Three-Time Olympian Jenny Simpson Retires After Rare Heart Condition Stopped Her Heart Mid-Race

Jenny Simpson spent nearly two decades building a career on her heart's ability to run faster and longer than almost any American woman in history. In June, that same heart nearly killed her.

The three-time Olympian and 2011 world champion in the 1,500 meters collapsed while pacing a group of girls during a milelong race in Raleigh, North Carolina, according to CBS News. She was 39. She went into cardiac arrest on the track and doesn't remember any of it.

She's alive because of where she happened to be standing.

Joey Pointer, CEO of running retailer Fleet Feet, had hired Simpson as the company's chief running officer earlier this year. His wife, Ivy Pointer, is a pediatric intensive care unit physician. The couple has a child with congenital heart disease, so they carry an automated external defibrillator with them, CBS News reported.

When Simpson went down, Ivy Pointer told CBS News she knew immediately something was badly wrong. She sent her husband for the AED and started CPR, yelling Simpson's name the whole time. "This can't happen right now," she recalled thinking. "You are going to fight. You're going to hold on."

Bystanders kept up CPR until EMS arrived. Simpson was rushed to a hospital in the Raleigh area, suffered a second cardiac arrest, and was then transferred to Duke University Medical Center, where she spent days on life support, according to CBS News.

The "Sir Walter Running Team," which organized the event, posted a statement on Instagram after the collapse thanking the medics and bystanders who responded, saying Simpson was "receiving excellent medical care" and that the group's thoughts were with her family, according to reporting picked up by The Independent.

Simpson went public with her diagnosis in an Instagram post last Thursday, August 20. She has arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, or ARVC, a rare congenital condition in which damaged heart muscle is replaced by tissue that doesn't conduct electrical signals properly, according to CBS News and CBC. That faulty wiring triggered "dangerous heart rhythms that ultimately caused my heart to stop," Simpson wrote, as reported by CBC and The Independent.

Running didn't cause the disease. It's genetic. But CBS News reported that the strain of elite endurance training over years likely accelerated the damage, dilating her heart and setting up the conditions for the arrest. Simpson said her family has no history of heart conditions.

She confirmed the diagnosis means she can't return to competitive running. "That chapter has ended," she wrote. "Thankfully, my story hasn't." Both CBC and The Independent carried that quote as the emotional center of her announcement.

Simpson also used the post to tell people how not to talk to her about it. "Please do not say that you're sorry or that you feel bad for me," she wrote. "If it is true in your heart, please tell me you're glad that I'm here. That's how I feel, so glad that I'm still here."

She described waking up in the hospital as jarring after a career spent, in her words, bringing people joy. "To wake up and see that the room was full of heaviness and sorrow, that was really hard," she told CBS News.

Simpson's résumé closes as one of the most decorated American female runners in history: world champion in 2011, runner-up at worlds twice, and an Olympic bronze medalist in the 1,500 meters at the 2016 Rio Games. Before her collapse in June, she'd spent the prior year touring all 50 states with her husband, Jason, running with local groups.

Not every version of this story got the details right. A post from otterrockradio, syndicating the CBS report, garbled the timeline and buried the actual medical facts under boilerplate weather copy. Another outlet, unscrolled.news, ran what amounted to a placeholder, calling the story "developing" without reporting a single new fact.

Simpson survived because two specific people, Ivy and Joey Pointer, happened to be standing nearby with an AED they carry for their own child's condition. The American Heart Association has long pushed for wider public access to defibrillators at races, gyms, and schools precisely because sudden cardiac arrest kills most people who experience it outside a hospital. Simpson's case illustrates the argument for broader access, and Duke University Medical Center has not released further detail on her long-term cardiac monitoring or whether she'll require an implanted defibrillator going forward.