You win some, you lose some, hopefully you live through them all… but not always.
More than a century ago, there was a jockey who won his race but didn’t live to tell the tale.
That jockey was Frank Hayes, and originally he wasn’t supposed to be on the horse at all.
Hayes was a stable hand from Brooklyn who had to substitute in as a jockey.
On June 4, 1923, he was riding a horse named Sweet Kiss at the famed Belmont Park racetrack in New York.
A horse named Gimme was the favorite to win, though Sweet Kiss, a 20-1 longshot, kept near the leader as the two-mile steeplechase went on.
On the final turn the two nearly collided, but then Sweet Kiss took off and crossed the finish line a length and a half ahead of her rival.
Only her jockey was in no condition to celebrate.
After finishing the race Frank Hayes fell out of his saddle onto the ground.
A doctor on the scene said he had suffered a fatal heart attack during the race.
Hayes was either 22 or 35, depending on which articles you read; either way it was pretty young for a fatal heart attack.
One theory is that what actually did him in was his effort to make weight for the race.
He had to cut like 10 pounds in 24 hours, which he did by exercising a ton and denying himself water.
And while that did get him under the weight limit, it may have also helped him become the first jockey to posthumously win a horse race.
Hayes was buried days later in the racing silks he wore; meanwhile Sweet Kiss the horse also never raced again.
I guess the other jockeys thought it might be bad luck to ride the horse that had been nicknamed “Sweet Kiss of Death.”
No sport wants to have a Frank Hayes moment, but at least a few sports have plans in place in case they do.
One of them is chess: there are notations for all sorts of unusual ways a match might end, like a game concluding because of a time forfeit, an emergency or “a third party adjudication process.”
There’s also a way to mark in the notation if a chess game concluded because one of the players had not lived to see a regular finish.
Frank Hayes: The jockey who won a race despite being dead (CNN
Standard: Portable Game Notation Specification and Implementation Guide
If you’re reading this, you lived long enough to back our show on Patreon
Image from the Buffalo Courier via Newspapers.com