In just the past one month the life of two young athletes have been cut short. On Friday, 20-year-old Tarania Clarke was fatally stabbed during a fight with another woman over a cellphone.
Clarke, captain of the Waterhouse FC in Jamaica’s Women’s League, had just made her senior international debut for the Reggae Girlz in September, scoring a goal in a 12-1 win over Cuba in an Olympic qualifying match.
Clarke’s death comes at a time when the sporting world was also mourning the death of Paralympic champion Marieke Vervoort who chose to end her life through euthanasia.
Less than a month ago, Florian “Flo” Janny, a goalkeeper currently under contract with the EHC Black Wings team in Linz, Austria was shot and killed together with his girlfriend and her family by the latter’s jealous ex-boyfriend.
We would never know the heights these athletes could have reached. In a blink of an eye, their dreams, aspirations and future have been ripped away.
Twenty five years ago, the sporting world was jolted by the brual muder of Colombian footballer Andres Escobar. Escobar was shot multiple times and killed all because of a mistake on the pitch thta cost the Colombian team from progressing further in the 1994 World Cup.
He had conceded an own goal in the match against the USA, that paid put to the Colombian sides World Cup hopes.
More than 120,000 people attended his funeral while his birth city of Medelin unveiled a statue in his honour in 2002. Humberto Castro Muñoz, who was responsible for shooting the footballer six times, was released from prison in 2005 after spending just 11 years in prision.
Ben Wilson was the number one ranked high school basketball player in American going into his senior year. In 1984, the 17-year-old seen as “Magic Johnson with a jump shot” was tragically shot dead by another student.
On the fateful day, Wilson went to meet his girlfriend Jetun Rush, with whom he had a child early in 1984, a son named Brandon. Rush would neither speak to Wilson nor let him see his child. After failing to speak to her, the upset Wilson bumped into Billy Moore and following an argument was shot twice by the latter.
Brandon, who was 10 weeks old when his father died, went on to play basketball for the University of Maryland-Eastern Shore, wearing Wilson’s number 25.
With just two seasons to his name, Darrent Williams was seen as a stalwart on the defensive end for the Denver Broncos in thee NFL. While attending a birthday party for the then-Nuggets player Kenyon Martin, teammate Brandon Marshall got into a verbal dispute with members of a gang at the club they were partying in.
As the duo and two other friends were driving away from the club, one of the gang member Willie D. Clark fired at the car and it struck Williams in the neck.
He was only 24 years old when he was tragically killed.
Figure skater Denis Ten was murdered at the age of 25 just over a year ago. Ten was said to have got into a confrontation in Kazakhstan with a group of people attempting to steal a mirror from his car. When the argument turned violent, he was stabbed to death.
Born in Kazakhstan to a family of Korean descent, Ten was Kazakhstan’s first medalist in figure skating. He won bronze at the Winter Olympics in Sochi in 2014.
The list of athletes, whose careers have came to an abrupt end is just too many. One minute, they are at the top of the world with the prospect of sporting accolades, and in the next minute they are just reduced to memories.
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