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Heinz Kluetmeier, the legendary Sports Illustrated photographer who captured the joy of the US men’s Olympic hockey team as they upset the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Games and swimmer Michael Phelps’ victory in the gold medal race in the summer of 2008. Olympics, died Tuesday in his apartment in Manhattan. He is 82 years old.
Her daughter Jessica Kluetmeier said the cause was complications from Parkinson’s disease.
For decades, even as television photography grew, Sports Illustrated’s star photographers, including Mr. Kluetmeier, Neil Leifer and Walter Iooss Jr., provided a weekly dose of sports fans with sharp pictures and animations.
“Heinz wants to take people to places or corners they’ve never seen,” says Marguerite Schroop Lucarelli, the magazine’s director of photography. “He also had a special ability to connect with athletes.”
On Feb. 22, 1980, Mr. Kluetmeier found the perfect angle at the Lake Placid Olympic Center to cover the U.S. hockey team’s 4-3 semifinal victory over the Soviets. (In the next game, the Americans beat Finland to win the gold medal.)
His photo — which shows players holding their sticks in the air and cheering on the ice — ran on the cover of Sports Illustrated, without a caption or explanatory caption, a rarity in the history of the newspaper.
“I think that’s one of the pictures that people remember that I took,” Mr. Kluetmeier told the sports website of Dartmouth College, his alma mater, in 2007. “It’s a really compelling moment. .”
By the time he arrived in Beijing for the 2008 Summer Games, Mr. Kluetmeier had established himself as an expert in underwater photography. This is the result of his curiosity about the distance between technological photography and his early training as an engineer.
He and his longtime assistant, Jeff Kavanaugh, designed and built a tethered underwater camera system that allowed images to be downloaded directly to a computer. That system clearly showed Phelps touching the wall a third of a second earlier Milorad Cavic of Serbia in the 100m butterfly final. It was the seventh of Phelps’ eight gold medals in China.
Mr. Kluetmeier first used underwater cameras, secretly, at the World Swimming Championships in Perth, Australia in 1991, and then officially at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. at the bottom of the pool, his camera captured an upside-down world: the American Mel Stewart won gold in the 200-meter butterfly in record time with the board, standing spectators and the sky above them.
In 2017, Mr. Kluetmeier became the first photographer to be inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
Heinz Kluetmeier was born in Berlin on October 1, 1942, and lived in Bremen with his family until he moved to Milwaukee when he was 9 years old. , worked for The Associated Press.
When Heinz was 13, his mother took a picture of his sick mother at home, while his parakeet, Chirpy, was eating pasta from his spoon.
“That was the spark that lit the fire,” daughter Tina Kluetmeier said in an interview. “He got his picture in the paper.”
Ilse Kluetmeier also helped Heinz get work processing film at The AP as a teenager. But he believed he could take pictures as well as the cable service photographers, and he worked as a high school and college recruiter, shooting pictures at Green Bay Packers games.
He graduated from Dartmouth in 1965 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering and followed that professional path for a year at Inland Steel in Chicago before being hired as a photographer at The Milwaukee Journal.
He began as a contract photographer for Life and Sports Illustrated in 1969 and was on the Sports Illustrated staff from 1979 to 2009, covering nearly every sport and many Olympic Games. “Loved the Olympics,” said daughter Erica Kluetmeier. “That was our relationship with him. He was always walking. That’s what I learned about the world.”
His subjects included Jackie Joyner-Kersee who won a gold medal in the long jump at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul; Pete Rose, as Cincinnati Red, flies to first base to third base but seems to jump into the camera of Mr. Kluetmeier; and Lynn Swann makes a diving catch for the Pittsburgh Steelers during Super Bowl X.
In 2011, Mr. Kluetmeier found bright lights at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., to help him create a portrait of New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez — his bent body, his helmet torn, his hat. got a bulging right bicep tattoo – while he was being groomed by New York Jets linebacker David Harris.
“A picture of my killer,” he told The New York Times – a reference to Hernandez’s subsequent prison sentence for first-degree murder – while his work was part of the show, “Who Shot the Sport: History “the Image, 1843 to the Present,” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. The exhibition’s curator, photo historian Gail Buckland, compared Hernandez’s portrait to Picasso’s Minotaur. man, half bull – because of his strength.
Mr. Kluetmeier, who worked for many years as a freelance photographer for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, has contributed to Sports Illustrated since 2016.
In addition to daughters Jessica, Erica and Tina Kluetmeier, from his marriage to Donna Orlandi, which ended in divorce, Mr. Kluetmeier is survived by another daughter, Kirsten Schmitt, from a brief relationship; four grandchildren; and a brother, Jorn. Had a home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
In 2005, at Ms. Lucarelli’s suggestion, Mr. Kluetmeier turned the pool where Michael Phelps trained as a student at the University of Michigan into a bedroom. In a shoot for Sports Illustrated on Campus, a long-running spinoff, Phelps floated in a pool amid desks, chairs, lamps, Michigan banners, desktop computers and laptops.
“I went there a few days before and saw a restaurant, an old office, a dead laptop and a computer that we could put in the water,” Mr. Kavanaugh said. “We weighed everything with dumbbell weights. Phelps thought it was hilarious. “
In an interview on the Sports Illustrated website in 2008, Mr. Kluetmeier added: “He couldn’t be a better subject. And, man, can the man hold his breath underwater.”
