“Viral Infections and Cycling: The New Risk Cyclists Face in the Age of Covid-19”

A chance meeting during this Easter holiday, somewhere where the sun was shining. The man, also Belgian, had already passed by a few times, very interested in our gravel bikes. Later that afternoon, after our tour, he stopped for a chat. A Lanzarote Ironman T-shirt would have been the last straw.

“Triathlete?”

“More participant in triathlons than triathlete. Ever. Nor Ironman Lanzarote, to be honest.”

“I also did triathlon. And I rode the bike every week. Gran fondos I did too. I was on different teams.”

“And not anymore?”

“No. I got covid in 2021 and now I can’t do anything. When I was healed and started walking for the first time, I immediately felt it: this is not right. It never got better. Long covid, have you heard of it? I had to sell all my bikes. I can only drive electrically and after twenty kilometers I have to take a fifteen minute rest or I won’t get back. Walking is hardly possible, certainly not working at all. I had a hard job and that is no longer an option. I have just returned from three weeks of research in Gasthuisberg. They can’t help me. You’ve had bad luck, they say.

We in the sport have (almost) all at one time or another dismissed corona as a fall, at most a flu or something that – well spent – happened to the weak and untrained. That didn’t take long. It soon turned out that the virus also had a hard time attacking perfectly healthy, sporty people, even real athletes and demolished bodies of all kinds. Heart, brain, lungs, other organs, you name it, Covid-19 and related variants have wreaked havoc everywhere.

Last Sunday, such a perfectly healthy, extremely trained body completed a time trial at 200-220 heart rate for forty minutes. In the unknown that he now had an extremely dangerous virus among the members. It was therefore not ridiculous of Soudal-QuickStep and it did not show excessive caution to remove Remco Evenepoel from the Giro. Anyone who claims that is off the same path as the wappies who now attribute Evenepoel’s exit to the vaccinations.

They haven’t even been careful enough, not the team, not the doctor and not the rider. Maybe they should have done that covid test the morning of the time trial when he had woken up with a cough, a slight fever and a stuffy nose. That was not communicated, but after the game that cold sore was noticed. Like the fact that he seemed more broken than after the first time trial, but that was perfectly explained by the succession of efforts and the double fall a few days earlier. We now know that there was more to it.

Correction: there’s more to it. Next week, the world champion will undergo a cardiological examination. That too is not overly cautious. To win – the nature of the beast – his engine had to deliver an above-average performance on Sunday, with a virus raging inside. If Evenepoel comes out unscathed, he once again climbed out of an abyss last Sunday.

That questions were asked at his sudden departure is crazy. It should be known by now that cycling at the top level is such a heavy attack on the heart and blood vessels that only genetic freaks can afford it, or on the absolute condition that nothing goes wrong.

It should also be known that no sport has suffered as many heart deaths as cycling. In 2003, a top group of cardiologists published a study of 46 endurance athletes with cardiac arrhythmias. The vast majority had problems with the right ventricle. Eighteen suffered from a serious disorder, nine of them with sudden cardiac death. All nine dead were cyclists.

This study concerned cardiac arrhythmias, but viral infections should also be avoided like the plague because they can turn a perfectly healthy heart into a sick heart in no time. Myocarditis, cardiomyopathy, ever heard of it? It was long assumed that doping, and especially EPO, was the cause of the cardiac deaths. The fact that EPO had not yet been invented when one runner after another died was a side effect that was conveniently ignored.

Today, with better preventive testing, we know better. At the slightest fever and slightest viral infection, you should absolutely avoid straining the heart. In other words: with covid (and of course a mouth mask) you can still try to become world champion snooker. Riding a bicycle competitively is completely out of the question.