Beth Heiden

February 26, 2026

By Tom Ewing

Fifty years ago, Wisconsin speed skater Beth Heiden finished eleventh in the 3000 meter race at the 1976 Olympics. Heiden’s time was faster than the Olympic record set four years earlier, but not in the top ten for the 1976 competition. Press coverage of the sixteen year old Heiden emphasized her achievement in winning the world junior championship one month earlier, her diminutive size (emphasized in a photograph), the fact that she had to miss high school classes while in Austria, and her spirit of competition.  

Heiden returned four years later to win a bronze medal in the 1980 Olympics, and then won the US national and world championships in cycling later the same year. At a time when most Americans paid little attention to competitive cycling, her visibility as an Olympic medal-winner helped boost the visibility of this sport in ways that continued in the decades that followed. She was named cyclist of the year by Cycling USA Magazine. 

In the early 1980s, once Heiden had completed her competition as an amateur athlete, she endorsed products from the American Dairy Association, including a photograph with her racing bicycle. Heiden’s visibility as an elite was thus connected to the growing popularity of bicycling in the decade of the Bikecentennial.