These recent heart problems in football
http://football.guardian.co.uk/News_Sto ... 83,00.html
You know you're a cycling fan when you raise an eyebrow at these kind of stories.
You know you're a cycling fan when you raise an eyebrow at these kind of stories.
Fckin' Quintana … that creep can roll, man.
0
Posts
You know i was wondering the exact same thing myself and mentioned it to a guy at work, he thought drugs in football ? ...........no chance says he !
cheers
MG
But when I first heard about the Barca player, I did think the sorry story could have been prompted by blood doping.
- @ddraver
The others are just a coincidence. Some guy playing lower league football in England and some Zambian no-one has ever heard of. It's like shark attacks. You have one serious incident and then every other tiny incident is blown up out of all proportion.
Three non-related incidents in the space of a week, spread halfway across the globe, and all of a sudden there are calls for mandatory heart screenings and defibrillators to be installed at every club in the world.
But still - there is a certain irony about the guy's name.
The recovery times from injury, the 'oxygen tents', the visits to specialist doctors in the US/Italy/Spain when a player needs to get back for a big match quickly, etc, etc. All looks a bit suspicious.
I've spoken to a top sports scientist (works for a top rally team) who suggested that football might be less prone to systemic doping due to the fact that it is more a general fitness sport rather than specialising in a certain area. That was just an informed opinion rather than based on insider knowledge though.
Injury recovery is another matter though. The most interesting thing about the Chelsea blood spinning thing was the fact that it isn't illegal in football. I'm not sure if this is due to the fact that it was localised rather than a full blood transfusion. I can't say I've followed the technical side of it that closely.
Rio's missed test was after a match.
Not out of competition.
BIG DIFFERENCE.
As to whether the reported spate of footballers collapsing & dying is drug-related (EPO did cross my mind too!) or coincidence, we'll not know, unless the autopsy reports get published, but cast your minds back to the late 80's, when there were several similar deaths in cycling, in Belgium, IIRC.
The deaths in football are nothing like those deaths in cycling. Most (all?) of those kids went to sleep and never woke up. That's how EPO gets you; your heart rate drops to zero and you arrest and die.
The footballers had physical stress related heart failures. There is no comparison. Anyone who makes the connection is flawed in his logic at best and downright sinister at worst. Rubbing your hands at premature deaths in football as a sign of drug taking in the sport is really clutching at the most feeble of last straws to try to justify cycling's current malaise.
Our sport is rotten to the core. It stands with athletics sprinting and weightlifting as the most drug dependant sport on the planet. Its in the gutter; it doesn't matter what other censored is in there with it, cycling must crawl out of the gutter itself.
Click here to view Top_Bhoys RC2:
http://www.atomicecho.com/cycling
You can forgive peoples cynicism though.
My blog and pod...
Beers of Belgium Cycling Club UK
incidently i spent 3 hours yesterday being injected with drugs and having shedloads of ECGs taken to look for signs of Long QT syndrome, I guess my two family members who recently died should have stayed from the EPO ?