The detective stood in a long line outside a courthouse in Mpumalanga, South Africa.

It was the morning of November 18, 2019.

He was fifty-four years old.

And he was exhausted.

Muzi Makhubela had been waiting nearly six years for this day.

He was an investigator on a violent robbery case.

Back in 2014, a group of armed men stormed into a couple’s farmhouse.

They brutally beat the couple.

They made off with electronics, jewelry, weapons, and other valuables.

Muzi and his team eventually caught the criminals.

They even recovered some of the stolen items.

Now Muzi had one of those items with him.

He was supposed to present it as evidence at today’s trial.

Muzi had done court duty plenty of times in his career.

But today, he felt drained.

On top of trial prep for this case, he had been working other active cases.

He was also mentoring junior detectives.

He was not young and energetic anymore.

He was nearing retirement age.

All these obligations were taking a toll.

But the biggest thing exhausting Muzi was this robbery case itself.

It had been full of delays and complications.

It had taken so long to bring this to trial that the evidence Muzi was holding had actually been returned to the victim couple.

They used it until the trial finally happened.

Now Muzi was determined to see it through.

The criminals were incredibly violent.

They needed to be behind bars.

Muzi entered the courthouse.

He passed through the security checkpoint.

He hoped the guards were appropriately on alert.

In his experience, violent offenders often had violent friends.

In Mpumalanga, this kind of crime was rampant.

It wasn’t unheard of for criminals to barge into court proceedings.

They retaliated against cops or prosecution.

But Muzi got through security without issue.

No suspicious people.

No disruptions.

He made his way into the courtroom.

The space was already full.

The defense, the jury, the prosecutors, and the judge were all there.

Members of the public sat in the gallery.

Muzi went over and sat at the prosecution table.

He would remain there until it was his turn to present.

He put the evidence down in his lap.

He turned and gave a quick wave to the prosecutor.

Her name was Adelaide Ferreira-Watt.

She sat at the table as well, going over her trial notes.

Muzi had worked with Adelaide before.

They got along well.

She was a total pro.

Her being on board meant this case had a good chance of getting a conviction.

Adelaide waved back and quickly returned to her notes.

Muzi looked around the courtroom.

Everything seemed quiet.

No sign of gang members charging in to cause problems.

He hoped it would stay this way.

The judge called the court to order.

The trial started.

Adelaide got up and began to present the case.

Despite waiting nearly six years to get to this point, Muzi felt an enormous wave of exhaustion sweep over him.

He wasn’t energized.

It was the opposite.

It was relief.

The room was hot.

He was tired.

His eyelids got heavier and heavier.

His head slumped to the side.

He dozed off.

For a couple of minutes, he slept.

Nobody even noticed.

Nobody cared.

Everything was okay.

Then there was a sudden, very loud scraping sound.

Chairs moving across the floor.

It woke Muzi up abruptly.

He was startled.

When he jolted awake, he dropped the evidence onto the ground.

He got up.

He got his bearings.

It was embarrassing.

Did anybody see me asleep?

Everyone was moving around.

He saw the evidence on the ground.

He went under the table.

He scooped it back up.

As he sat back up, he heard a deafening bang echo through the courtroom.

He still didn’t know what was going on.

He had just woken up.

Chaos.

Then he heard a scream from his right.

He turned.

The scream came from Adelaide.

Muzi looked over the table.

Adelaide was on the ground.

She was clutching her hip.

Blood gushed from it.

She had been attacked.

That loud bang was almost certainly a gunshot.

The friends of the criminals have stormed the courthouse, Muzi thought.

They’ve attacked Adelaide.

Are there more shooters?

Are there more attackers?

Muzi, who had only woken up thirty seconds ago, began looking around for perpetrators.

A gunman.

Someone attacking.

All he saw was chaos.

People trying to flee.

Others rushing to Adelaide to try to help.

No perpetrators.

No gunmen.

Nothing.

Just chaos.

For a second, Muzi sat there.

Paralyzed by shock.

Still getting his bearings.

Then he realized something.

There was no gunman.

There was no perpetrator.

There was nothing.

That could only mean one thing.

To understand what happened inside that courtroom, you first have to understand something about South African police procedure.

After evidence is taken from a crime scene, it’s examined and determined to be safe.

Then it’s transferred to an exhibit room until trial.

But in South Africa, there are exceptions.

