece of paper ripped from a notebook, a 14-year-old Wisconsin boy scrawled two lifelong goals. One was to become a doctor, an orthopedic surgeon like his father. The other was to become an Olympic speedskater. Lofty ambitions, the kind of stuff that’s usually dismissed as the pipe dreams of an impetuous youth. Yet the boy would keep that paper, hang on tightly to those two goals. Eventually, he would end up accomplishing both of them.

The journey began at age four. Watching the television broadcasts of the 1976 Winter Olympics, the impressionable child’s eyes widened when he saw people careening down ice-laced chutes at speeds of 90 miles per hour. And the boy wanted to try. He pulled himself closer to the television, creeping forward until his nose was inches from the screen. He watched the sliders zoom by, larger than life, and vowed that someday, somehow, one of those superheroes would be him.

"Heck, gold medals, what can you do with them?"

The idea was born from a sibling rivalry. When you’re kid number four in a five-child household, you just don’t get the breaks the others do. Too young to be first, too old to be the baby, you sometimes have to make some noise for the attention to shift your way. For one Lake Placid youngster, the noise had to come outdoors, with a narrow board attached to each foot. At age five, he begged his parents to let him join his older brother Jonathan on the ski slopes. Finally, they relented. The boy grew to love skiing, and darned if he didn’t have a bit of a knack for it, too. Not long after putting on his first pair of skis, he began training seriously for the first time, his eyes set on a seemingly impossible dream. One of these days, he swore, he would ski in the Olympics.

The Olympics are full of storybook endings, magical moments that are now replayed by NBC over and over again until your spine becomes numb from tingling so much. These three children who wanted to make it to the Games are part of that legacy — one cementing his status in 1980, one making his biggest statement in 1998, one shocking the world just weeks ago in 2010. The 14-year-old from Wisconsin grew up to be Eric Heiden, the icon in the tight golden skating suit who won five gold medals on the Lake Placid speedskating track in 1980, the greatest individual performance the sport has ever seen. The four-year-old who loved sliding sports became Gordy Sheer, winner (along with teammate Chris Thorpe) of the doubles luge silver medal in the 1998 Nagano Games, the first Olympic luge medal the Americans had ever won. And the noisy five-year-old who just had to do what Jonathan did is known to the world now as Andrew Weibrecht, winner of the bronze medal in the Super-G event in Vancouver. These are the ones who dreamed big and made it big, all the way to the Olympic medal stand. All the way, one would assume, to athletic immortality.              

You’d assume that — until you talked with them. From the start, Eric Heiden wasn’t about to let his medals go to his head. “Heck, gold medals, what can you do with them?” he asked the assembled members of the press after winning his fifth gold in Lake Placid. "I'd rather get a nice warm-up suit. That's something I can use. Gold medals just sit there. When I get old, maybe I could sell them if I need the money.” Across America, a sports-frenzied nation collectively gasped.

Thirty years can do a lot to change a man’s perspective. Eric Heiden has not sold his medals. They’re still in his Utah home — “floating around somewhere,” as he puts it. Through the years, the shiny discs he earned over nine days in Lake Placid have come to signify more to him than just a hunk of gold. “People have to take that in context,” Heiden says today. “The more I look at them now, the more I realize in context what those things mean. I’m proud of those gold medals. But at the time, as a truly amateur athlete, I really could use a nice warm-up suit more than I could the medals. I was proud of what I did. But the experiences I had, not the awards, were most important to me.”

"I don’t think that the medal really changes my plan at all"

Weibrecht, too, seems slightly unsure of what to do with a disc of bronze hanging around his neck. Medals, he seems to realize, can become millstones if not put in the proper perspective. “I don’t think that the medal really changes my plan at all,” Weibrecht says. “I’m going to continue to work on my skiing, work hard in the off-season, and try and achieve more consistent results in the World Cup.” Then, looking further ahead, he adds “I look forward to the experience of the next Winter Games. But skiing is a sport with a lot of variables, so even if I’m skiing better at that point, it doesn’t guarantee better or more Olympic success.”

