Professional Cyclists dying young

Our sport of cycling has been hit with tragedy in recent years where cyclists have died at a very young age.
Jose Maria Jimenez and Michel Zanoli are only the latest casualtiesto be added to this terrible list.
Why are so many seemingly fit cyclists dying of heart failure ???

Can only be one thing.............

I really dont think that anything can be gleaned from this. People die all the time for unknown or undisclosed reasons... Whether it has to do with drugs, or the intense physical stressors placed upon hearts or blood vessels that are genetically predisposed to fail... who knows? But, to go down the path of making claims that cycling is somehow more dangerous than any other activity is a really slippery slope statistically.

Runners drop dead, football players and baseball players... drop dead... some 'related' to drugs such as ephedra, or some for no reason at all... one never knows.. .when it is your time to go... bang. Not much you can do. But to start to infer some meaning into the fact that it just so happens that two professional cyclists die in relatively close proximity is more a matter of coincedence.

So, in a nutshell, go ride and don't worry about it.

Chris

Funknuggets : Perhaps I need to contextualise the question that I posed.
Personally, the fact the cyclists are dying at a young age doesn't prevent me from participating in our sport (have cycled amateur national tours when I was fully competitive in our sport).
So I do have some insight in to our sport from a competitive viewpoint, albeit at an amateur level.
In addition, my career is statistically-based and the incidence of premature death in cycling is far higher than other endurance (and indeed non-endurance) sports.
Statistically, our sport has the highest level of cardiac related deaths amongst it's participants in the world.
The empirical evidence is that since 1970's, premature cardiac-failure induced death in our sport, has risen.

I personally do not accept that because our sport is so rigourous that this is the reason why young, seemingly fit men are dying prematurely of cardiac failure.
Obviously, some cyclists do die through natural causes induced through physical stress from training/racing.
However, actuarial indicies show that perhaps this should only happen in 1/5000 cases, for males between the ages of
20 and 35, within the general population.
If you consider the volume of medical checks within the professional ranks, evidence of cardiac irregularities should be detected/diagnosed before a fatality occurs.
Obviously the medical checks which cyclists are subjected to, have not uncovered cardiac irregularlarities because the governing bodies would prevent a cyclist from participating who had such irregularities.
Therefore, the medical checks are qualitative.

I do feel that there is widespread drug abuse within the sport and
I feel that this abuse is directly attributable to extremely high levels of premature death within our sport.
These deaths cannot be solely attributable to 'natural causes'
A certain percentage of these deaths, are I agree, through natural causes.
However, the recent spate of deaths is due to something other than 'natural causes'.