It's a thrill to watch sports stars competing.
But even in the tightly controlled world of professional athletics, accidents do happen,
both on and off the field.These sports stars died right when they were hitting the top
of their game.
It may not have been too surprising initially when Davey Allison died in a crash.
He was a NASCAR driver and the son of the great Bobby Allison, who retired in 1988 after
a near-fatal car crash, and brother of Clifford Allison, who died in a crash in a 1992 practice
race.
The type of crash that killed Davey, though, probably wasn't the one people were worried
about.
During Allison's 1992 season, he stacked up win after win after win.
As 1993 rolled on, he was in great position for the Winston Cup crown and on his way to
becoming a NASCAR legend.
On July 12, 1993, though, he was piloting a helicopter into the Talladega Superspeedway
when something went wrong and the craft crashed on its left side.
Alison was only 32 years old.
After his death, thousands came out to line the route of his funeral, including hundreds
of cars stretching for miles and miles.
Roberto Clemente is probably the best Puerto Rican baseball player of all time.
A Pittsburgh Pirate for his whole career, he smashed down barriers for Latino baseball
players with almost as much force as he smashed balls into the stratosphere.
Clemente won 12 Golden Gloves and four National League batting titles, all while posting a
career batting average of .317.
Yet, for all his sporting prowess, he was equally famous off the field for his charity
work.
He spent his down time coaching underprivileged youth in Puerto Rico and heading up charity
relief efforts in Latin America.
But in one of those twists of fate that make you question the meaning of existence, it
was this charity which led to his death.
Just before Christmas 1972, Nicaragua was hit by a catastrophic earthquake.
Despite being at the height of his career, Clemente headed up relief efforts, including
personally flying out on a cargo plane.
On New Year's Eve, that plane went into the sea.
Clemente's body was never found.
You are a great tribute to society to America to Pittsburgh, and obviously to Puerto Rico.
And I wish you good health and good luck and thanks for all the great memories."
In 1975, Don Wilson was famous as a pitcher for the Houston Astros.
He had a reputation of inconsistency, but he was capable of kicking insane amounts of
backside.
Soon, however, he would be famous for a far less happy reason.
Wilson could've been up there with the greats.
All the way back in 1965, when he was only 19, observers were remarking on his mysterious
ability to make the ball do whatever he wanted.
By the time he hit the big leagues, he was throwing pitches that defied the laws of physics,
weaving and curving like something out a game of Quidditch.
He was also famous for, along with one of his white teammates, becoming the first pair
of integrated roommates in the majors.
On the afternoon of January 5, 1975, police responded to Wilson's garage to find him slumped
inside his car, dead from carbon monoxide poisoning, his bloodstream full of alcohol.
His son was also dead - as carbon monoxide leaked into an upstairs bedroom above the
garage, while his wife and daughter were critically ill and his wife had an injured jaw she couldn't
explain.
Officially, Wilson's death was ruled an accident, but rumors persist that he killed himself
or that this was a domestic dispute turned deadly.
If you're a Yankees fan, just reading the name Thurman Munson can send a shiver down
your spine.
One of the greatest catcher of the 1970s, he racked up accolades like most people rack
up wrinkles and receding hairlines.
He was a seven-time All-Star, three-time Golden Glove winner, and two-time World Series champion,
while also nabbing the 1976 AL MVP Award.
On August 2, 1979, Munson was perhaps the most popular Yankee on the team.
On that hot, sultry day, he took off in his plane to show off his piloting skills for
two friends.
At that point, he'd been flying for a year and a half and was on his fourth plane.
Unfortunately, while practicing touch-and-go landings, Munson unintentionally stalled the
plane and crashed into some trees.
Although he survived the crash, he didn't survive the subsequent fire.
Shattered, burned, and broken, he died of smoke inhalation before help could arrive,
though his two friends managed to survive.
His death was so shocking that the Yankees left his locker untouched until their stadium
was demolished in 2010.
A founding member of Japan Women's Pro Wrestling, Plum Mariko was once one of the biggest sports
stars on the Asian scene.
Although she played second fiddle to bigger names, she was still a big enough draw to
headline shows.
After a period away from the ring in the '90s due to injury, she returned looking like her
star could finally go supernova, if only she could get over some gaps in her memory and
strange headaches she kept having.
Although she wasn't aware of it, Plum was suffering from the effects of brain damage,
the result of a lifetime of being smashed head-first into a mat.
Supposedly, she didn't tell Japan Women's Pro Wrestling about her problems, fearing
they'd retire her.
On August 15, 1997, Plum was hit by a finishing move known as "the Ligerbomb," which is basically
the wrestling equivalent of having a 10-ton truck go to town on your body.
No one is quite sure if the move went wrong or if it just triggered something that was
going to happen regardless, but Plum hit the mat and didn't get up.