Sheer seems more willing to confess the significance of what he achieved with Chris Thorpe at the Nagano Games. Yet the historic medal seems to mean more to Sheer for the way it changed America’s perception of his sport than it does as recognition of his own accomplishment. “It was a big moment,” Sheer says. “While we didn’t win gold, luge had two of the 13 medals won by the U.S. team at the 1998 Games, so it was a big deal. We didn’t have to answer the question ‘What is luge?’ as often.”

Of course, Olympic medals don’t come without a price. For most athletes, the largest cost comes in time. At a young age, most Olympic hopefuls have to make a choice: enjoy a so-called “normal” childhood…or train for the Olympics. Heiden’s training started in earnest when he was 14, the same year he scribbled those two lofty goals into his notebook. Speedskating had been a personal hobby since he was 7. Now, it became a way of life. He began working on a structured program with a personal coach for the first time, a coach who would stick with him until Heiden turned 21. The workouts became more regular, the workload became more intense. Five-hour training days were typical. When winter storms blasted his Wisconsin home, he just threw on some warmer clothing and went to work, business as usual. “We didn’t have indoor speedskating facilities,” Heiden remembers. “Today, with the wonderful facilities we have, every day you train is perfect conditions. It wasn’t like that when I was training.” 

Weibrecht began race training at age 10. By the 2003 World Cup season, he was a member of the U.S. Development Team, the national team’s primary pipeline of talented skiers. In 2004, he began racing on the Junior World Cup circuit, a career he concluded with a bronze medal in the Super G. On November 30, 2006, he made it to the senior World Cup circuit, the equivalent of a baseball player being called up from Triple-A to the majors…and promptly was disqualified for a technical violation in his first race. In 2009, he competed at the world championships with mediocre results — 39th place in the Super G and “Did Not Finish” outcomes in the downhill and super combined. Still, even in the face of disappointments, Weibrecht says the overriding objective never left his mind. “The Olympics have been a huge goal for me as long as I can remember,” he says. “So my main goal for this year was just to ski well and qualify for the Games.”

Sheer was 12 when he began luging competitively. “My first year of sliding basically involved spending a few weeks in Lake Placid during the summer, then about six weeks in Lake Placid the following winter,” he remembers. “As you move up the team ladder, the sport becomes more of a time commitment.” By the time Sheer was a junior in high school, he was spending four months of the school year racing throughout Europe with the U.S. Junior National Team. On top of that, he recalls, a large portion of every summer was spent training with Thorpe in Lake Placid. All this, for a sport most Americans couldn’t even pronounce properly. “We worked very hard at improving,” Sheer says. “We also worked very well with our teammates, Mark Grimmette and Brian Martin. We pushed each other and trained hard together. It was a team effort.” 

"The challenge is not being nervous, but still being ready"

For Olympic athletes, making the national team is the first hurdle. Being selected as one of the members of that team to represent your nation in the Games is the next obstacle to surmount. Yet making it to the world’s biggest stage does not guarantee success. Heiden still speaks with disappointment of his first Olympic experiences, at the 1976 Games in Innsbruck, Austria. Once there, Heiden says, he became overwhelmed with the moment. Just four years before winning five golds in Lake Placid, Heiden finished seventh in the 1,500 meters and nineteenth in the 5,000 meters in the Games held an ocean away. “You train so long,” he explains, “and then when you finally get there, you almost want to relax instead of compete. Or you become too tense to compete well. The challenge is not being nervous, but still being ready. And when you’re in the Olympics, accomplishing that state of mind is very, very hard.”

