Athletes are icons, role models, and heroes, so it's always an unspeakable loss when one
leaves this world far too soon.
These sports stars all met tragic ends when they passed away in freak accidents.
Kobe Bryant had one of the most legendary careers in NBA history: he won five championships
and was an All-Star 18 times before his retirement in 2016.
On January 26 2020, Bryant was on board a helicopter with his 13-year-old daughter Gianna.
He was heading up to Thousand Oaks to coach Gianna's basketball team along with seven
other passengers when the vehicle crashed northwest of Los Angeles.
No one on board survived the impact.
The other victims included the pilot, a baseball coach, and some other young basketball players
and their parents and family members.
Moments of silence, speeches, artwork, memorials, and public services soon followed as loved
ones, colleagues, and fans across the world paid tribute.
Gold and purple were everywhere for months.
That was just the beginning to a particularly turbulent year that also included a presidential
impeachment, a contentious election, impassioned civil rights demonstrations, and of course,
a deadly pandemic that took millions of lives and sent the global economy into a spiral.
The 2001 Daytona 500 race was one of the most anticipated events in NASCAR history.
Ads were everywhere, including expensive TV spots during the NFL playoffs.
The race would end up being one of the most talked-about in the sport's history, but not
for the reasons anyone hoped.
Even if you weren't a NASCAR fan, Dale Earnhardt was inescapable.
Despite several serious recent injuries at the time, including a broken collarbone, the
seven-time Winston Cup champ had no respect for safety guidelines.
He even reportedly made a point of not appearing at an event where NASCAR officials brought
in an automotive safety expert to pitch its benefits.
Alas, that might've saved his life.
On Lap 180 of the big race, Earnhardt's Monte Carlo crashed into a concrete barrier after
colliding with another driver.
The impact measured about 60 G's of force, which wrecked the car and inflicted numerous
injuries on Earnhardt.
He suffered a broken ankle, broken ribs, a fractured sternum, cuts to his scalp and chin,
and a fatal fracture that included breaks in all of the bones where the skull meets
the spine.
All of this happened within the span of 80 milliseconds, and suddenly, Dale Sr. was gone.
Dale Earnhardt Jr. recalled to ESPN,
"Having Dad was like a cheat sheet, like knowing all the answers to everything.
And I was like, 'Man, I'm going to have to do this without that for the rest of my life.'"
"I'm proud of who he was.
If I never do another thing in this sport, what matters to me is that his legacy stays
that way."
Legendary runner Steve Prefontaine made an impact that punched well above the weight
class his single, relatively unspectacular Olympics appearance would suggest.
Nevertheless, he was a high school prodigy and a peerless college performer who inspired
countless young runners to dust off their sneakers and hit the road.
He was later the subject of multiple movies, and he ultimately became a major influence
on the explosion of popularity that long-distance running enjoyed in the 70s.
That's why it was no surprise that Prefontaine's death devastated the running community — and
the world at large.
In 1975, "Pre" tragically rolled his convertible and became pinned beneath it.
He was gone before help could arrive.
As Sports Illustrated writer and Olympic runner Kenny Moore remembered him,
"He was so open and inviting.
He had the crowd.
There was nothing like him [...] We all feel something when the crowd goes crazy, but he
gave more.
It's a matter of degrees.
No one gave as much as he did."
It's always tragic when athletes are cut down in their prime, but there's something particularly
sad about those who meet their demise right after their career has begun.
In the case of Nick Adenhart, who joined the Los Angeles Angels in 2009 at the age of 22,
he also had to recover from a serious elbow surgery to get to where he was.
Then, through no fault of his own, his story came to an abrupt end when the car he was
in was struck by a drunk driver in a minivan who had just run a red light.
Adenhart passed away during surgery.
Two other passengers died on the scene, and a fourth ultimately managed to recover.
The driver fled the scene, but was arrested later that night.
At the next Angels game, Nick's father Jim walked out onto the pitcher's mound, stood
in silence before the crowd, and covered his face with his hands.
During a news conference, Angels manager Mike Scioscia said,
"It is a tragedy that will never be forgotten."
Meanwhile, Adenhart's agent Scott Boras recalled through tears,
"He told his dad that he'd better come here, that something special was going to happen.
He was so elated [...] he felt like a major leaguer."
"He was one of the- a bright personality, always had a smile, was very engaging.
Those are the people you definitely miss."
Even though much of pro wrestling is staged, that doesn't mean it's not dangerous.
Grapplers can suffer severe lifelong injuries, or even death, as in the case of Canadian
grappler Owen Hart.
He suffered a fatal accident in 1999 before his match even began.
About 75 minutes into the televised "Over the Edge" event, Hart was being lowered into
the ring to compete in front of 16,000 spectators at Kansas City's Kemper Arena.
According to eyewitnesses, the cable holding him either snapped or disconnected, sending
Hart tumbling 50 feet below.
He died after hitting his head on impact.
Pay-per-view audiences mercifully didn't see the accident, instead seeing a highlight reel
of Hart's greatest moments.
A paramedic who rushed to the scene after the accident commented that she didn't think
the cable snapped.