This trial had taken almost six years to start.

Because of that time lag, some of the evidence recovered from the robbers’ homes had been returned to the victim couple.

They could use it until the trial finally happened.

The couple had returned that particular evidence to the police that morning.

Muzi was charged with bringing it to court.

And literally holding it.

But Muzi did not double-check to make sure this evidence was safe to be in a courtroom.

Sometime after Muzi fell asleep, the judge announced it was time for a break.

The scraping of chairs that woke him up was the sound of people getting up to leave.

Muzi sat up suddenly.

He dropped the evidence.

That evidence was a shotgun.

When Muzi reached down to grab it, the gun was still loaded.

He accidentally hit the trigger.

He fired it.

The bullet hit Adelaide.

It severed an artery.

It killed her.

Muzi was so confused by the chaos that at first he didn’t even realize he had fired the gun.

He scooped it up.

He heard the bang.

What’s going on here?

When he realized there was no gunman, he looked down.

The shotgun was aimed right at Adelaide.

He must have shot her.

Muzi ultimately pleaded guilty to culpable homicide and negligence.

He was ordered to serve a six-year prison sentence.

It was suspended.

That was the first story.

Here is the second.

On the morning of July 14, 1912, a twenty-one-year-old athlete named Francisco Lázaro stood in his hotel room in Stockholm, Sweden.

He was getting dressed for the day.

He was in Sweden to run the marathon in the Olympics.

He was representing Portugal.

This was his home country’s very first Olympics.

Lázaro was one of only a few Portuguese athletes at the games.

He believed he stood the best chance at bringing home a medal.

He wasn’t even that nervous.

He knew he was an elite runner.

Even though he was just twenty-one, he had already won three huge marathons in Portugal.

He was a star back home.

But if he wanted to win on the world stage, he needed to come extremely prepared.

That’s exactly what he had done.

He had trained for months.

He had recently gotten a medical exam to confirm he was healthy.

He had begun thinking about little ways to give himself a boost.

What to fuel.

What to put in his body.

Even what to put on his body.

The smallest detail could make the difference between winning and losing.

He spent the next hour putting on the specific clothes he had selected.

He ate a perfectly balanced light meal containing carbohydrates and protein.

Exactly what he had mapped out.

He had been warned it was supposed to be very hot on race day.

Lázaro saw this as an advantage.

He was from Portugal, where it often got much hotter than Sweden.

He already knew how to protect himself from the sun and the heat.

Before he knew it, he was ready.

He left his hotel room.

He was on his way to compete in the Olympics.

A few hours later, around 1:45 p.m., Lázaro walked out into the middle of Stockholm’s massive stadium.

The race would start there.

Race officials directed him and sixty-seven other competitors to their places at the starting line.

Lázaro was confident.

So confident that he called out to a nearby reporter.

“I win or I die,” he said.

The runners took their spots on the starting line.

Direct sunlight.

Unbelievably hot.

In the shade, it was already ninety degrees.

Sweltering.

Lázaro looked up and down the line.

Everybody else looked flushed.

They were sweating profusely.

They looked not ready to run 26.2 miles in this heat.

They looked overwhelmed.

Lázaro was not overwhelmed.

He was prepared.

Lázaro wasn’t even sweating.

He could hear the roar of thousands of people in the stands.

He stood there taking it all in.

Appreciating how special this moment really was.

The marathon was a major event.

The stadium was completely sold out.

Even the king and queen of Sweden were supposed to be somewhere in the crowd.

Lázaro had a certainty.

When this race was finished, all those people, even royalty, would know his name.

The announcer told the runners to take their marks.

Adrenaline surged through him.

A hush fell over the crowd.

The runners stopped moving.

They tensed, waiting for the signal.

Bang.

The starting gun went off.

Everyone lunged forward.

Jostling.

Lázaro was pushed back toward the middle of the pack.

He was surprised by how quick the overall pace was.

But he wasn’t worried.

He had studied this course extensively.

He knew he would have a chance to get out in front soon.

The route was flat.

But Lázaro was used to competing in Portugal, which had much more mountainous terrain.

Once the other runners got tired from the heat, he would still be feeling fine.

He could move out in front.

He decided to hang back.

Wait for his move.

For the next hour and a half, he stuck to his plan.

He kept his pace steady in the back.

At some point, people would begin falling off.

