It's hard to overstate how big Peggy Fleming was when she won the gold medal for figure skating in the 1968 Olympics. American pop culture was such a smaller circle then... there were only 3 TV networks, and literally everyone was watching the Winter Olympics and knew and talked about Fleming and Jean Claude-Killy, the great French skier who swept the slalom, giant slalom and downhill. Fleming was America's sweetheart then in a way that reallly hasn't been duplicated since in sports.
A story I had forgotten: Fleming won the only gold medal America won in the 1968 Olympics, and her gold was particularly important, because the U.S. figure skating team had essentially been wiped out in a plane crash in 1961 traveling to the World Championships.
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