Violence against athletes is rare — but that doesn't mean it never happens. From
an Olympic medalist to a top-ranked tennis star,
these sports stars know what it's like to get hurt both on the playing field — and off of it.
Colombia of the 1980s and early '90s was well-known for two things: coffee and cocaine,
the latter of which was exported through Pablo Escobar's notoriously violent Medellin Cartel.
Despite the cartel wars, however, the national soccer team gave the populace something to
smile about when "Los Cafeteros" qualified for the 1994 FIFA World Cup in the United States.
Despite the wealth of talent, Colombia flopped at USA '94, being eliminated after losses to
Romania and the United States. To make matters worse, the first goal conceded
against the U.S. was an own goal from captain Andres Escobar — no relation to Pablo Escobar.
Now, according to Andres' teammate Freddy Rincon, who gave an interview
about the event to Sabotage Times in 2011, the owners of Colombia's soccer teams were,
quote, "not guys you wanted to annoy." Many were old cartel bosses and had money
placed on Colombia's performance. Being from the cartel stronghold of Medellin,
people soon began to fear for Andres' safety following his own goal — and for good reason.
After the tournament, Andres was at a Medellin bar called El Indio. It was there that two
gangsters accosted him about his own goal. Stories differ about what exactly happened,
but in the end, the two men shot Andres six times,
killing him. Rumor has it that the killers yelled "gol" or "autogol" with each shot,
in reference to Spanish-language commentators who would shout that whenever a goal was scored.
Ron Artest is best known as the guy who ignited the infamous 2004 fan brawl in Detroit. The game
between the Indiana Pacers and Detroit Pistons was going well for the visitors. As the clock
ran down and the Pistons were behind 97-82, a frustrated Artest let his temper get the better
and his teammates were naturally not happy and a minor brawl erupted between the two teams.
Had not fans gotten involved, it might have just ended there. As the ESPN announcers
noted at the time, Pistons fans, who were frustrated with their players' performance,
had been heckling and abusing them for some time. One of them threw a beverage at Artest,
which fortunately did not injure him. While the NBA would have expected him to show restraint,
Artest had enough. He made his way into the stands and attacked a different, completely innocent fan.
"There goes Artest out into the crowd. He's absolutely out of his mind."
This ignited a massive brawl as more fans joined in, escalating into what is today known as the
"Malice at the Palace." Artest paid dearly for his actions: He was hit with a full season suspension,
losing nearly his entire $5 million salary. Zvonimir Boban was captain of the Croatian
team Dinamo Zagreb, which in 1990, played in the Yugoslav First Division. But that year,
he made a name for himself for refusing to let police beat him up without a response. See,
in 1990, Yugoslavia was coming apart at the seams, and it showed in the sports world. In May,
the calendar had a volatile fixture pitting Serbian powerhouse Red Star Belgrade against
Dinamo Zagreb at the Maksimir Stadium in the Croatian capital. With nationalistic
tensions reaching a boiling point, a massive riot broke out before the game started.
During the chaos, most of the players went back to the locker rooms. Boban,
however, stayed on the pitch and confronted the mostly-Serbian police who were beating a Dinamo
fan. As video of an oft-omitted angle from the riot shows, the police attacked him with
batons as well, and one of them seemed to have landed a hit on Boban's face.
Boban managed to get away from the officers and, had he disengaged,
that might have been the end of it. Instead, however, he went back and delivered a knee to
an officer’s face. For this, Boban got himself a six-month suspension from the Yugoslav Football
Association. More significantly, however, he is known in Dinamo folklore as the player who
started the Croatian War of Independence, a sentiment he fully agrees with today.
Today, the jumpshot is the standard shot in basketball. But interestingly,
it did not become common in the pros until Joe Fulks began smashing records with it in the
1940s. Before that, the norm had been a two-handed shot with both feet on the ground. He eventually
became a star with the Philadelphia Warriors in the old Basketball Association of America.
According to Vice, Fulks abused alcohol, although the term "alcoholic" had not been
officially defined in the 1950s. But it might have cost him his life. In 1976,
he visited his girlfriend Roberta Bannister. She had a 22-year-old son named Greg,
who hated Fulks out of a sense of paternal loyalty. Greg and Fulks got into an argument,
which was exacerbated by both men's heavy drinking of vodka. There were also guns in the house,
and guns and alcohol don't mix particularly well. The story goes that Fulks had an issue
with a pistol Greg's wife Sharon owned. Fulks demanded Greg leave. In response, Greg retrieved a
shotgun and shot Fulks point-blank in the carotid artery, leaving him to bleed to death. He was 54.
Kim Glass made her name in volleyball circles as part of the silver medal-winning 2008 USA
Olympic squad. In fact, she was so good that her alma mater, the University of Arizona,
retired her number back in 2011. After retiring from volleyball,
Glass settled in her native Los Angeles and became a model. In July 2022, an unhoused man randomly
attacked her while she was meeting a friend for lunch in the city's downtown. What happened,
according to Glass' own testimony, was that the man ran up to her from across the street
and threw a metal object at her face, giving her a black eye and a cut above her nose.
"And he just, like, looked at me with some pretty hateful eyes.”
