Athletes Who've Suffered Cardiac Arrest While Competing

For all sport can teach us about teamwork, perseverance, and dedication, it also has plenty to teach us about pain — both the kind you can play through, and the kind you can't. For every athlete who has managed to complete their careers relatively free of injury or health issues, there are scores more who have suffered serious, even life-changing, mishaps on their chosen fields of play. Sure, you can make the argument that pro athletes are paid millions of dollars to put their safety on the line while you toil away at your far-less-lucrative-yet-still-super-dangerous job as a sanitation worker (via Business Insider), but at least you don't have to collect trash while J.J. Watt is trying to take your head off.

From hockey to football (both kinds) to boxing to distance running, athletes regularly engage in the kind of intense physical activity that would have most of us weeping like toddlers after five minutes, and even the most conditioned of bodies can be pushed beyond their limits to catastrophic effect. The athletes we'll be looking at today — the ones who are still with us, that is — know this all too well, as they all suffered that most terrifying and dangerous of medical maladies, cardiac arrest, right in the middle of competition.

Everybody knows that NFL football is a violent sport, but the play that very nearly ended the life of Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin didn't exactly look like one that should have resulted in serious injury, much less a medical emergency. In the first quarter of a Monday night game against the Cincinnati Bengals on January 2, 2023, Hamlin tackled receiver Tee Higgins, absorbing a reasonably hard shot to the chest in the process. Hamlin stood up, took a couple of steps, and collapsed — and as Bills medical staff worked on him, it became clear that something was very wrong (via The New York Times).

Hamlin was transported from the field in an ambulance, and it was later reported that he had likely been struck by a condition known as commotio cordis, in which an impact to the chest delivered in a very specific spot at a key moment in the cardiac cycle can cause the heart to simply stop, per NPR. After a week recovering at the University of Cincinnati Medical Center, Hamlin was discharged to go home to Buffalo, where he was promptly checked back in to the hospital for further monitoring (via CNN). As of this writing, his recovery appears to be coming along nicely; nine days after the incident, the Bills reported via Twitter that Hamlin had been released from Buffalo General Medical Center. But his shocking close call with death, broadcast live on national television, will long linger in the minds of NFL fans.

Oddly, a 2020 meeting between the St. Louis Blues and the Anaheim Ducks was the setting for another scary, albeit slightly less dramatic, incident involving a cardiac episode. As he was sitting on the bench, Blues defenseman Jay Bouwmeester suddenly began feeling a little off — and then, a lot off. "It all just came pretty suddenly," Bouwmeester would later say (via People). "Everything up to that point was normal. I hadn't been sick or had much going on. It was completely out of the blue."

"It" was a slight case of cardiac arrest, and while it was obviously a frightening circumstance, Bouwmeester had nothing but gratitude for the Blues' medical staff, saying that the event took place "in the absolute best place that it could happen" and crediting the team's doctors with saving his life with their quick deployment of the defibrillator. Bouwmeester was placed on injured reserve for the remainder of the season, after which he "quietly" retired, according to The Athletic. The proud owner of a new cardioverter defibrillator implanted in his chest, Bouwmeester is now living a relatively normal life — and understandably, after his distinguished 17-year NHL career that included a Stanley Cup win, he never considered returning to the ice. "I knew I was done essentially when it happened, to be quite honest," he said.

While pretty much all sports are physically demanding, few athletes are possessed of more robust endurance than distance runners. That's why it was particularly shocking when, in 2021, elite runner Meghan Roth suddenly collapsed during the eighth mile of the Boston Marathon, according to CBS News. "It happened in seconds," Roth remembered. "I passed out. I don't remember hitting the ground." Fortunately for her, acquaintance and fellow runner Nick Haney — who happened to hold down a day job as a firefighter — was also taking part in the marathon, and immediately sprang into action. "The fact that I knew who this person was made it a lot more real," Haney said. "At work you're not used to going on people we know or care about."

Per The Washington Post, Haney was joined by spectator and retired nurse Marie Rogers and others, all of whom took turns administering CPR until an ambulance made its way to the scene. Roth was rushed to the hospital, where she too was fitted with an implantable cardioverter defibrillator and discharged just four days after the heart attack. Going down in the middle of the Boston Marathon certainly makes for a dramatic story — but for a distance runner, accustomed to training on long, empty stretches of road in the middle of nowhere, it could hardly have happened in a more fortunate setting.

The death of Loyola Marymount University forward Hank Gathers was shocking not only due to his young age (only 23), but because he seemed absolutely destined for stardom. According to History, Gathers had led the nation in scoring as a junior, and he entered his senior season prepared to set the basketball world on fire — but there was a small hiccup. Early in the season, Gathers collapsed on the court, but he quickly recovered. While it was unclear what exactly had happened, he was prescribed heart medication — and cleared to continue playing.

On March 4, 1990, Gathers had just laid down a wicked dunk when he once again collapsed while returning to mid-court. This time, he regained consciousness only briefly, and after being taken to the hospital, he passed away. An autopsy would later conclude that Gathers was living with an undiagnosed condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, which results in a thickened heart muscle and decreased blood flow (via Mayo Clinic). An anonymous cardiologist familiar with Gathers' history was quoted by the Los Angeles Times (via ESPN) as saying that Gathers had been told by his medical team to stop playing basketball, but that "Hank Gathers was going to play ... It didn't matter what some doctor told him."

At the Monterey Bay Half Marathon in December 2022, potential disaster struck not once, but twice. Per USA Today, about a quarter of the way into the race, 67-year-old Gregory Gonzales went into cardiac arrest and went down hard; fortunately for him, also running that day was Dr. Steven Lome (pictured above), a cardiologist who immediately recognized the cardiac event for what it was. After performing six minutes of chest compressions, Lome gave Gonzales over to emergency personnel, who defibrillated him and carted him off to the hospital.

Lome then composed himself and finished the race — at which point he saw another participant, 56-year-old Michael Heilemann, go down in an extremely similar fashion. "He had a head wound, completely unresponsive, not breathing, no pulse," Lome later told NBC News. "So I decided, okay, let's do it again." And that is exactly what he did, jumping into CPR mode until medical staff could assist. As improbable as it might seem that two separate race participants could have heart attacks in the immediate vicinity of the same cardiologist miles apart, the outcome was perhaps even more so: Both Gonzales and Heilemann fully recovered, and were even able to take part in an emotional reunion with Dr. Lome on the Today show, during which the runners credited the good doctor with saving their lives.

More than five decades prior to Damar Hamlin's 2023 scare, an eerily similar situation played out during a game between the Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears. Detroit wide receiver Chuck Hughes (No. 85, pictured above after making a tackle) had just been subbed in for an injured teammate when, after being taken down following a reception with 62 seconds left in the game, he collapsed face-down to the turf. Hughes was quickly whisked off the field, but no medical intervention could have saved him; he had suffered a massive, fatal heart attack, becoming the first (and thus far, only) NFL player to die during a game, per The Sporting News.

Hughes' widow Sharon was watching when Hamlin's injury occurred, and she told NBC News that she spent that night lying awake, thinking about the young man's family. Fortunately, Hamlin's story had a much happier ending — and while it's easy to blame the violence of the sport when tragedy strikes, Sharon Hughes urged fans not to, pointing out that her husband had loved football all of his life. "You can't blame football," she said. "I never did."