At the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Finland’s Lasse Viren was one of the favorites in the 10,000 meters. Then on the 12th lap, he got tangled up with Tunisia’s Mohamad Gammoudi and both men went down on the track. That should’ve been the end of his race. Instead, Viren got up fast, caught the leaders, and took over the pace. He ran his last lap in 56.4 seconds and won the gold medal. His time was a world record. One Olympic historian called it surely the only track world record ever set by somebody who fell during the race. Falling isn’t what defines you. What you do in the next few seconds does.
In 1993, college basketball coach Jim Valvano, who had led North Carolina State to the 1983 national championship, was dying of cancer. At the first ESPYS awards, he received the Arthur Ashe Courage Award. He’d been sick with a fever that day and had to be helped onto the stage, but then he gave the speech of a lifetime. He told everybody to do three things every day: laugh, think, and have your emotions moved to tears. “If you laugh, you think and you cry, that’s a full day.” He announced a cancer research foundation with the motto, “Don’t give up, don’t ever give up.” He ended, “Cancer can take away all my physical abilities. It cannot touch my mind, it cannot touch my heart, and it cannot touch my soul.”
In the early hours of September 26, 1983, at the height of the Cold War, Soviet officer Stanislav Petrov was on duty at a nuclear early warning center when the computers announced that the United States had launched missiles. His training said to report it up the chain immediately. “All I had to do was to reach for the phone,” he said later, “but I couldn’t move. I felt like I was sitting on a hot frying pan.” Something didn’t add up, so he reported a system malfunction instead. Twenty-three minutes later nothing had happened. It turned out satellites had mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for missile engines. One man’s calm judgment may have kept the world out of a nuclear war.
Shortly before 1 a.m. on February 3, 1943, a German submarine torpedoed the Army transport ship Dorchester in the icy North Atlantic, with 902 men aboard. In less than 20 minutes it would sink. In the chaos, four Army chaplains, a Methodist minister, a Jewish rabbi, a Catholic priest, and a Dutch Reformed minister, moved among the men, calming them, praying, and handing out life jackets. When the life jackets ran out, all four took off their own and gave them to four frightened young men. One survivor called it “the finest thing I have seen or hope to see this side of heaven.” As the ship went down, men in the rafts saw the four chaplains with arms linked, praying together.
Polycarp was an old man, the bishop of Smyrna, and tradition says he had been taught by the apostle John. Sometime in the second century, Roman authorities came to arrest him. He could have run, but he said, “The will of God be done.” When the officers arrived, he ordered food and drink set out for them and asked for an hour to pray. He prayed for two hours. In the stadium, the proconsul urged him to swear by Caesar, curse Christ, and go free. Polycarp answered, “Eighty and six years have I served Him, and He never did me any injury: how then can I blaspheme my King and my Saviour?” He was burned at the stake.
