There's really no arguing the point: For nine days at Lake Placid in 1980, Eric Heiden was the greatest Olympic athlete of all time. The fresh-faced, unassuming Wisconsin boy with 29-inch thighs won all five speed skating events, setting Olympic records in four and a world record in one.

	Eric Heiden of the USA in acton during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, N.Y.

Heiden was absolutely dominant. His days at the racing oval were routine: He toed the line, tore up the course, then bent his neck to wear another gold medal.

Norwegian skater Frode Roenning, who finished fourth in the 500 meters, said in a Washington Post article: "Heiden is the biggest, greatest skater there has ever been. The rest of us are waiting for the next Olympics."

Heiden won the 500-meter event ahead of world-record-holder Yevgeny Kulikov thanks to three strokes coming out of the second turn that he said "felt like being fired out of a sling shot."

After the victory, Heiden stayed low-key and on-task. "To tell you the truth," he said, "when people talk about the five golds, it goes in one ear and out the other. I just want to skate well."

Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post wrote that when Heiden skated well, he was a relentless, perfectly engineered machine: "His back (and) body mov(e) like a metronome, each stroke a distillation of applied force and extreme patience. His foes are prostrate before him."

Heiden won the 5,000-meters handily, thrashed the 1,000 meter field by one and a half seconds, and overcame a slip at the 600-meter mark to win the 1,500-meter race by more than a second.

Four medals in four tries made him the toast of Lake Placid and a hero for a country still smarting from the Iran hostage crisis and still in the throws of the Cold War. "Heiden is not some Soviet recently emerged from a hidden lab after decades of selective breeding," Ken Denlinger wrote in the Post. "He is American, from Green Bay Packer country."

The night before Heiden's fifth race -- the 10,000 meters -- he went to the hockey game between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. He was so amped up after the Americans' upset victory that he had a hard time getting to sleep. He woke up late the next morning, grabbed a couple of pieces of toast, and hurried to the track for warm-ups. Running mostly on adrenaline, Heiden crushed the field by nearly eight seconds to set a world record in 14:28.13.

When it was over, he smiled as the crowd cheered his name, but at a news conference afterward, he seemed unimpressed by his accomplishment. "Gold, silver and bronze isn't special," he said. "It's giving 100 percent and knowing you've done the best you can."

Heiden could have capitalized on his performance by earning millions of dollars in endorsements, but he wasn't interested in fame. "Put my face on a cereal box? No thanks," he said before retiring from skating. "I really liked it best when I was a nobody."

After skating, he trained to become a world-class cyclist, eventually winning the United States professional cycling championship. He competed in the Tour de France in 1986, but suffered a severe crash and had to quit riding.

He later attended medical school at Stanford, where he studied to become an orthopedic surgeon. He'll tell you now that the medical degree, not the five gold medals, is his greatest accomplishment. "To me, it's the fact that I'm here, an orthopedic surgeon. I've had to work pretty hard to get to this point."

Heiden will return to the Olympics in Salt Lake City, this time as a doctor. He'll be taking care of the short track and long track speed skating teams' everyday medical needs during the Games.

Information from published reports was used in compiling this story