As she noted to reporters,
"He was supposed to be lowered down into the ring.
It didn't get hooked on to him.
He thought it was hooked on."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the audience initially didn't realize that Hart's fall wasn't just
a part of the act.
As one 15-year-old spectator commented,
"We thought it was a doll at first.
We thought they were just playing with us.
We were really shocked when we found out that it was no joke."
Canadian skier Sarah Burke had successfully pulled off a 540 Flat Spin on a 22-foot halfpipe
countless times in practice runs before her final attempt.
She'd all but mastered the move, to the point that she had a reasonable expectation of landing
it for years to come.
Unfortunately, her attempt to pull off the trick on January 10, 2012 turned tragic.
The tumble she took didn't look terribly threatening initially, but when she didn't get up after
the fall, those who tried to help her found that she had no pulse and wasn't breathing.
Nine days later, Burke died at the hospital of hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, a condition
in which oxygen deprivation leads to brain damage.
She was only 29.
Burke's loss was a stunning blow to her loved ones and anyone involved with the Winter X
Games.
The tributes that poured in noted that she'd also been highly influential at the Olympics,
as she'd successfully pushed to have the halfpipe added as an event at the Winter Games.
As Peter Judge, CEO of the Canadian Freestyle Ski Association, noted,
"She was doing a trick she was well versed in.
The conditions were good, and everything seemed normal.
That mitigates a lot of that sort of introspection."
"The spirit of Sarah is just, she went through life fearlessly and gracefully."
Imagine training your entire life for something spectacular and being so close to it pulling
off, only to have it all ruined at the last possible second because of a single stray
dog walking on the street.
That may sound ridiculous, but that actually was the reason for a terrible tragedy.
Portuguese cycling hero Joaquim Agostinho was a six-time consecutive Portuguese biking
champion who also finished the Tour de France 12 of the 13 times that he participated.
He finished third in that particular race on two separate occasions, in addition to
numerous other accolades over the course of his career.
Tragically, it all came to an abrupt end on April 30, 1984.
Agostinho, who was just 41 years old, was nearing the finish line of a race when a dog
wandered onto the path.
He tried to swerve but couldn't, instead colliding with the poor animal and crashing into the
pavement headfirst Agostinho got back on the bike afterward, and even finished the race
before undergoing surgery 10 hours later in Lisbon.
Unfortunately, the injury was far more serious than he was willing to admit, and 10 days
after fracturing his skull in the accident, he passed away.
You'd be absolutely stunned and heartbroken to discover how many promising athletes have
been killed in airplane or helicopter crashes.
One of the most tragic and deadliest examples was a 2011 crash in Yaroslavl, Russia that
killed 44 out of the 45 people on board.
In an instant, the entire Lokomotiv Yaroslavl hockey team was taken away by an unimaginable
tragedy.
It wasn't just players who passed away, as dozens of other members and coaches and assistants
were also lost.
Wives were widowed, children lost their fathers, and parents lost their children.
International hockey felt the loss as well: The Hockey News' Adam Proteau wrote in 2021,
"Although Lokomotiv eventually moved forward after the tragedy and iced a KHL squad again,
the spirit of those who perished still surrounds the team.
It really doesn't feel like it's been a decade since we lost them.
The pain is still raw for their friends, family, and teammates."
"You just can't describe how sad the tragedy really is.
It's overpowering."
New Zealander Jack Lovelock was a husband and father of two little kids who worked as
a medical professional in 1949.
However, most people remember him as a record-breaking track and field pioneer and an Olympic hero
who nabbed his home country its first-ever gold medal at the Summer Games.
By the mid-30s, though, Lovelock's career aspirations in medicine and several injuries
forced him to hang up his sneakers once and for all.
Sadly, the problems didn't stop there.
In the early 40s, Lovelock fell off a horse, hit his head, and was unconscious for at least
two days.
Perhaps unsurprisingly after such an injury, dizziness and eyesight issues would plague
Lovelock for the rest of his life, likely playing a major role in his death.
On December 28, 1949, Lovelock was standing on a train platform when he called his wife
and said that he felt too unwell to go to work.
He would never make it home: sick and dizzy, he fainted and fell onto the tracks.
The oncoming train killed him instantly.
Nowadays, batting helmets are required in baseball, but they haven't been around forever.
In fact, back in the 1920s, nobody wore them at all.
During one August 16, 1920 game, Raymond Chapman was at bat for the Cleveland Indians.
A pitch by New York Yankee Carl Mays struck Chapman in the temple, sending him to the
dirt.
By the next morning, he had passed away.
He's the only player in MLB history who's ever died after getting hit by a pitch, even
though the league as a whole didn't require batting helmets until the 70s.
There was another factor here that contributed to Chapman's fatal injury: the spitball.
A since-banned pitch, it involves the pitcher spitting on the ball to alter its path.
Mays was infamous for this type of practice, and for occasionally hitting batters.
But it wasn't until Chapman collapsed that Mays realized that the sound of the ball wasn't
from the bat, but from the head of the man at the plate.
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