She was just 29 years old.
Baseball legend Lou Gehrig was so famous that the disease that killed him, ALS, is still
popularly known as "Lou Gehrig's disease."
When he passed in 1941, his place in the public consciousness transcended the sports world,
but remarkably, he achieved that level of fame after he'd passed his physical peak.
When Gehrig succumbed to ALS, people saw him go in just two years from a great baseball
player to a man incapable of even tying his own shoelaces.
The change was so shocking, and so sudden, that everyone with even a vague interest in
sports took notice.
When Gehrig was forced into early retirement by his illness in 1939, people were so moved
that they came in droves to watch him give a famous farewell speech that was unforgettably
touching.
When he died two years later, his number was the first to be retired in baseball history.
"Today, I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."
There's a minor twist to this story.
In 2010, Wired reported on research suggesting Gehrig may not have actually had ALS.
So that's how famous Gehrig was: Even a disease he may not have had wound up named after him.
A sprinter from Somalia, Samia Omar was one of only two athletes the war-ravaged nation
sent to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Desperately underequipped, she nonetheless qualified for the 200-meter dash at the age
of 17.
She stood on the starting block in her loose T-shirt, donated sneakers, and black leggings,
and watched as her competitors proceeded to disappear in a cloud of dust.
Omar placed last, by several seconds.
But the crowd didn't care.
Seeing how hard she was trying, they gave her the biggest cheer of the entire night.
However, Omar was embarrassed by the applause.
It made her realize how poor training was back in Somalia, and she returned determined
to improve things for the 2012 London Olympics.
Sadly, her future would turn out to be far less uplifting than the reception she received.
Although she was famous back home, Omar found herself by 2010 living in a displaced persons
camp after militant group al-Shabaab overran the capital of Mogadishu.
She decided to make a break for Europe, hoping to get the training she craved.
She spent a year being smuggled from Somalia to Libya, finally boarding a boat bound for
Italy in spring 2012.
But she never made it - after the boat ran out of gas, a rescue boat threw some ropes
to get people to safety, and in the chaos, Omar was accidentally knocked into the water
and she tragically drowned.
There's a good argument to be made that Tom Simpson was Britain's greatest cyclist ever.
But hanging over his legacy is the manner of his death, and it's possible connection
to performance enhancing drugs.
But it wasn't until his untimely death at the age of 29 that it was discovered he was
regularly using amphetamines.
The year was 1967, and Simpson was riding the 13th stage of the Tour de France.
Just five years before, he'd become the first Brit to ever wear the fabled yellow jersey.
In the meantime, he'd also become the first British road race world champion, BBC sports
personality of the year, and the winner of a galaxy of smaller races, titles, and trophies.
He'd also turned his bloodstream into a steady flow of alcohol and speed.
Simpson was nearing the summit of a mountain when he appeared to have suffered a massive
heart attack and fell from his bike after veering across the road.
So determined was he to win that he begged to be put back on his bike.
After a short distance more, his bike began to wobble.
He was held up by spectators, who discovered that he was unconscious, with his hands locked
onto his handlebars.
They escorted him to the side of the road and laid him down.
This time, he didn't get up.
Officially, Lloyd Seay competed in only a handful of races in his lifetime.
Unofficially, his life was one long race, gunning it away from the long arm of the law.
Before he became a professional racer, he was a professional bootlegger in Georgia,
and his life sounds like something out of a Dukes of Hazzard prequel.
Sheriffs told stories about how Seay sometimes paid his speeding fines upfront to save time
when he was gunning back from a moonshine sale.
Seay has been called NASCAR's "greatest driver who wasn't," as he died six years before NASCAR
existed.
Even in 1941, the year that he passed away, people knew that he was destined for a memorable
legacy.
In his first big season, he won the Daytona Beach Road Course, the High Point Speedway,
and the Lakewood Labor Day event within 15 days of each other.
He was just starting to get noticed on the national stage when he got in an argument
with a cousin over money and was shot dead at the age of 21.
In 2006, the London Telegraph described British runner Lillian Board as a "golden girl not
so much touched by stardust as smothered in the stuff."
It's a description that shows how potent her memory still is decades after her death.
She exploded onto the athletics scene at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, winning a silver
medal in the 400 meters at the age of 19.
The next year, she nabbed a gold in the 800 meters at the European Championships and was
a part of the winning U.K. team in the 400-meter relay.
Everyone was certain that she'd get the gold at the 1972 Olympics.
But just as Board was becoming Britain's top female sports star, she started developing
weird back pains.
It turned out that she had developed bowel cancer, which was diagnosed in 1970.
She passed away on the day after Christmas that year.
She was only 22.
Board's legacy lives on through the Lillian Board Trophy, which is awarded annually for
outstanding cancer fundraising.