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.”
By the time he arrived in Beijing for the 2008 Summer Games, Mr. Kluetmeier had established himself as an expert in underwater photography. That was an outgrowth of his curiosity about how far he could take photography technologically 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 download directly to a computer. That system conclusively showed Phelps touching the wall a hundredth of a second ahead of Milorad Cavic of Serbia in the 100-meter butterfly final. It was the seventh of eight gold medals Phelps would win in China.
“The image of four sets of fingertips bent backward against the touch pads prompted a Serbian protest, instantly becoming an aquatic Zapruder film,” Andrew Das wrote in The New York Times in 2012.
Mr. Kluetmeier first used an underwater camera, surreptitiously, at the 1991 world swimming championships in Perth, Australia, and then officially at the 1992 Barcelona Olympic Games. From the bottom of the pool, his fish-eye lens captured a world turned upside down: the American Mel Stewart winning gold in the 200-meter butterfly in record time with the scoreboard, the spectator stands and the sky above him.
In 2017, Mr. Kluetmeier became the first photographer inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame.
Heinz Kluetmeier was born in Berlin on Oct. 1, 1942, and lived in Bremen with his family until they immigrated to Milwaukee when he was 9. His father, Fred, taught German in middle school, and his mother, Ilse (Pauke) Kluetmeier, worked at The Associated Press.
When Heinz was 13, his mother took a widely syndicated picture of him sick at home, while his parakeet, Chirpy, ate noodles from his spoon.
“That was the spark that lit the fire,” his daughter Tina Kluetmeier said in an interview. “He got his picture in the paper.”
Ilse Kluetmeier also helped Heinz get a job processing film at The A.P. when he was still a teenager. But he believed that he could take pictures as well as the wire service’s photographers, and he worked as a freelancer through high school and into college, during which he shot 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 he was hired as a photographer at The Milwaukee Journal.
He started as a contract photographer for Life and Sports Illustrated in 1969 and was on Sports Illustrated’s staff from 1979 to 2009, covering nearly every sport and many Olympics. “He loved the Olympics,” his daughter Erica Kluetmeier said. “That was our connection to him. He traveled all the time. That’s how I learned about the world.”
The subjects of his pictures included Jackie Joyner-Kersee soaring to a gold medal in the long jump at the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul; Pete Rose, as a Cincinnati Red, flying headfirst into third base but seemingly flinging himself into Mr. Kluetmeier’s camera; and Lynn Swann making a diving catch for the Pittsburgh Steelers during Super Bowl X.
In 2011, Mr. Kluetmeier found the right sliver of lighting at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., to help him create a tightly framed picture of the New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez — his trunk bent forward, his helmet ripped off, his tattooed right bicep bulging — as he was being tackled by the New York Jets linebacker David Harris.
“My killer photo,” he told The New York Times — a mordant reference to Hernandez’s subsequent imprisonment for first-degree murder — when his work was part of a show, “Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1843 to the Present,” at the Brooklyn Museum in 2016. The curator of that exhibition, the photographic historian Gail Buckland, compared the Hernandez picture to a Picasso Minotaur — half man, half bull — for its brute power.
Mr. Kluetmeier, who also worked for many years as a freelance photographer for the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, contributed to Sports Illustrated until 2016.
In addition to his 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. He also had a home in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
In 2005, at Ms. Lucarelli’s suggestion, Mr. Kluetmeier turned the pool in which Michael Phelps was training as a student at the University of Michigan into a dorm room. In a shoot for Sports Illustrated on Campus, a short-lived spinoff, Phelps floated in the pool amid a desk, chairs, a lamp, Michigan banners, a desktop computer and a laptop.
“I went there a couple of days earlier and found a recliner, an old desk, some dead laptops and a computer that we could dunk underwater,” Mr. Kavanaugh said. “We weighed everything down with dumbbell weights. Phelps thought it was hilarious.”
In an interview on Sports Illustrated’s website in 2008, Mr. Kluetmeier added: “He could not have been a better subject. And, man, can the guy hold his breath underwater.”
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