The object, which was likely a pipe, also fractured her eye socket in several
places. According to video footage obtained by TMZ, the attack left
several small puddles of blood on the ground. In the end, Glass was okay. She later shared
a video on her Instagram, noting that she had required 40 stitches to her face. Her attacker,
meanwhile, was held down by a witness who got the police involved. Police later identified
the attacker as Semeon Tesfamariam, who was charged with felony assault.
In 2010, Paraguayan international Salvador Cabanas was in peak form, playing a central
role in the offense of Mexico's star-studded Club America. His most recent achievement
had been helping his country qualify for the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa,
which earned him the attention of the English club Sunderland. But there would be no European
or World Cup dream for Cabanas, whose career abruptly ended with a bullet.
After a 2-0 loss to Monarcas Morelia, Cabanas, who had been having knee issues, decided to take
some time off with family. One fateful night, he went to a high-end Mexico City establishment
called Bar Bar, frequented not only by celebrities but by members of Mexican organized crime,
including narcos. One of these, a man named Jose Juan Balderas, told Cabanas that he was
stealing money from Mexico by sending it back to Paraguay and shot him in the head.
The bullet, which was never removed, impaired Cabanas' vision and memory, prematurely ending
his career. He was forced to move back in with his parents and take a job as a delivery driver.
In 2014, he attempted to make a comeback in the lower divisions of his native Paraguay and Brazil,
but it proved to be too much. Since then, he has been absent from the soccer world.
One of the more bizarre incidents of Olympic history involves a former Catholic priest,
and two marathon runners. Brazilian marathoner Vanderlei de Lima was winning the 2004 Athens
Olympic marathon. Suddenly, defrocked Irish priest Neil Horan jumped out of the crowd and shoved
de Lima into the spectators. The shove, which came at mile 22, threw de Lima's rhythm off and
allowed Italy's Stefano Baldini to win the race, leaving the Brazilian with a third-place finish.
Horan had apocalyptic, heterodox beliefs, and a habit of interrupting sporting events,
most notably jumping into the middle of the track during the 2003 British Grand Prix while cars
were racing on it. But he claimed that he had no intention of pulling any stunts in Athens. So why
did Horan shove de Lima? He said it was "destiny," adding that the Brazilian would have been "nowhere
near the star if not for [him]." For his trouble, Horan ended up in jail and was later fined.
In a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Horan said he still held a grudge against de
Lima because the Brazilian had never acknowledged his letters of apology.
The former priest maintains that had he not shoved de Lima, the Brazilian would
have faded into obscurity rather than lighting the Olympic flame at the 2016 Rio games.
Peng Shuai is one of China's most recognizable tennis stars. She made waves as the No. 1 ranked
doubles player in the world, winning the doubles both at Wimbledon and the French Open in 2013.
A decade later, however, she would be better known for her #MeToo allegation against Chinese
Vice Premier Gaoli Zhang — one of the most powerful officials in the Chinese Communist Party,
and with whom she had an on-again-off-again relationship. She claimed in a post on
the Chinese social network Weibo that Zhang sexually assaulted her in 2018.
The allegations of criminal assault implicated the CCP and proved embarrassing for the state,
so Beijing quickly put a damper on the story, per NPR, regardless of the veracity of the
allegations. In 2022, Shuai gave a staged interview with the French magazine L'Equipe,
arranged by the CCP, in which she retracted all allegations against Zhang.
Shuai then mostly receded from public view outside a few CCP-approved appearances in
state media. This resulted in concerns about her safety, freedom to speak and move about China,
and whether the CCP took control of her social media. If true,
she would be among the highest-profile victims of China's massive surveillance state.
Yugoslav Hungarian tennis player Monica Seles was on top of the world in 1993. At just 19 years old,
she had dethroned German "Steffi" Graf and won eight of 11 grand slam events.
There seemed, however, to be some resentment of her success among Graf's German fans. For
whatever reason, an unemployed German lathe operator named Gunter Parche took Seles'
ascent personally. So when she went to Hamburg to play against Bulgarian Magdalena Maleeva,
Parche managed to get courtside and stab her in the back. Seles received a knife wound to her
spine and shoulder blade, barely avoiding paralysis in part because she was hunched
over when the knife entered her back. She never recovered her pole position in the tennis world,
while Steffi Graf got it back — just as Parche had intended.
To add insult to injury, Seles never saw justice for the attack. She spent two years
in physical therapy and only made it back to tennis in 1995. But she was never the same.
"I could've come back after the 6,
7 month period and played but emotionally I was just not ready to come back."
Parche, meanwhile, was given a two-year suspended sentence because he had only intended to injure
Seles, not kill her. German courts justified their decision based on Parche's mental instability,
while the tennis world roundly criticized the verdict, noting that Seles could have died.
Having competed in various triathlons at the elite level since 2015,
South African triathlete Mhlengi Gwala's life changed radically in 2018 when he survived a
vicious attack while training at home in South Africa. Gwala was out training one
morning when three men ambushed him. They dragged him behind some bushes at gunpoint
and instead of just robbing him, proceeded to try and amputate his leg with a chainsaw.
Gwala told the BBC that doctors attempted everything to save his leg. He underwent five
hospital admissions and several surgeries to reattach it. But on the sixth attempt,
he got an infection and had to have the limb amputated and replaced with a prosthetic. Thus,
his days of competing in the regular elite triathlons were
over. No one was ever arrested for the assault and the case remains cold.