In a hospital in Girona, Sonny Colbrelli recovers his life and the memory of his dark moment and awaits examinations and tests, while, shaken by the wind from the coast, on a sunny, blue Tuesday, the Volta without him ascends to Perpignan, skirting the Mediterranean to Perpignan, Portbou, Colliure, where Machado died remembering the blue skies, the sun of childhood. As expected, the stage, the second, so flat, ends in a sprint – won by a young Australian from Bike Exchange, Kaden Groves, perfectly launched by the leader, his compatriot and teammate Michael Matthews, winner of the Sant Feliu de Guixols stage ahead of Colbrelli, whose heart, not two minutes later, began to beat madly, accelerated and without rhythm, which caused him to have convulsions and fainting, a cardiac arrest from which he came out thanks to the speed of response of the nurse Borja Sáez de Cos who he went with the defibrillator immediately and to the help of the race doctor who activated it, who resuscitated him–; Unexpectedly, some of the important ones did not arrive with the peloton, which broke up in the last kilometers due to the combined action of wind, breakdowns and falls: the British Simon Yates, after a fall, and the Granada native from Almuñécar Carlos Rodríguez, after a puncture, they were cut and lost 36s. The loss will motivate them against Valverde, Carapaz, Ayuso, Higuita, Marc Soler or Nairo, for the two decisive stages in the Pyrenees, Wednesday (La Molina) and Thursday (Boí Taüll). Thanks to the bonuses and points captured during the kilometers he was on the run, the young Norwegian from the DSM Jonas Iversby Hvideberg accumulates all the jerseys of the race: general, by 1s, mountain, points and best young.
The peloton passes quickly, but it does not forget what it leaves behind, nor the Volta doctor, who remembers the minutes that followed the fainting of the European champion and conqueror of Paris-Roubaix. “If he happened to train, he would probably have died, because he would not have had a defibrillator nearby,” he explains to Sergi López Egea, from The Newspaper of Catalonia Àlex Flor, the Volta doctor who removed Colbrelli, 31, from cardiorespiratory arrest at the Sant Feliu finish line with the defibrillator. “He came out with the first shock. We moved pretty quickly.” Specialists say that the period of action in these cases is 10 minutes, and that each minute of delay means 10% less chance of resuscitating a person in arrest. “Later, we decided to transfer him to the Doctor Trueta university hospital in Girona, because he has a “very powerful” arrhythmia unit.
Colbrelli, like all the cyclists in the first two divisions, passes the mandatory cardiac check-up every year, which includes, every two years, a Doppler echocardiogram, and, alternating, an electro with stress test. And all cyclists who have had covid should have an echocardiogram before returning to training and competition to rule out myocarditis, heart disease. They must also fill out a questionnaire that serves to find out if any family member has suffered a heart attack and is the basis for a genealogical study of the chances of sudden death.
In the hospital, people close to him say, Colbrelli also gradually recovers the memory of the minutes before his collapse and undergoes a series of tests that determine the cause of the ventricular arrhythmia that was about to cause his sudden death. That says the statement from his team, Bahrain, the same from Mikel Landa and Pello Bilbao. “With diagnostic imaging, electros, echoes, stress tests, a Holter monitor, genetic analysis in search of a gene associated with sudden death… a structural image of your heart will be obtained and the causes can be determined and whether intense exercise or training can make your condition even worse,” says Luis Serratosa, a sports doctor at the Quirón clinic. “And even if the causes are not found, it will probably end up being decided that an automatic defibrillator should be implanted in case the problem recurs.”
“Although the most logical cause, given the age and the circumstances, should be hereditary heart disease, other possibilities cannot be ruled out,” says Araceli Boraíta, a cardiologist at the Higher Sports Council (CSD). “The arrhythmia could also have been triggered by an imbalance of electrolytes and sodium levels caused by dehydration and because you pushed your body and heart to the limit; or by malignant hypertrophy, widening of the walls of the heart that prevents the electrical signal that activates a rhythmic march”.
There are cycling doctors who have seen their runners reach more than 200 beats per minute in a sprint or climbing a mountain top. “The acceleration of the rhythm can be a trigger for the electrical alteration, but not the cause, although it is more likely to occur after an intense effort,” says Pedro Celaya, a cycling doctor. “Sudden death in athletes, such as that of the soccer player Puerta or the marathon runner Diego García, is a very striking phenomenon because this danger is not associated with a person as healthy as an athlete, but it is nothing exceptional.”
Colbrelli’s future as a professional cyclist, married with two children, is up in the air, uncertain, a runner with great potential from a young age who took years to exploit because he was believed to be a sprinter and it was later discovered that he was much more, and what He did it in a big way, first with good mountain rides, in the Alps of the Tour in 2020 and 2021, and then defeating Evenepoel in the European championship and the mud, cold and cobblestone in Paris-Roubaix. His return will have to be decided by the team’s doctors after a favorable report from a specialist. “Even if an automatic defibrillator is implanted, it will not be easy for him to compete again as the soccer player Eriksen has done,” says Serratosa, who believes that no cyclist appears in the central registry of athletes who compete with a defibrillator. “First, we would have to set the filters very well, the settings, of the device, which is triggered, launches a spark that reactivates the heart when it detects ventricular fibrillation or tachycardia. If going up a mountain the high pulsations trigger it, or when a crash or a fall causes it to trigger, its inappropriate discharge is very dangerous, and can cause a fall and put the rest of the platoon at risk”. And Boraíta emphasizes: “A soccer player makes very short efforts, his heart is not at full throttle for 40 minutes, and if at 180 beats the ICD (implanted automatic defibrillator) thinks there is tachycardia and launches the spark, the athlete will feel like a kick , a kick, in the pit of the stomach…”
You can follow EL PAÍS DEPORTES on Facebook and Twitteror sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Exclusive content for subscribers
read without limits
#Sonny #Colbrelli #improves #recovers #memory #happened