One Athlete Has Won Olympic Gold in a Summer and a Winter Sport

Eddie Eagan was a Yale-educated lawyer with a competitive boxing career on the side. At the 1920 Antwerp Games he won light-heavyweight gold for the United States. He kept boxing through the early 1920s, including stints at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and by the late 1920s he was retired from competition.

In 1932 the Winter Games came to Lake Placid. The American four-man bobsled team needed a fourth, and Billy Fiske, the team driver, recruited Eagan less than a month before the event. Eagan had never bobsledded. Three weeks of training later, the U.S. team won gold by about two seconds over Germany. Eagan had now won Olympic golds in two different sports, in two different Olympics, in two different seasons.

No one else has done it. A handful of athletes have won Olympic medals across both Games — Jacob Tullin Thams (ski jumping and sailing), Christa Luding (speed skating and track cycling), Clara Hughes (speed skating and road cycling), Lauryn Williams (athletics and bobsledding) — but only Eagan has gold from each. The bar has gotten harder over time as athletes specialize earlier and the events get faster.

The footnote is that Eagan barely seemed to notice. He went on to a career in law and military service, served as a colonel in the Army Air Forces in World War II, and ran the New York State Athletic Commission for most of the 1940s. The double gold gets a sentence in his obituary, alongside the rest of a fairly busy life.