Aries Merritt
On August 28, 2015, in Beijing, Aries Merritt ran 13.04 to win World Championship bronze in the 110m hurdles — his fastest time in three years, run with kidney function under 20 percent. Four days later, on September 1, his sister LaToya Hubbard gave him one of her kidneys at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix. Merritt had been the best hurdler on earth: world indoor champion and Olympic champion in 2012, and on September 7 that year, in Brussels, he set a world record of 12.80. Then, after the 2013 World Championships, he was diagnosed with collapsing focal segmental glomerulosclerosis, a rare kidney disease; his function had already fallen below 15 percent. Told in May 2015 he needed a transplant, he asked to race Beijing first. He came back after the surgery too: fourth at the 2016 Olympic Trials, missing Rio by a hundredth of a second; a Diamond League win in Rome in June 2017; fifth at the 2017 World Championships. He now coaches at Texas State. His world record stood for nearly fourteen years, until June 10, 2026, when Auburn's Ja'Kobe Tharp ran 12.75 in an NCAA semi-final at Hayward Field.