The Only Athlete With Gold in Both Summer and Winter Games
Eddie Eagan won boxing gold in 1920, then climbed into a bobsled twelve years later having never sat in one before.
On 15 February 1932, Eddie Eagan crossed the finish line as part of Billy Fiske's four-man bobsled team at Lake Placid and became, by accident of timing and a friend's invitation, the only person to win Olympic gold in both Summer and Winter Games in different sports. He had taken up bobsledding three weeks earlier. Before that he had never sat in a sled.
Eagan was an Olympic boxer first. At the 1920 Antwerp Games he won the light-heavyweight title, a Yale law student in the ring while finishing his degree. He later boxed at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and held an amateur world title in the early 1920s.
The bobsled call came from Billy Fiske, the 21-year-old American driver who needed a fourth man for Lake Placid. Eagan, then 34 and a New York lawyer, took two practice runs and showed up to compete. Fiske's team won by just over two seconds across four runs.
The distinction has held for nearly a century. Sweden's Gillis Grafstrom won gold at both Games as well, but all of his came in figure skating, which appeared at the 1920 Summer Olympics before moving to the Winter program in 1924. Eagan is the only one whose two events were genuinely different sports.
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