"To an Athlete Dying Young"

The Sudden Deaths of Humanity's Fittest

Why are so many young athletes suddenly dying? Scarcely a week goes by that we don’t see a report of the “sudden death” of a sportsman. Today (October 19, 2022) the Mississippi State football player, Sam Westmoreland, died at the age of 19. On September 30, world class Pakastani cricketer, Shehzad Azam Rana, died of cardiac arrest at 36. On September 18, the much loved (and extremely fit) Celina, Texas youth coach, Trey Boddie, died of a heart attack at 39. On September 4, Clark Yarbrough, a 21-year-old senior defensive lineman at Ouachita Baptist University, suddenly collapsed and died. On August 30, Eli Palfreyman, captain of the Ayr Centennials hockey team, suddenly died in the locker room during the first intermission of the Ayr Mutual Global Invitational tournament game. He was just 20 years old. On August 23, Scottish Mountain Biking Champion, Rab Wardell, died in his sleep of a cardiac arrest at 37. Two days earlier he won the Scottish MTB XC Championship race in Dumfries and Galloway. His death was reported on August 24 by Mark Steyn of GB news, who also reported the deaths of three other young athletes during the same week.

There was a time not so long ago that the death of a young athlete would shock an entire community and leave everyone—most of all the parents and medical examiner—desperately seeking to discover the cause. Now such deaths are reported as apparently unsolvable mysteries. The genesis of sudden, cardiac arrest among humanity’s fittest is never mentioned in news reports, and it seems that autopsies are rarely if ever performed. My coauthor, Dr. Peter McCullough, just posted about the probable cause of many of these deaths. Why isn’t his analysis being reported on every MSM channel?

This bizarre state of affairs takes me back to the Max Frisch play, Biedermann and the Arsonists, that I mentioned in my post this Monday. A great evil is happening right before our eyes, but many of us can’t see it precisely because it is so out in the open. We assume that if such terrible incidents were the results of human actions, they would be thoroughly investigated by our trusted authorities. Surely, we think, such perfidy would be carefully concealed, and not hiding in plain sight. This is what one of the arsonists referred to when he said, “The best disguise, even better than humor and sentimentality, is the truth, because no one believes it.”

By the end of March, 2020, it was crystal clear that COVID-19 posed virtually zero risk of hospitalization and death to young athletes. Nevertheless, in most college and professional leagues, young athletes have been forced to receive the experimental, mRNA gene therapy injections. Brave individuals such as Aaron Rodgers and Novak Djokovic have been relentlessly bullied, ostracized, and even (in the latter case) prohibited from playing at major tournaments because they refused the shots.

Going back to Ancient Greece, young athletes have been championed as the flower of the human race, more celebrated than philosophers, scientists, and artists. We are awed by their strength, beauty, and skill. When we gather together to watch them perform at the highest level, we share a communal emotion akin to a religious experience. A young athlete’s death has therefore long been perceived as the most difficult to comprehend and come to terms with. How strange that what now passes for rational adult leadership is killing them in droves.

“To an Athlete Dying Young,” by A.E. Housman, published in 1896, is a classic of modern British poetry. Here is the Danish author, Karen von Blixen (played by Meryl Streep in Out of Africa) reciting it at the funeral of her beloved Denys Finch Hatton.