Tragedy encompasses all sports – Not just harness racing

Witnessing on television the terrible incident involving Damar Hamlin recently on Monday Night Football, it brought me to a point where harness racing needed to be defended from all the scuttlebutt concerning our sport about safety.

Hamlin was, obviously, deemed to be in exceptional health going into every game during his college days at the University of Pittsburgh and, obviously, shown to be in exceptional health going through the necessary physicals once selected in the NFL Draft and continuing pre-season physical tests and pre-game check-ups.

This was a one-in-a-million situation deemed to be unavoidable with all of the components leading up to that tragic milli-second hidden from view by doctors, their modern testing equipment and medicine, itself.

When something tragic happens in our sport, of course we feel at a loss for words with blame being thrown around anywhere it might stick.

Our flesh, no matter the shade of light beige to dark brown we all have, covers a multitude of things—from early disease when the first cells of cancer begin to grow to problems with the heart, which can extinguish life in, well, a heartbeat.

Horses are athletes, too, and whether they be bay, chestnut, grey, black or, even, in rare cases, pinto or any one of 27 other classifications, their coat can hide any number of maladies leading to tragedy on the track.

Damar Hamlin’s situation on the football field is no different than any horse that suffers an unfortunate incident on a racetrack.

Yes, transparency is important when situations occur and, while transparency is lacking in our sport, once that situation improves, it will help our sport—not hurt it!

Transparency spawns’ action, too, and, in doing so, will make our sport even better in future years.

Has football lost a single fan due to Hamlin’s unfortunate situation? I doubt it…and press coverage merely brings light to the hazards of being an athlete, who are among the best conditioned and healthiest human specimens on earth, with any underlying malady hidden by, yes, our flesh.

The NFL list of players who met an early death includes 26-year-old Gaines Adams (Chicago Bears), who died from cardiac arrest in 2010, Frank Buncom (Bengals), age 29, from a blood clot, J. V. Cain (St. Louis Cardinals), age 28, from a heart attack and Howard Glenn, playing in the AFL, from an in-game neck injury at the age of 26.

The list goes on-and-on with players as young as 21 years-old.

Heck, the Detroit Lions wide receiver Chuck Hughes was 28 when he suffered cardiac arrest in a game, compounded by an injury he suffered in a previous game!

Did not anyone know he may have had a heart issue?

Basketball had its tragic moments involving Reggie Lewis, Conrad McRae and Zeke Upshaw—all in their 20’s when their lives were cut short on the court.

Have you ever heard of Ray Chapman? He played shortstop with the Cleveland Indians a century ago and died after he was struck in the head by a pitch during a game.

Doc Powers, a catcher for the Philadelphia Phillies, sustained a game injury which necessitated surgery and died from complications following that surgery.

Evan Chambers, age 24, a minor league outfielder in the Pirates organization, died in 2013 from a heart defect. For how long was that a hidden situation?

Dick Conway was all of 19-years-old and playing with a minor league affiliate of the Yankees when he was struck in the heart by a thrown baseball…and died.

Alfredo Edmeads was but 17 years of age and playing for a Pirates minor league team when he was involved in an outfield collision, suffered brain trauma and died.

There are others, too, with deaths caused by internal bleeding from base path collisions to being hit in the chest by a pitch to one minor league player being struck by lightning during a game.

The list features, literally, hundreds of players.

Marathons have also produced some deaths due to the flesh hiding underlying problems.

That number is well over 50 with heart attacks, coronary artery abnormality, sudden arrhythmic death syndrome, mitral valve prolapse, congenial heart abnormalities, cardiac arrest and even a brain aneurysm being the hidden cause of death.

Studies have shown that the risk of such tragedy is between 0.6 and 1.9 deaths per 100,000 participants with the youngest participant in the list being 19 years old.

It’s a risk everyone takes when becoming an athlete.

Maybe another type of racing just might be more compatible here—NASCAR Racing.

There have been 29 fatalities in this sport of speed, the last involving the legendary Dale Earnhardt a little over two decades ago. Were any of these caused by medical issues of the driver…or could it have been from any mechanical failure?

Look, athletics is part of our world heritage and there are mishaps—virtually unreported—in just about every sport from the above-mentioned events to bicycle racing, swimming, soccer, golf, volleyball, hockey and, finally, boxing, where there are reports of nearly 500 boxers dying in the ring or as a result of injuries suffered during a bout.

Some boxers were as young as 18 with the latest fatality being Simiso Buthelezi, 24, of South Africa who was knocked so senseless and died from a brain bleed on June 5, 2022.

Jean Zacarias Zapata, 18, suffered a seizure after his fight and died five days later in 2021.

Patrick Day was 27 when he was knocked down so hard his head was bouncing on the canvas violently. They got him to a hospital where he began to suffer seizures and then died. A boxing promoter then said the sport needed to become “safer.”

Getting back on track with the flesh hiding medical issues, Bulgaria’s Boris Stanchov, 21, suffered cardiac arrest during his fight. In a bizarre twist of events, Stanchov was using another person’s license and medical records to fight!

Yet another bizarre incident involved Hugo Santillan, 23, of Argentina. After his fight was over and the referee was about to announce the decision, he collapsed and was found to have brain swelling and kidney failure with the rest of his organs subsequently failing. By the way, he had suffered a brutal loss the month before in Germany which led their boxing federation to ban him from fighting. His regular coach knew about it and did not coach him for this fight.

There are many, many more incidents in the world of sports and, although we all know the danger, it comes with the territory in the world of athletics.

In our sport, yes, we have lost drivers including Billy Haughton, Shelley Goudreau, Wayne Smullin, Hal Belote and Henri Filion, to name a handful, and we’ve had many incapacitated from accidents on the track but, all things considered with the speed and number of races contested, we sure beat the heck out of drivers on I-95 and other highways in safety.

So, when incidents happen on our racetracks, let’s open the starting gates of information and avoid future confrontation with our critics.

The “time” has come!

by John Berry, for Harnesslink