On This Day: February 23 Marks Historic Achievement as American Speedskater Clinches 5 Gold Medals at a Single Olympics

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As of Monday, February 23, 2026, we mark the 54th day of the year, with 311 days remaining on the calendar.

Today in history:

On this day in 1980, American athlete Eric Heiden achieved a remarkable feat at the Winter Olympics held in Lake Placid, New York. Heiden made history by clinching all five men’s speed skating events, capping his triumph with a world record-setting victory in the 10,000-meter race. This accomplishment established him as the first athlete to win five gold medals in a single Winter Olympics.

Also on this date:

Turning back the pages to 1836, the infamous siege of the Alamo commenced in San Antonio, Texas. Heavily outnumbered, nearly 200 Texan defenders faced Mexican troops. Among the fallen during the thirteen-day siege was Davy Crockett, an American folk hero and politician.

In the annals of history, 1903 saw President Theodore Roosevelt formalizing an agreement with Cuba, allowing the U.S. to lease land at Guantanamo Bay. This lease lacked a termination date, and today, the site hosts a naval base alongside a high-security detention facility for suspected terrorists.

During the tumultuous times of World War II, on this day in 1942, the U.S. mainland encountered its first shelling when a Japanese submarine targeted an oil refinery near Santa Barbara, California.

Further into World War II, in 1945, U.S. Marines famously seized Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima. This victory was immortalized by the raising of two American flags, with the second flag-raising captured in an iconic photograph by Joe Rosenthal of The Associated Press.

In 2011, in a major policy reversal, President Barack Obama’s administration said it would no longer defend the constitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act, a federal law banning recognition of same-sex marriage.

In 2020, a 25-year-old Black man, Ahmaud Arbery, was fatally shot while running in a coastal Georgia neighborhood after a white father and son armed themselves and pursued him. (Greg and Travis McMichael and neighbor William “Roddie” Bryan subsequently drew life sentences for murder convictions and later were convicted of federal hate crimes.)

In 2021, golfer Tiger Woods was seriously injured when he crashed his SUV into a median and rolled over several times on a steep downhill road in suburban Los Angeles.

In 2023, a federal judge handed singer R. Kelly a 20-year prison sentence for his convictions that include producing child sexual abuse materials and federal sex trafficking charges., but said he would serve nearly all of the sentence simultaneously with a 30-year sentence imposed a year earlier on racketeering charges.