But 28-year-old Russian also bad the heart of a sick, elderly man. While practicing in Lake Placid, N.Y., last week, Grinkov became dizzy and lay down on the ice. He never regained consciousness. The autopsy revealed that Grinkov had severe blockage of major coronary arteries and had suffered a heart attack sometime in the 24 hours before his death. “It was a massive heart attack,” said the pair’s agent, Jay Ogden, who was with “Katya” when she received the autopsy report. “That was the definitive cause of death.”
The sudden death of a great athlete, one who appears to embody all the virtues of health and fitness, always leaves the rest of us grasping for more of an explanation. America has witnessed this painful ritual before, with basketball stars Reggie Lewis, Hank Gathers and Len Bias and Olympic volleyballer Flo Hyman. But Grinkov,s death did not result from cardiomyopathy, the most frequent cause of sudden death in athletes. Lewis and Gathers were both victims of this condition, which can cause irregular heartbeats and blockage of blood flowing to the heart. Nor was it a case of Marfan syndrome, a ballooning of the aorta that leads to aneurysms, which killed Hyman. And there was zero evidence of drug use; though Grinkov suffered from both back pain and hypertension, he apparently took no
Rather, Grinkov’s death resulted from that most common of killers, heart disease, and the only thing uncommon about it was his age and profession. “Here was an athlete considered the strongest on the tour,,” says Ogden. “There were simply no symptoms.” But the first symptom of heart disease is often a heart attack. Grinkov was either unaware of the attack (about one third of heart attacks are “silent”) or conditioned, by the lifting and throwing in his routine, to ignore minor chest strain -and discomfort. Those seeking a clue point to the death of Grinkov’s father from heart-related illness at 52, which almost certainly meant Sergei had a genetic predisposition to the disease. “Still, that degree of heart disease in a 28-year-old is pretty extraordinary, and you’re unlikely to be looking for it,” says Dr. David Oakes of the Heart Institute of Spokane, Wash.
Grinkov was an ideal candidate for routine screening, in which an oral history helps identify likely victims of heart disease. Doctors can perform relatively simple tests that can often diagnose heart disease or cardiomyopathy. A stress test and an echocardiogram are expensive, at least $1,000 and often far more. A highly paid athlete like Grinkov could certainly afford the tests. They, in turn, could have led to treatment that might have saved his life, if not necessarily his career.
But athletes seldom are inclined to dwell on their infirmities. “Athletes aren’t psychologically conditioned to go out of their way to look for abnormalities that might affect their ability to perform,” says Dr. Barry Maron, director of cardiovascular research at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation. “Athletes want to reo main in the arena.” Monty williams, for example, was diagnosed with cardiomyopathy in 1990 before his sophomore season at Notre Dame. He sat out two years before doctors gave him the green light to compete. Williams now plays for the New York Knicks, but always with a defibrillator, a machine to electrically restart the heart, and a cardiologist ready at courtside.
The case of Northwestern University freshman Nick Knapp is even more extreme. During a summer pickup basketball game, he fainted after blood temporarily stopped flowing to his heart. Knapp had a defibrillator surgically inserted in his abdomen to regulate blood flow, and his doctors said he could resume playing. Northwestern’s doctors disagreed. So while honoring its scholarship commitment, the university declared Knapp “medically ineligible.” Now the freshman is suing-for damages and, apparently most critically, the right to play for the team. “You have to wonder,” says Maron, “how society lets sports get so important that this should even get serious consideration.”
If the medical lessons from Grinkov’s death are not necessarily profound, the sense of loss certainly is. Gordeyeva and Grinkov’s tale was one of the most charming in sports. The two, who had been paired as youngsters by Soviet skating authorities, combined balletic movements with powerful lifts and throws to redefine pairs skating. In 1988 they won–“skating like brother and sister,” Grinkov liked to recall–the Olympic gold in Calgary. They began dating a year later and were married in 1991.
When they returned to the Olympic ice in 1994, they had incorporated their passion into their performance. There was no mote stirring sight in skating than the powerfully built Grinkov tossing his 90-pound wife through the air. “They were the epitome of pair skating, perfectly complementing each other in line and emotion,” says Jirina Ribbens, a skating producer who had known tile couple for a decade. “The two of them were just one.” In the sports world, where greatness is a judgment too casually rendered and “superstar” a term too frequently bestowed, their performances will remain the standard for generations to come.
