Windsor was having a turnaround season and Renaud, 19 years old and from Tecumseh, is a local kid from southwestern Ontario, so the grief speaks for itself.
It's a little ghoulish to speculate about the cause. What we do know about these cases some scrutiny in the medical community of how uniform the screening process for instances of an enlarged heart.
A.B. has more over at Sporting Madness.
Related:
Spitfires captain Mickey Renaud dies suddenly (Windsor Star)
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2 comments:
Interesting AP link you found: I hadn't seen that one before. It would be a tough thing to regulate, but looking at athletes' hearts more closely would certainly be beneficial, I think: most of the in-competition deaths I've heard of are from heart issues, and the statistics cited in the AP story seem to support that. It brings up another issue though: if 100 athletes with a certain condition keep competing, one dies and the rest are fine, should the other 99 be barred from playing the sport they love? At the end of the day, I think it comes down to a lot of individual decisions: each case and the risks associated with it are quite different, so my opinion is that each athlete should make the final decision to play or not (in consultation with doctors and parents or guardians). It's important to inform them of the risks, which is where a more universal screening procedure could come in handy, but I don't think there should be a universal standard to ban athletes from competing.
What a heartbreaking story. Whenever you see a young person taken from us just as their journey was starting, it always seems so incredibly unjust. The team and community will pull together, because that is what teams and communities do, but it always leaves a mark.
I think it is only natural, though, that people want to know how it happened. Healthy 19 year olds aren't supposed to drop dead like that, and when it is a high profile young person in the community that interest is only heightened. Get the information out there as quickly as possible -- otherwise, people start to speculate on their own, and that's when the really inappropriate stuff starts cropping up.
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