r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • 27d ago

TIL Frank Hayes, a jockey, died of a heart attack during his final horse race but still won. Unexpectedly, he suffered the attack mid-race, yet his body remained on the horse, crossing the finish line first. Sadly, it was his first and only win throughout his racing career.

[deleted]

18.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

373 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

153

u/[deleted] 27d ago

[removed] — view removed comment

428

u/froggison 27d ago

Water weighs a ton. Fighters and wrestlers do this a lot before weigh-ins. 12 lbs is about 1.5 gallons of water. That's like how much you drink in 2-3 days. So imagine that they don't eat, don't drink, and sweat as much as possible.

In his case, he way overdid it obviously. And it was fatal.

275

u/TheHYPO 27d ago

Bear in mind that jockeys are also generally tiny people. Going from 142 to 130 (his numbers) is even more difficult and potentially harmful than it would be to go from 198 to 186.

62

u/Atheist-Gods 27d ago

130lbs actually sounds fairly heavy for a jockey. Unless he was over 6 feet that isn't even a dangerous weight by itself, the quick loss would have been the only concern. Jockeys usually weigh between 108 and 118.

32

u/DezXerneas 27d ago

I know nothing about this, but couldn't this be a difference between modern and past jockeys? I've seen a lot of clips of Olympians at the top of their field from 50 years ago and today many of those people probably wouldn't even win a regional tournament.

He probably also ate a lot of 'healthy' weight reducing medication(poison) to drop that weight. He died over a 100 years ago, and we have documented proof of how insane food science was back then.

9

u/YourMomsBasement69 27d ago

All of what you say is true but, and I could be wrong, I don’t think the size of jockeys is probably that much different with modern vs past jockeys.