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Outside Magazine June 2004

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Spinning in Their Graves
The Tour's new scandal: Elite cyclists are mysteriously dropping dead

By Nick Heil & John Bradley


	(Matt Mahurin)

ON FEBRUARY 13, an amateur Belgian cyclist named Johan Sermon slipped into bed early, hoping to rest up for an eight-hour training ride the next morning. A 21-year-old with strong prospects for a professional career, Sermon had undergone a complete cardiac evaluation a few days earlier, and doctors for his team, Daikin, had deemed him to be in excellent health. But shortly after dawn, Sermon's mother found him lifeless in his bed. An autopsy listed the cause as heart failure—an astonishing exit for a young athlete in peak condition.

The Fatal Finishing Line

The question isn't whether cyclists are dying—eight passed away during a 13-month period beginning last year—but rather what it is that's killing them. CLICK HERE to find out.

Sermon's death was soon overshadowed by the demise of 34-year-old Marco "the Pirate" Pantani, the great Italian cyclist and 1998 Tour de France champion, whose career had been destroyed by doping allegations. Just hours after Sermon died, Pantani's body was discovered in a hotel room in Rimini, Italy. A cocaine overdose became the grim final act of a storied career that was pockmarked with drug use, race expulsions, and controversy.

These deaths weren't isolated occurrences. In the past 16 months, six other riders have died under circumstances eerily similar to Sermon's. (See "The Fatal Finish Line," below.) Looking for an explanation for this shocking death toll, cycling journalists were quick to raise a familiar chorus: Doping remained endemic to the peloton, and, whether directly or indirectly, it was taking lives. Writing in a London newspaper, Phil Liggett, the veteran cycling broadcaster, pointed out that as many as 100 international racers have died prematurely during the past decade, most from heart attacks. The likely cause, Liggett argued, was the ongoing abuse of EPO, a synthetic and stealthy version of a hormone that spurs red-blood-cell production and thus boosts endurance.

"A body of literature shows that EPO conveys a five- to 15-percent advantage," says Charles Yesalis, an epidemiologist at Penn State University and an expert on drugs in sports. Translated into minutes, a five-percent boost would have been the difference between first and 143rd in last year's Tour. But EPO can also be lethal. The drug's most immediate threat is "hyperviscosity," or thickened blood, which can cause a heart attack. Studies about permanent health effects from EPO use are inconclusive, but the sludge-like blood can linger for up to 120 days.

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