Zdeno Chara Hit a Runner on a Slovak Cycle Path. He Says He Could Not Have Avoided It.

Zdeno Chara, the retired Boston Bruins captain who has finished three Boston Marathons since leaving the NHL, was on a training ride near Beluša, in western Slovakia, on July 29 when he collided with a 56-year-old man who police say was on foot in the cycle lane. The runner fell, was taken to a hospital, and the case was closed at the scene.

The collision happened around midday on a well-used stretch of path in the Púchov district, and the account given by police in the Trenčín region was reported on Aug. 6 by the Slovak outlet Športnet. A police spokeswoman, Petra Klenková, said the pedestrian went down on the pavement, and that breath tests on both men came back negative for alcohol. Paramedics drove the 56-year-old to a hospital to be checked over, and Pravda reported that he was admitted in a condition that was not life-threatening. Neither man pressed for an investigation, which closed the matter.

Chara said he called for help and treated the man while waiting. “Last week, I collided with a runner on the cycle path near Beluša,” he told the Slovak paper Športový čas, in remarks carried by Športnet and translated from Slovak. “It was a situation that I could no longer avoid or prevent. Emergency medical services and the police were immediately called to the scene. I provided first aid and subsequently cooperated with all authorities.” He said he is in touch with the man’s family, and that “the priority is for the man to get back to normal life and in full health.”

The Headphone Detail

Chara also gave his own account of who was at fault, and it is his account rather than a published police finding. Everyone at the scene “agreed and acknowledged that it wasn’t my fault, but it was the fault of the runner who shouldn’t have been on the cycle path, was running with headphones on and suddenly changed direction, which I couldn’t react to,” he said. The police statement goes no further than a pedestrian in the cycle lane who fell. The runner has not been named by police or in Slovak media, and his version of the collision has not been reported.

The headphones are Chara’s detail, and the reports MH reviewed do not say what kind the man was wearing, which matters because the hardware differs. Open-ear and bone conduction designs leave ambient sound audible; sealed in-ear and noise-canceling models do not, which is the basis of MH’s advice to keep the outside world audible anywhere you are sharing space with traffic or with faster-moving users. On a shared path a runner has less warning of what is coming up behind them, which is part of the reasoning behind the conventional guidance on which side of the road to run on.

Three Boston Marathons and an Ironman

Chara retired in 2022 and took up distance running almost immediately. By the spring of 2024 he was training more than 20 hours a week, about 60 miles of it running, under the Belmont, Mass., marathoner Becca Pizzi, the Boston Globe reported in a profile of his marathon project.

His first marathon was Boston in 2023, in 3:38:23. He ran it again in 2024 in 3:30:52, then ran 3:11:04 in London six days later. His personal best of 3:10:24 came at the Houston Marathon in January 2024, inside the current 3:15:00 Boston qualifying standard for men aged 45 to 49. He also ran 3:19:19 at the New York City Marathon in 2023. On April 20 he returned to Boston a third time, fired the starting gun, and finished in 3:18:00.

The bicycle came with his move into triathlon. Chara completed his first Ironman at Kalmar, Sweden, in August 2024 in 10:40:48, riding the 112-mile (180K) leg in 5:12:03, an average of roughly 21.5 mph (35 km/h). Neither police nor Chara has said how fast he was riding near Beluša.

His farewell game, billed as Zee’s Final Shift, is scheduled for Aug. 21 at the winter stadium in Trenčín, with Patrice Bergeron, Brad Marchand, David Pastrnak and Jaromir Jagr among the former players expected to appear.