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.
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.