Death of a Sports Star

What do you hear at the bottom of the ocean? How does it feel to swim with whales? Or make friends with an octopus? Come and find out. This is Life Under Water.

Wildlife filmmaker and TV personality Hannah Stitfall wants to take you the world below the waves. She’ll be chatting to freedivers, marine biologists, submarine pilots and more, hearing mind-boggling stories about the oceans-deep and its inhabitants. We explore The Lost City. We hang out with your favourite animals. The hypnotic sound design and storytelling will drop you right there.

Oceans: Life Under Water is brought to you by Crowd Network and Greenpeace UK, which is how these stories can be told so beautifully but also responsibly.

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NASCAR racing is never the same after Dale Earnhardt’s death. It sounds dramatic, but that’s what Dale means to people. 

There’s never been a race car driver like him. He’s loved by most, for the same reason he’s hated by the rest. He races harder than anyone ever has. And his death changes NASCAR forever.

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Hansie Cronje was South Africa’s captain, endorsed by Nelson Mandela. But he was also a scam artist, mixing with criminals. His story has lies, greed, bribery, threats, corruption and ultimately a plane crash that ended his life.

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WARNING: this episode contains references to suicide.

Robert Enke needs to talk. But it's harder than it looks. Especially with all that baggage from the past and worries about the future. He's the kid from East Germany who made it to the Bundesliga. But he's also the man who's tormented by inner-demons - even if you can't quite see it.

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We all know that old line about football and life and death. But in Colombia in the 1990s - run by drug cartels - nothing makes sense. And when a footballer for the national side makes a critical mistake, the repercussions will echo around the world.

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Vitas Gerulaitis is the New York native turned global celebrity. The immigrant outsider shaking up an establishment sport. Living as large as the Times Square billboards. But when the money is spent, and the momentum slows, what’s left? And when you live as fast as Vitas, can you hold fast to anything?

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WARNING: this episode contains references to murder and suicide.

In professional wrestling, you don’t know where fantasy ends and reality starts. But Chris Benoit was a method actor. He liked realness. And after years of drugs and injuries, that had deadly consequences.

If you’ve been affected by any of the issues spoken about in this podcast, please go to crowdnetwork.co.uk/helplines to find a list of people you can go to for help.

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If you were asked to design a super-hero to save America, he’d probably look like Pat. But what Pat looks like and who he really is are two very different things. He reads poetry and the Qur'an and the Communist Manifesto. He fights tooth and nail to make it in the NFL, so how did he end up giving it all up to join the army and risk getting killed?

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He did things no other football manager had ever done. He came from hardship and took a struggling club to the top of the world. Football saved him, gave him a purpose. All until one dark autumn night when two countries met with so much at stake and the pressure finally became too much.

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In the whole history of boxing, there cannot be a story murkier than Sonny Liston’s. And there’s no sport murkier than boxing. Even when Sonny was heavyweight champion of the world – one of the most famous men on the planet – the public didn’t really know him. He was unloved and unwanted.  

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