4w ago

Spectator killed by hammer weight thrown at high school track meet in Colorado

www.nbcnews.com Spectator killed by hammer weight thrown at high school track meet in Colorado

The weight, thrown by a competitor, went into the crowd rather than the field and fatally struck 57-year-old Wade Langston.

Summary

A 57-year-old spectator, Wade Langston, was killed at a high school track meet in Colorado when a hammer weight throw accidentally cleared barriers and struck him.

The incident occurred at the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs during a club sports event.

Langston, the father of a competing athlete, was pronounced dead at the scene.

Fundraising campaigns have been launched to support his family.

6 comments

It sucks for the man's family but I feel most sorry for the kid who threw the hammer. Having to live with that for the rest of your life has got to be awful.
- Personally, I don't know about "most sorry", when another kid lost his father. But yeah, it's terrible for everyone...
- The star pitcher on my little league baseball team threw a high and tight fastball that hit the batter in the face. Completely crushed the kids nose.
  Total accident obviously, but it was pretty horrific. We were all around 12-14 years old. The kid was screaming and rolling around on the ground while his parents and the coaches all tried to keep him from thrashing and keep a towel on his face to slow the bleeding.
  The kid who was pitching was fucked up from it, started crying and stormed off the field, said he would never play baseball again. He felt horrible about hurting another kid.
  I can't imagine how much worse it would be if you accidentally killed somebody. These kinds of accidents are so brutal because nobody did anything wrong, just supremely bad luck.
- Yeah I was talking with my wife along these lines. Your just doing a sport and now you have to live with killing someone for the rest of your life.

This is nowhere near the top of my anxieties list, but since I used to have to shoot track and field events when I was doing news videography, I can't say I never saw a hammer throw or javelin and thought, "please don't hit me..."
- I went to a tiny K-12 private school for my last two years of high school. I was the "best" shot and disc thrower on a pair of very, very weak years for the track & field team (tell me again how Clay from '95 got recruited by Harvard, Brianna... ONE... MORE... TIME... PLEASE 😤).
  The thing about that is when a team is that stretched for bodies and coaches, the middle school kids will practice with the high schoolers, and if you think high schoolers don't pay attention, imagine a gaggle of 13 year olds who are mostly doing this because it counts as a semester of PE (I understand that by grabbing them early they eventually developed several of them into decent middle-distance runners). I never actually hit one, but especially in my senior year I spent a lot of time yelling at tweens to get the hell out of the discus cone, and even had a couple of kids almost get their toes broken by a little 25-foot standing throw from one of the other kids I was silently conned into coaching once the adults all realized my annoyance came out as profane but helpful instruction.
  I won a Team Spirit award for it, but didn't care enough to remember when the team banquet was, LOL.

6 comments