The heat would wear them down.

He would make his way up.

He wasn’t rushing.

He was waiting.

Biding his time.

Staying confident.

He even gave another sound bite to a reporter on the road.

“I’m feeling great for the first half of this marathon,” he said.

He felt like he was running the race of his life.

Everything in his training and background had prepared him to excel.

He consistently moved past runners.

Some were really struggling in the heat.

They weren’t used to it.

Some had stopped running altogether.

They put their hands on their knees.

Others just sat on the ground, unable to get up.

Everything was playing out exactly the way Lázaro expected.

He was making his move slowly but surely toward the front of the pack.

Then something changed.

Around the nineteen-mile mark.

His legs felt heavy.

A lead-like feeling.

A few minutes later, his vision started to get blurry.

He kept running.

He told himself he was fine.

This is just late-race fatigue, he thought.

Marathon runners often say the real halfway point is not thirteen miles.

It’s twenty miles.

The last six miles are brutally hard.

So Lázaro worked as hard as he could.

One foot in front of the other.

He told himself it was worth it.

At the end of this, a stadium packed with people would be screaming his name.

He could still win.

Then his legs went from heavy to completely giving out.

He slammed to the ground.

His whole body began to convulse.

Within the hour, an emergency doctor at a local hospital greeted a crew of Olympic medical staff.

They wheeled in a man on a stretcher.

His name was Francisco Lázaro.

He had collapsed in the middle of the marathon.

The doctor was not surprised.

Olympic paramedics had been swamped all day.

Other marathon runners had gotten sick from the oppressive heat.

But as soon as the doctor began examining Lázaro, he knew this case was different.

Much more serious.

His other patients had mild symptoms.

Sweating.

General fatigue.

Dizziness.

Easily cured by water and cooling off.

Lázaro was twitching and convulsing.

He was shouting deliriously that he had won the race.

The doctor rushed him into an exam room.

He took his temperature.

It was 106.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Critical.

A temperature that high is often fatal.

Lázaro’s organs were likely already shutting down.

The doctor yelled for nurses.

Water.

Ice.

Lázaro did not respond to treatment.

As the hours passed, he got worse.

The doctor and his team worked through the night.

They tried to stabilize him.

The next morning, Lázaro died.

The doctor could not shake the feeling that something was off about Lázaro’s death.

Heat stroke can be deadly.

Lázaro had a very bad case.

But lots of runners got heat stroke during that marathon.

All of them were fine.

The doctor decided to run some tests.

Maybe there was an underlying illness.

Something else to blame.

When the tests came back, the results made Lázaro famous.

Remember, Lázaro had put a lot of thought into preparing for this race.

He trained hard.

He ate right.

He chose the right clothes.

The right shoes.

And critically, he took very specific measures to protect himself from the heat.

At first, it seemed like all those measures had paid off.

When Lázaro looked down the line at the start, all the other runners were pouring sweat.

Flushed.

Looking horrible.

Everybody was exhausted before they even started.

But not Lázaro.

He wasn’t even sweating.

That was because of one of the precautions he had taken.

But not sweating in that type of heat was actually a very bad thing.

Sweat is the body’s way of cooling itself down.

Lázaro’s lack of sweat was a sign that he was in danger.

Lázaro was so prepared that he went out and found what he thought would be the best and most powerful sunscreen option ever.

A substance called suet.

It’s a type of animal fat.

Typically used in cooking or making candles and soap.

Sometimes used for skincare because it has nutrients.

Lázaro believed that because suet is very thick, it would act as a barrier against the intensity of the sun.

He slathered a bunch of suet all over his body just before the race.

What he didn’t anticipate was that the suet would work too well.

It was so thick that it clogged the pores in his skin.

It prevented anything from passing through.

Even sweat.

Without a way to cool itself down, Lázaro’s body essentially turned into a furnace.

It cooked him from the inside out.

The weekend after Lázaro’s death, the Olympics held a memorial service for him.

Over twenty thousand people attended.

They paid tribute to him.

It’s probably not the type of fame he had hoped for.

But his name is still frequently referenced today in Portugal.

The Portuguese refer to someone who looks sick and bedraggled as looking like Lázaro.

Two men.

Two events they had worked toward for years.

One fell asleep at the wrong moment.

One prepared too well for the wrong thing.

Confidence did not save either of them.

It became the death of them.