Born April 26, 1897, Eddie Eagan, whose father died in a railroad accident when he was only a year old, grew up in Denver, Colo., with his mother and four brothers.  His mother supported his family through a small income she received by teaching foreign languages.  Despite growing up in a poor family, Eagan never gave up. The Rhodes Scholar went on to study law at Yale, Harvard and finally at the University of Oxford. 

In 1920, he competed in his first Olympic Games, where he defeated Sverre Sörsdal of Norway to win the gold medal for the light heavyweight boxing championship at the Antwerp Olympics. In 1924, he once again made the Olympic team; however, this time he never made it past the first round of the Olympic heavyweight boxing competition.

Solidifying his Olympic legacy twelve years after his first Olympic Games, Eagan returned to competition as a member of Billy Fiske’s four-man bobsleigh team at the 1932 Games in Lake Placid. Despite the fact that Eagan had only taken up bobsledding three weeks before the competition, his team won the gold by two seconds. 

After winning his two gold medals, Eagan retired from sport competition, became a successful lawyer, and even served as a colonel in World War II. He died in Rye, N.Y., at seventy years of age. Today, Eagan holds the prestigious honor of being the only person in Olympic history to win gold medals in both summer and winter sports, and the first American to make an Olympic team for both seasons.