At the 1988 Winter Olympics, speedskater Dan Jansen learned just five hours before his 500-meter race that his sister Jane had died of leukemia. He skated anyway and fell. Four days later he fell again in the 1,000. In 1992 he came up short again. In 1994 he slipped in the 500 and finished eighth, and he admitted, “Maybe it’s not meant to be.” But he vowed not to quit. In his final Olympic race, the 1,000 meters, he won gold in a world record time. Then he took a victory lap carrying his baby daughter, whose name was Jane. Disappointment is not the end of the story for those who keep going.
In 1849 Harriet Tubman learned that she was about to be sold, so she escaped slavery in Maryland and made it to freedom. Most people would have stayed safe up north. She went back. Over about ten years, in about thirteen separate trips, she slipped back into Maryland’s Eastern Shore and led around 70 people to freedom, including her brothers and their families, and gave instructions to dozens more. Abolitionists called her Moses. Years later, speaking at a convention in 1896, she said, “I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say: I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”
On May 1, 2023, a small plane went down in the Colombian Amazon. The mother and two pilots died, but four children, ages 13, 9, 4, and 1, survived the crash and wandered into the jungle looking for help. For weeks soldiers and Indigenous volunteers searched, finding a tiny drinking bottle, scissors, a hair tie, a makeshift shelter, and little footprints. On the 40th day the radio crackled with the code words: “Miracle, miracle, miracle, miracle.” All four were alive. Their family said 13-year-old Lesly had grown up knowing which fruits were safe and how to care for a baby, and she kept her younger siblings going until help came.
Wilma Rudolph was born premature, the 20th of 22 children, and as a little girl she battled pneumonia, scarlet fever, and polio, which left her with a weak leg and a brace. Because of segregation she couldn’t get treatment at the local hospital, so every week she and her mother rode a bus 100 miles round trip to Nashville. At home her family massaged her leg four times a day. By age nine she was walking without the brace. “My doctor told me I would never walk again,” she once said. “My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.” In 1960 in Rome she won three Olympic gold medals, the first American woman to do that at a single Games, and cemented her status as the fastest woman in the world.
On a foggy morning, February 2, 1949, golf champion Ben Hogan and his wife Valerie were driving home to Fort Worth on a two-lane Texas highway when a Greyhound bus trying to pass a truck came straight at them in their lane. At the last second Hogan threw himself across his wife. The steering wheel was driven through the seat where he had been sitting, and he was convinced he would have been crushed. He ended up with a double fracture of his pelvis, a broken collarbone, a broken ankle, and a chipped rib, and blood clots nearly killed him. Sixteen months later he was at Merion for the 1950 U.S. Open, wilted in the heat on the final day but still forced a playoff, and won it.
