The American Soccer reporter, Grant Wahl, who collapsed and passed away while he was covering thw World Cup in Qatar just last week, apparently passed away due to an aortic aneurysm that ruptured, as confirmed by his wife, Dr. Celine Gounder. She said, “It’s just one of these things that had been likely brewing for years, and for whatever reason it happened at this point in time.”
In a longer statement Gunder said that an autopsy that was performed by the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office had showed that Wahl passed away from “the rupture of a slowly growing, undetected ascending aortic aneurysm with hemopericardium. Adding that, “The chest pressure he experienced shortly before his death may have represented the initial symptoms. No amount of CPR or shocks would have saved him.”
Wahl was a longtime college basketball and soccer reporter for Sports Illustrated as well as for his own newsletter, collapsed during Friday’s Argentina-Netherlands match and later was declared dead at the age of 49. He had covered soccer for over two decades, including 11 World Cups, six men’s, five women’s and wrote several books on the sport.
In the days prior to his death he told his co-host that, “It had gotten pretty bad in terms of like the tightness in my chest, tightness, pressure. Feeling pretty hairy, bad.” Wahl also described the incident in a December fifth newsletter where he wrote that his body “broke down” after he had little sleep, high stress and a heavy workload. He said he had a cold before it “turned into something more severe,” he wrote, while adding that he seemed to feel better after having had antibiotics.
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