Heidegger competed for the Italian sailing squad, as a 20-year-old, in the inaugural class at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing. Building up to his Olympic selection, he scored a commendable, eleventh-place finish at the 2007 ISAF Worlds in Cascais, Portugal to lock the country's top RS:X spot for the Games. Heidegger started the series comfortably with a superb top-eight mark on the third leg, before fading steadily towards the middle of the 35-man fleet and never looked back, sitting him in the top twenty overall position with 138 net points.