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.
When World War II broke out, Irena Sendler was a 29-year-old social worker in Warsaw. After the Nazis sealed some 400,000 Jews inside the ghetto, she got a permit to go in and inspect sanitary conditions, and she used it to help. Working with the underground group Zegota under the code name Jolanta, she and her partners smuggled Jewish children out and placed them in orphanages, convents, and with Polish families, keeping coded lists of where they were. In October 1943 the Gestapo arrested her. She was sentenced to death, but the underground bribed officials to set her free, and she went right back to work. Nobody knows exactly how many children she and her partners saved.
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.”
Roberto Clemente was one of baseball’s greatest stars: 3,000 hits, four batting titles, two World Series championships with the Pittsburgh Pirates. In December 1972 a massive earthquake devastated Managua, Nicaragua, and Clemente led the relief effort from Puerto Rico. When he heard that supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers, he decided to fly along himself to make sure the aid reached the people who needed it. On New Year’s Eve, the overloaded DC-7 crashed into the ocean shortly after takeoff from San Juan. He was 38, and his body was never found. He could have stayed home and sent a check, but he chose to go.
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.
