Originally Posted by
009jim
My guess is that this poor chap was making a bit of a personal come-back and pushed himself. It's ok to do that when you're 30 but inadvisable for some of us older folks. Such a shame for wife or kids who might have been spectating.
If you read read the article linked to in the first post, the opposite is true.
There have been various athletic people with high profiles who have died of heart attacks. Ed Burke is one of the better known cases. A small number of soccer players have collapsed on the field and died.
One of the reasons that has not been explored sufficiently in sports morbidity rates, in my opinion, is the influence of air travel and the resulting effect that deep vein thrombosis has on cardiac function in circumstances like this.
It was only after Machka developed a case of DVT after a long, uninterrupted flight from Canada to Australia, that we gained a better understanding of what can happen through the research she did, and what the blood specialist told us.
She was a fit, a long-distance cyclist, but it was discovered that she has a genetic predisposition for developing blood clots that then can break away, make their way to the lungs and heart and cause death if not caught in time.
Of course, there may well be other factors at play in the deaths being discussed. Unfortunately, while an autopsy reveals what actually was the cause of death in the triathlon case, we are unlikely to ever find out.