Great runners who have died young????

Bill McChesney

Travis Landreth

Gary Crossan won the Mt. Washington race twice (I believe)and was killed a few years later when he was run over by a train.

John Tarrant, a very good British ultra marathoner died of stomach cancer while still relatively young.

James Duffy, a Canadian who won the 1914 Boston Marathon was killed the next year during a German offensive outside Calais, France.

Pat Dengis, 4th place finisher at Boston in 1939 was a test pilot killed in a plane crash the following year.

Tim Cook, a solid runner for William and Mary in the 70s died several months ago in a car crash. He was in his 40s, but I consider that young.

Sheldon Karlin, winner of the NYC Marathon in 1972 died of a heart attack in January, 2000.

Mark Gleason - 15th at Footlocker Cross County in 1997.

Had the work ethic and was talented...died in a car accident.

8:44.6=Eric Hulst

Chris Severy of Colorado (Oct. 1998)

Jim Morrison. The greatest.

richard chelimo set a WR for 10,00m in 1993, died 29 yo.

When I say died young I mean they were still had there top running left to go. Yes, 40 is young but thats not what I'm looking for.

I don't know if they were all world-class but they were Division 1 runners. Eight Wyoming Cowboy men's cross country team members were killed in a rollover accident on Hwy. 287 near the Colorado border in September 2001. I recall about six or eight girls from the women's cross team at Iowa State were killed in a small plane crash in the 1980's.

Man this thread is depressing.

J.P. Savoie may not have been an All-American, but he was a state high-school mile record holder, a New England high-school cross-country champion, and a mamber of an NCAA-championship-winning cross-country team.___________________________________________________________

Star athletes touch us aesthetically with their grace, strength, and coordination, but few of us watching are satisfied with these physical manifestations of what we, in a more equitable universe, might ourselves have become. We want to know more - a competitor's secret desires, his intellectual curiosities, his favorite foods, his ways with dogs and small children. And through this subconscious pursuit of holistic fandom, we are occasionally surprised - and humbled - to discover that beneath an athlete's programmed sporting skills lie his most overwhelming gifts of all. Righteously, such athletes become our heroes.

When a hero dies too soon, a surreal story is scripted; we see men and women built up and then broken down by forces of fate to mercurial to reckon with, and we may lose track of where reality ends and legend begins. Desperate for some sort of resolution, our minds dutifully undertake the task of sorting it all out, assigning the proper labels and characterizations, crafting stories - blunt gestures meant to ensure a powerful memory of a life itself too powerful for our clumsy language to describe.

In the early 1970's, the U.S. was fighting in Vietnam and Bishop Brady High School of Concord, N.H. was busy building a cross-country dynasty. When John "J.P." Savoie graduated from Bishop Brady in 1973, he was already a legend, widely regarded as the finest athlete ever to wear a Green Giant uniform; in the minds of many, he still holds this distinction. Savoie captained the basketball team and was eminently capable on the hardwood, but for purposes of this story, J.P. Savoie was a runner.

As a junior he finished third in the 1971 New England Championship, having led his mates to the New Hampshire Class I state championship the week before. After again leading the Green Giants to the state crown in 1972, he returned to the New Englands and, coming from 50 yards behind in the final half-mile, crossed the line a winner by a full ten seconds, setting a record of 12:11 for the 2.5-mile course. In the spring, he set a Class I State record by grinding out a 4:19 mile. All told, Savoie at one time held over 30 cross-country records throughout New Hampshire. J.P. Savoie, who spent fewer than three decades running and roving among us, was a winner of the first magnitude. Sports were only a part of that.

Harvey Smith was an English teacher at Bishop Brady in 1966 when he started the school's cross-country program. Although he was unable to get clearance to hold practices and races until October, the team he assembled still finished second at the Class I State Championship that fall. The following year, Brady won its first of seven consecutive state titles under Smith, who has since moved on to Concord High school and has racked up ten Class L state championships in tennis. This is a man who clearly knows something about winning and accomplishment. He recently said: "J.P.'s win at the New Englands was and is my greatest moment in sports and as a coach."

Several days after arriving at Providence College for the start of his freshman year, Savoie promptly came home, ostensibly for good, because he missed his family so badly. However, Smith convinced him to return to school. In 1976 he ran on a Providence team that won the NCAA Division I national championship. After graduating with a degree in business administration, Savoie returned to the area. He continued running, coached freshman basketball at Bishop Brady and played in the city softball league. He remained close to the Smiths and occasionally babysat their children.

In April 1982, without warning, J.P. suffered a stroke that robbed him of his speech and paralyzed the right side of his body. Two months later a brain tumor was discovered. Four months after that he married a woman he had net four years earlier at a Brady-Concord High basketball game, and his health gradually improved. He underwent experimental treatments and was even able to resume light jogging for a time. But eventually the tumor's growth accelerated, and in December 1983, J.P. Savoie died. Friends describe his final weeks as painful ones, and they were glad to see him finally set free. He was 28.

The English metaphysical poet John Donne wrote: "Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind." As others have noted, some men leave bigger gaps than others. Harvey Smith, who has worked with hundreds if not thousands of young athletes in his long career, recently said: "I never go more than two or three days without thinking of J.P. I'll be at a practice and something will remind me....out of all the kids, oh, he was just the sweetest." Seventeen years after J.P.'s death, Harvey Smith's voice cracked as he recalled a living treasure.

Savoie lived as complete a life as a young man could. He was in the Friends program at Providence and was a Big Brother in Concord. He acted in the Bishop Brady Summer Theater. In talking with those who knew him, a common theme about his character persistently emerges: Giving. Caring. Terrific sense of humor. Honest. Forthright. J.P. Savoie plainly cared for the world around him, the people around him. The message we receive from his short but powerful journey on Earth is that there is no reason to wait for some ill-defined tomorrow when you can begin living and chasing your dreams today.

J.P. Savoie is in another place now, but it must be a beautiful one, for he continues to touch all of us with the rarest of gifts.

Bret Hyde

That dude who ran the very first marathon.

Bob Packowski was a junior at Navy when he died in a car accident with a few other members of his team. He ran like a 8:40 steeple or something. This was in the 1980's. He also finished pretty high up at XC nationals.

Let's not forget the gent who captained that space shuttle.

And somebody mentioned Terry Fox.

I don't know if he ever did any kind of competitive running, but he definitely died too young. Ask any Canadian about him and they'll get a bit quiet and maybe have to fight back a tear. A true hero, the Terry Fox run is an event that has been going on for many years and raised many many millions of dollars for cancer research since he was stopped, too soon, in his running shoes, near Thunder Bay, already half way across Canada, running about a marathon a day with an artificial leg.

Andy Palmer

Pete wrote:

Let's not forget the gent who captained that space shuttle.

And somebody mentioned Terry Fox.

I don't know if he ever did any kind of competitive running, but he definitely died too young. Ask any Canadian about him and they'll get a bit quiet and maybe have to fight back a tear. A true hero, the Terry Fox run is an event that has been going on for many years and raised many many millions of dollars for cancer research since he was stopped, too soon, in his running shoes, near Thunder Bay, already half way across Canada, running about a marathon a day with an artificial leg.

FloJo??? C'mon man...I wouldn't call her a great runner. I'd call her a great sneaky drug user.

Jimmy "Peach head" Gordon a black cat with red hair was the only sprinter to ever beat Bullet Bob Hayes who he didn't gain revenge upon.

Gordon beat Hayes way back in the day at the Florida high school championships. He was shot to death in a gang related incident before he ever got started.

Those Australian sprinters in "Gallipoli"