So it is perhaps fitting that on Tuesday February 14th, just days after Mr Laker died, competition authorities launched investigations into possible price collusion by a number of large airlines.
Great men consolidated their power by marrying as many wives as the diversity of their following required, so whenever a great chieftain died, competition to the death among sons of different wives was likely.
Dying young is, of course, tragic no matter how it happens, and yet there is something particularly unsettling, particularly indelible about a young athlete dying in competition.
At the other end, local markets are dying under competition from foreign superstores, selling food at low prices that are only made affordable by subsidies and technology that the peasant farmers don't have.
Koreans' ppalli-ppalli, or "hurry-hurry," penchant — a trait more evident in Seoul than anywhere else — helps explain why South Koreans consider broadband Internet a virtual birthright and why the nation's three telecommunications firms wage a do-or-die competition to expand and improve their networks.
This concept comes from IDEO and won Google's 2008 Innovate or Die competition.
The speculation is that it was caused by the recent success of the movie The Hunger Games, where the main character competes in a do-or-die competition that includes archery.
Riders say they believe he is the only professional to have died in competition.
He, too, died in competition, when he crashed into trees in Estonia after losing control on a rutted road sluiced by torrential rain.
The Big Ten Conference men's indoor championships in Minneapolis were called off yesterday, a day after a Penn State pole-vaulter died in competition.
