In a women’s 5,000 meter heat at the 2016 Rio Olympics, New Zealand’s Nikki Hamblin tripped and fell, accidentally taking American Abbey D’Agostino down with her. D’Agostino jumped right back up, but instead of chasing the pack she stopped to help Hamblin to her feet and urged her to finish the race. D’Agostino had hurt her ankle in the fall, so Hamblin hung back to encourage her in return until D’Agostino urged her to go on without her. A few days later both women received Fair Play awards, and Hamblin said simply, “I am so grateful to Abbey for picking me up.”
In the summer of 2018, twelve boys and their soccer coach were trapped deep in a flooded cave in northern Thailand. Saman Kunan had already left the Thai navy, but he came back to volunteer in the rescue. His job was to carry air tanks into the cave for the boys and the other divers. On the way back out, he ran out of air himself, lost consciousness, and died. The rescue went on, and days later every one of the boys and their coach made it out alive.
In the summer of 1941, after a prisoner escaped from Auschwitz, the camp leader picked ten men to die by starvation as punishment. One of them, Franciszek Gajowniczek, cried out that he had a wife and children. A Polish priest named Maximilian Kolbe stepped forward and asked to take his place, and to everyone’s shock the commander agreed. Kolbe died in the starvation bunker in August 1941. Gajowniczek survived the war and spent years telling people about the man who died so he could live.
On January 2, 2007, construction worker Wesley Autrey was standing on a Manhattan subway platform with his two little girls. A young film student named Cameron Hollopeter had a seizure and fell onto the tracks just as a train’s headlights appeared. Autrey jumped down, realized there wasn’t time to lift him out, and instead pressed the young man down into the shallow trough between the rails and lay on top of him. The train rolled right over them with only inches to spare, and both men lived. His girls up on the platform thought they had lost their daddy, until they heard him call out from under the train that both of them were okay.
