Heinz Kluetmeier, Inventive Sports Photographer, Dies at 82

Heinz Kluetmeier, a prominent photographer for Sports Illustrated who captured the exultation of the United States men’s Olympic hockey team when it upset the Soviet Union at the 1980 Winter Games and the swimmer Michael Phelps’s minuscule margin of victory in a gold medal race at the 2008 Summer Olympics, died on Tuesday at his loft in Manhattan.He was 82.His daughter Jessica Kluetmeier said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.For decades, even as television imagery grew more influential, Sports Illustrated’s star photographers, including Mr.

Kluetmeier, Neil Leifer and Walter Iooss Jr., provided sports fans with weekly doses of sharp-eyed action shots and portraits.“Heinz wanted to bring people to a place or an angle they had never seen before,” said Marguerite Schroop Lucarelli, the magazine’s director of photography.“He also had a unique ability to connect with athletes.”On Feb.

22, 1980, Mr.Kluetmeier found the perfect angle at the Lake Placid Olympic Center to chronicle the underdog U.S.

hockey team’s 4-3 semifinal victory over the Soviet squad.(In their next game, the Americans beat Finland for the gold medal.)His photograph — which showed players holding their sticks in the air and reveling on the ice — ran on the cover of Sports Illustrated, without any explanatory headline or caption, a rarity in the magazine’s history.“I think that’s one of the pictures that people remember that I’ve taken,” Mr.

Kluetmeier told the sports website of Dartmouth College, his alma mater, in 2007.“It’s the moment that is compelling.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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