On September 24, 1988, Canadian sailor Lawrence Lemieux was racing in the Finn class at the Seoul Olympics and was on course to finish second in that day’s race. The wind had kicked up to about 35 knots when he spotted a capsized boat on a nearby course. Two Singapore sailors, Shaw Her Siew and Joseph Chan, were in the water. Siew was clinging to the hull, and Chan, badly hurt, was about 20 meters away. Lemieux turned his boat around, dragged Chan aboard, rescued Siew, and held his boat against the wind until a Korean Navy boat arrived. His medal hopes were gone, but the IOC honored him with the Pierre de Coubertin medal for sportsmanship.
At the 1964 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Italian bobsledder Eugenio Monti was the most dominant driver of his era. During the two-man event, the British team of Tony Nash and Robin Dixon suffered a broken axle bolt on their sled in their first run, and without a replacement they were finished. Monti lent them one of his spare bolts. The British pair went on to win the gold medal, and Monti and his partner took bronze. Monti became the first person to receive the Pierre de Coubertin medal for sportsmanship.
On January 2, 2023, in front of a national TV audience, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin made a tackle against the Cincinnati Bengals, stood up, and collapsed. His heart had stopped. Within seconds the medical staff were on the field, and assistant athletic trainer Denny Kellington, who had joined the Bills in 2017, started CPR. Doctors said Hamlin lost his pulse and had to be revived with CPR and a defibrillator, and that the quick response saved not only his life but his brain function. Head coach Sean McDermott said Kellington stepped up and took charge, and he credited him with saving Damar’s life.
In July 1948, during the Berlin Airlift, American pilot Gail Halvorsen met about 30 hungry kids at the barbed wire fence at Tempelhof airfield. All he had in his pocket were two sticks of gum, so he broke them in half and passed them through the fence. The kids who got gum tore up the wrappers and shared the strips so the others could at least smell them. Halvorsen was so moved that he promised to drop candy the next day and told them they’d know his plane because he would wiggle the wings. He started tying candy and gum to makeshift parachutes, and the idea grew into Operation Little Vittles. He lived to be 101, still known around the world as the Candy Bomber.