Prior to their Nagano silver, Sheer and Thorpe competed twice in the Olympic Games. Each one, Sheer says, served as a building block for the next time. In 1992, the duo finished twelfth; in 1994, they finished fifth, just shy of the medal podium. “We performed well at the Games in 1994 and raced to our potential at that time,” Sheer says. “Our result showed us that a medal was not just a pipe dream. We were capable of producing solid finishes at the biggest luge race in the world.” The four-year-old who had watched with rapt attention as the sliders raced by him on the TV screen now was one of those athletes. And his Olympic journey was far from over.

Vancouver marked Weibrecht’s first experience in Olympic competition. The ambiance of the Games, he recalls, was far different from anything he’d ever experienced on the World Cup circuit. “The atmosphere was definitely different from the moment that we entered the Vancouver airport,” Weibrecht remembers. “I think the biggest surprise was the amount of security that was around the whole event. We needed credentials to get into everywhere. It was pretty crazy.”

Any competitor can find success in the unlikeliest of places. It came for Heiden in 1977, when he defeated several favored European speedskaters to capture his sport’s world championship. That was the biggest hurdle,” Heiden says. “Winning the world championships was something that I never thought would be possible. I saw that all the work I was putting into this sport was finally starting to pay off.” With newfound confidence, he began training harder and racing better. In 1978, he won the world championship again, followed by a third consecutive world crown in ’79. Suddenly, the quiet athlete found himself atop the speedskating world — and faced with mountainous expectations entering the 1980 Games at Lake Placid.  

"When that happened, I knew that I was losing time"

No such expectations awaited Weibrecht in Vancouver. Entering the Super G, his top finish in any World Cup event had been tenth place. His best Super G result on the World Cup circuit had been eleventh. Then, after he had barely started his descent, Weibrecht got a little too lose and stumbled, one ski coming completely off the snow as he balanced on one leg, fighting desperately to regain his balance. “When that happened, I knew that I was losing time,” Weibrecht says. “I had to really hammer the bottom section to stay in there. With that thought, going into the second half of the course, I really just let it all hang out.” He steadied himself, refocused, skied the rest of the treacherous course flawlessly. His time was the fastest of the day — but since he was only the third skier down the mountain that afternoon, plenty of highly favored rivals waited to beat it. Reduced to the role of jittery spectator, Weibrecht stood on the sidelines and watched as the world took aim at ruining his unexpected medal hopes.

Sheer and Thorpe also did not enter the Games as medal favorites. Most American sports fans didn’t know their names. Yet when the duo found themselves in second place overall after their first run, the world began taking notice. And after they captured the silver medal on their final slide down the track, even Americans finally realized they had witnessed something historic. “Our sport takes its fair share of jokes, from folks saying it looks easy and takes no skill to the late-night talk show host jokes about doubles luge,” Sheer says. “With the jokes also comes an increase in coverage from the regular sports press, so I guess you take the good with the bad.” 

Heiden did not welcome the attention he received in Lake Placid. “I discovered early on that you don’t really want to read the newspapers,” he says. “You didn’t want to hear what people were saying about you, be it good or bad.” Yet as one race after another ended with Heiden clutching a gold medal, an entire nation wanted to know if their homegrown hero could win an unprecedented five golds. The night before his final race, the 10,000-meter event, Heiden finally had enough of the relentless scrutiny. What he needed, he recalls, was a place where he could just relax.

So he watched hockey. He walked down Main Street to the Olympic arena and watched Team USA upset the Soviet Union in one of the most storied sporting events of all time: the “Miracle On Ice”. Typically staid and serious, Heiden was so thrilled by the game that he had trouble falling asleep that night. The next morning, he overslept. He arrived at the rink with only a few pieces of bread from a rushed breakfast in his stomach, ready to take on the world. It was all he needed. Shattering the world record by an astounding 6.2 seconds, Heiden captured his fifth gold. Suddenly, he was flooded with an outpouring of support from newly converted speedskating aficionados from around the country.      

