Athletes

In brief: Between 1988 and 1990, the Detroit Pistons eliminated Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls from the playoffs three consecutive times. Jordan averaged over 29 points per game in those series — and still lost. This is not a story about Jordan’s talent. It is a story about what he did in the off-seasons…

In brief: In 1967, Kathrine Switzer became the first woman to officially enter and run the Boston Marathon — and a race official physically tried to rip her number off mid-race. She finished. But the story most people know ends there. What they don’t know is that decades later, after years away from racing, she…

In brief: Erik Weihenmayer was a teenager in Connecticut when he lost his sight entirely to a rare degenerative eye condition. He refused to accept the limits others placed on him. In 2001 he became the first blind person to summit Mount Everest. In 2008 he completed the Seven Summits — the highest peak on…

In brief: On June 12, 2021, Danish midfielder Christian Eriksen collapsed on the pitch at Euro 2020 and was clinically dead for several minutes. As paramedics worked to resuscitate him, he told them to keep his boots — he was done with football. 259 days later he made his Premier League comeback. He then went…

On the night of April 12, 2011, a 24-year-old national volleyball player lay bleeding on a railway track between Lucknow and Delhi. She had been thrown from a moving train by robbers after refusing to hand over her gold chain. She had fallen onto the tracks. Seconds later, a train coming from the opposite direction…

In 1978, a 15-year-old boy at Laney High School in Wilmington, North Carolina, walked up to a notice board after basketball tryouts and scanned the list for his name. It wasn’t there. What stung even more: the name of his close friend — fellow sophomore Leroy Smith, 6’7″ — was on the varsity list. Smith…

What would you do if the thing you loved most was being taken away — not because of lack of talent, but because of something happening inside your own body that you couldn’t control? At 11 years old, Lionel Messi sat in a doctor’s office in Rosario, Argentina, and received a diagnosis that could have…