Beth Heiden

Beth Heiden

Beth Heiden in 1979
Personal information
Born	(1959-09-27) September 27, 1959 (age 57) Madison, Wisconsin, United States
Sport
Sport	Speed skating
Club	Madison Speed Skating Club
Medal record Representing the  United States Olympic Games 1980 Lake Placid 3,000 m World Championships 1978 Montreal Junior 1979 The Hague Allround 1979 Grenoble Junior 1976 Madonna di Campiglio Junior 1977 Inzell Junior 1978 Lake Placid Sprint 1979 Inzell Sprint 1980 Hamar Allround 1980 West-Allis Sprint Women’s Cycling World Championships 1980 Road race

Elizabeth Lee "Beth" Heiden Reid (born September 27, 1959) is an American athlete who excelled in speed skating, cross-country skiing and bicycle racing. She was born in Madison, Wisconsin. Her brother Eric was a five-time gold-medalist speedskater at the 1980 Lake Placid Winter Olympics.

In her first year in high school Heiden was a tennis and soccer player. That same year, 1975, she ran a national record in the mile for her age and ran in states for both the 800 and the mile.

She attended her first Olympics in 1976, at the age of 17. In 1979, she won the World Allround Speed Skating Championships, the second female American to do so. Kit Klein had been the first, winning the first official world championship in 1936. Heiden won a bronze medal in the 3,000 m at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, skating on an ankle injury that had bothered her for some time.

In cycle racing, which she took up as cross training outside the skating season Heiden won the US road championship and (in 1980) the world road championship. After the Olympics, while a student at the University of Vermont (UVM), she was the NCAA national championship in cross-country skiing in 1983 and an All-American in the same sport, as a walk on in her first year of the sport. In that same year she became the US National Champion in one of the skiing distance events. She graduated from the university in 1983 and was inducted into the UVM Athletic Hall of Fame in 1993.

She has been inducted in the Speed Skating Hall of Fame.

She suffered a broken wrist and a ruptured spleen when she fell to the ground in 1980 after a second-floor porch railing gave way.