Photo Illustration by Elizabeth Brockway/The Daily Beast/Getty
If you believe Eric Lamaze, which fewer and fewer people do, the Olympic champion was given two hours to live in 2020 before he absconded from the hospital and went home to recover on his own. His vitals were failing, he says; the bleeding ulcer in his stomach was the largest the doctors had ever seen. As he left, his story goes, the needles were still in his arm.
“I told my cleaning lady, ‘Put the TV as loud as you can and throw a bucket of water on me every 30 minutes,’” Lamaze, one of the greatest show jumpers in history, claims to The Daily Beast.
Morning came, and light poured in. “For a second, the sun—whoom—went in front of me, and I swear to God, it was like an angel just flew by. My color changed,” he says, “I could breathe.” Three years later, he’s still alive.