Politics & Power Quote by Eric Heiden

"They're just big in the eyes of the American public" is the kind of line athletes drop when they’re trying to puncture the bubble that fame inflates around sports. Eric Heiden, a speed skating phenom who won five gold medals at the 1980 Olympics, isn’t denying greatness so much as relocating it. He’s reminding you that “big” is not a natural fact; it’s a social decision, voted into existence by attention, airtime, and national mood.

The phrasing matters. “Just big” carries a deliberate shrug, a downshift from reverence to scale. It implies that the public’s gaze doesn’t merely recognize achievement; it enlarges it, often beyond proportion. And “in the eyes of the American public” is a quiet demotion of authority. Greatness becomes a matter of optics and audience, not an objective ranking in the universe. The subtext: hero-making is provincial. The United States, with its media machinery and hunger for uncomplicated narratives, can turn a niche sport into a temporary religion if the timing is right.

Heiden’s context makes the skepticism land harder. Olympic success, especially in an era when the Games were tangled with Cold War prestige, came with a ready-made mythology: the athlete as national proof. His line hints at the psychological survival strategy behind elite performance, too. If you treat adulation as merely a public projection, you can keep your own ego and pressure in check. In that sense, it’s not modesty as virtue signaling; it’s realism as armor.