Yet Heiden knew something his newfound fans did not. Two years prior to these Games, he had made up his mind that Lake Placid would be the final chapter of his speedskating career. “I still enjoyed skating,” Heiden explains now, “but I was starting to lose the passion for the training. Plus, I wanted to get back to school, do some other things that I had gotten away from with all of the skating I was doing.” The boy from Wisconsin had accomplished one his goals from that handwritten list. Time to turn his attention to the other one — being a doctor like his dad — before too many years went by.

"Once I retired, I wanted to stay involved with the sport in some way"

After Nagano, Sheer continued to race a partial World Cup schedule with Thorpe. He also worked part-time as the public relations manager for the Olympic Regional Development Authority in Lake Placid, often writing press releases that featured his own race results. Ultimately, this experience would lead him to his current post-medal occupation. “Once I retired, I wanted to stay involved with the sport in some way,” Sheer says. “As it happened, the person who was working in the position of marketing manager (with USA Luge in Lake Placid) decided to take a position with USA Bobsled and Skeleton. So I was hired as a replacement. That began my career with USA Luge.” Today, Sheer still serves as the marketing director for U.S. Luge. The man captivated by the speed and skill of luge as a four-year-old still says he remains happy working with the sport he loves best. 

After watching a parade of skiers take aim at his time, Weibrecht’s result was the third-best of the day. It took him a moment, he recalls, to realize what this meant. For a man who plans to graduate from Dartmouth in 2015 with a degree in earth science, the facts were almost too simple to grasp. He had beaten many of the best skiers in the world. He, Andrew Weibrecht, Lake Placid long-shot, would be taking a bronze medal back to his hometown.

He wiped away tears as the medal was draped around his neck, gave interviews galore as everyone suddenly wanted a piece of him. He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated with three other medal-winning American skiers. Yet the reality of what happened on the Whistler Mountain slopes still hasn’t hit him. “It still hasn’t totally sunk in what I’ve been able to accomplish, because in almost every way I feel exactly the same,” Weibrecht explains. “It’s just the perception that people have of me is now somewhat different.”

If he wasn’t sure how different, he found out when he returned to Lake Placid. His local friends gave him a hero’s welcome, quite literally parading him through the streets. That’s when everything started to seem real. “It was awesome that so many people were so excited about my performance,” the medalist says. “I was really honored to be able to represent Lake Placid with the dignity it deserves.” Still, one week later, Weibrecht was off to Norway to ski the final World Cup event of the regular season. Even with an Olympic medal, life goes on.

As it does for Heiden, now Dr. Heiden of Park City, Utah, the second of those two childhood goals checked off the list. Today, he’s content with anonymity. “The majority of my patients have no clue who I am at first,” Heiden says, “and I like it that way. I’m just their doctor. Then, later when they tell someone their doctor’s name, then they find out that I skated in the Olympics.” Not that he’s totally removed from the sport that made him famous. Heiden now serves as the team physician for U.S. Speedskating, helping the young athletes who want to achieve what he accomplished on a frozen oval in Lake Placid. Yet Heiden believes nobody ever will. “Lots of athletes can do very well at one or two distances,” he explains. “I was an ‘all-arounder’. Physically, I was probably built best for the middle-distance races. But I was able to train myself to go between the different groups.” 

"My biggest goal now is to make sure they have a good life"

Still, if an athlete were to break Heiden’s record, the doctor probably wouldn’t mind. Gold medals don’t mean that much now, not with two new objectives replacing the ones he wrote down as a 14-year-old. One is named Zoe, age 8; the other is Connor, age 6. To hear Heiden talk, you’d think he’d trade his Lake Placid legacy in an instant just to ensure the best for the children he has with his wife, Karen, also an orthopedic surgeon. “I’m a parent now,” he says softly, “a parent with two young children. And my biggest goal now is to make sure they have a good life.” Proving, once again, that no matter how difficult those discs of gold and silver and bronze are to achieve, life moves on after the Games are done. And sometimes, as in the case of Heiden and Weibrecht and Sheer, it moves on to something even more valuable than those very precious medals.

Do you know an Olympic medalist?