erter (pronounced OAR-ter), a sandy-haired bear of a man who weighed as much as 297 pounds and stood 6 feet 4 inches, won Olympic gold medals in 1956, 1960, 1964 and 1968. Only Carl Lewis has duplicated the feat, winning the long jump from 1984 through 1996.

Oerter’s sweep was all the more remarkable because in each case he broke the Olympic record, beat the world-record holder, overcame an injury and was not the favorite to win. His winning throws — the men use a 4.4-pound disc that resembles a flying saucer and soars like one — were 184 feet 11 inches in Melbourne in 1956; 194-2 in Rome in 1960; 200-1 in Tokyo in 1964; and 212-6 in Mexico City in 1968.

Harold Connolly, an American hammer thrower who also won an Olympic gold medal, once told the sports columnist Stan Isaacs:

“In the opinion of many of us, he is the greatest field-event athlete of the century. There’s a magic about him when he’s competing. He’s nervous before the meet. He doesn’t eat well and his hands shake. But once the event is about to start, a calmness settles over him. The other athletes see it, and it intimidates them. They watch him, and they are afraid of what he might do.”

Oerter typically made light of his triumphs. In 1991, he told the Olympian magazine, “The first one, I was really young; the second, not very capable; the third, very injured; the fourth, old.”

The injury in his third Olympics, in 1964, came six days before competition was to begin, when he slipped on a wet concrete discus circle and tore rib cartilage on his right side — his throwing side — causing internal bleeding and severe pain. Team doctors told him to forget the Olympics and not throw for six weeks. He refused.

“These are the Olympics,” he was quoted as saying at the time. “You die before you quit.” He competed and won.

Alfred Oerter Jr. was born Sept. 19, 1936, in Astoria, Queens, and grew up on Long Island, in New Hyde Park. At Sewanhaka High School, he was a sprinter and then a miler.

One day, he recalled, when a discus landed near his feet, he casually threw it back so far that the coach immediately made him a discus thrower. He set the national schoolboy record and went on to the University of Kansas, where a classmate was Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball star.

Oerter earned two N.C.A.A. titles at Kansas and a business degree in 1959. Later, competing for the New York Athletic Club, he won six national championships and broke the world record six times.

In an era before elite track athletes trained full time, he worked full time as a computer executive for the Grumman aircraft company on Long Island. After his fourth gold medal, he retired from track, only to return many times.

In 1980, at age 43, he threw 227-11, a career best and the second-longest throw in the world that year. In the 1980 Olympic trials, he finished fourth, one place and four feet short of making the team. (The United States team did not compete in that year’s summer Olympics, held in Moscow, because of the boycott ordered by President Jimmy Carter to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan.)

After Oerter’s last throw, the crowd in Eugene, Ore., gave him a five-minute standing ovation. He bowed. “That never happened to me before,” he said.

When he was asked what he had to prove at that age, he replied: “You don’t understand. It’s not whether you get there. It’s the journey.”

He retired again, then re-emerged at 47 for the 1984 Olympic trials. He reached the finals, only to tear a calf muscle jogging before his last three throws.

In 1987, he quit elite competition for good, saying, “The drug culture had taken over.” He turned to meets for athletes 40 and older, setting world records for older age groups with a lighter discus. (“It feels like a potato chip,” he said.)

He recalled attending one such meet when he was 61. “I was showing some old duffers how to do it,” he said. “They were so excited competing. One guy said: ‘I just threw 120 feet. What did you do?’ I told him I just threw 204 feet.”

Besides his wife, the former Cathy Carroll, who once competed in international events in the long jump, Oerter is survived by two daughters from a previous marriage, Crystiana Beardslee, of Mexico, N.Y., and Gabrielle Oerter of Colorado Springs; a sister, Marianne Boland, of Stormville, N.Y.; and three grandchildren.

In later years he became a well-traveled motivational speaker and took up abstract painting. He also helped found Art of the Olympians, a program to help fellow Olympians promote their art work.

In his 60s, after a visit to the Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, he lamented what he saw as a culture of professionalism entering track and field. “I saw athletes in their 30s training full time,” he said. “That’s their life. What happened to the rest of it? I’m happy that I had a normal life, with a career and family. That makes a person whole.”

He also had no regrets about competing well into middle age.

“Have you ever seen a longer face,” he said, “than on an athlete who has quit in his prime?”