Bob Reilly remembers the kid’s body being put in a coffin, and the coffin getting hoisted into a beat-up van, and the van driving 150 miles on a dirt road until it reached the family’s mud hut in an East Africa village. It was ages ago, in the 1970s, and the kid’s name was John.
“He dropped dead running a 10,000-meter race,” Reilly says now. “These tragedies happen in every sport. You can go out jogging and drop dead of a heart attack. But the purpose of sports is not to inflict injury. We can’t ever forget that or what do we become? We become barbaric.”





