A day after he suddenly died, doctors revealed what killed skater Sergei Grinkov - his heart was too big.
An autopsy showed the 28-year-old, two-time Olympic figure skating champion died of a massive heart attack caused by a blocked artery in an enlarged heart plagued by high blood pressure."He was clearly in very good health except for this one problem," Dr. Francis Varga said Tuesday. "The entire front half of his heart muscle and a part of the left side of his heart muscle were deprived of oxygen."
Varga, who performed the preliminary autopsy, said Grinkov apparently had another heart attack about 6-8 hours before he collapsed Monday.
"His heart was enlarged, as athletes' hearts frequently are," Varga said. "But his heart was disproportionately enlarged, more than you would expect for an athlete" because of his history of hypertension.
Lev Markov, a chief doctor of the Moscow sports health center, where Grinkov was examined before the 1994 Olympics, disputes the U.S. medical findings.
"There is something in sport we call `sudden death.' We had several such cases before when an athlete's heart starts growing. It can become as much as twice the normal size. It causes a variety of heart dysfunctions and can cause such a sudden death. An athlete doesn't feel any discomfort or pain. Only a special medical test can detect the disease."
Grinkov, he said, showed no signs of this.
"In 1994, when we examined Grinkov for the final time before the Olympic games, we didn't find anything wrong. I doubt the diagnosis of the American doctors saying that he died from a heart attack."
Grinkov collapsed without warning while he practiced for an ice show with his wife and partner, Ekaterina Gordeeva. The show, Stars on Ice, which had been scheduled for Saturday, was postponed until Sunday, Dec. 3 so several of the skaters could attend Grinkov's funeral.
"If he continued at all on any schedule, it was only a question of time," Varga said. "Unless his condition was discovered and he had a bypass, the probability of survival for him was remote. Many times in young people the first sign of coronary artery disease is sudden death."
Leading Russian sports officials expressed surprise at news of Grinkov's heart problems.
"Before the Olympic games in Lillehammer, he passed through a medical examination and everything was all right," Elena Chaikovskaya, the head coach of Russia's Olympic team, told The Associated Press in Moscow.
"It is a tragedy. No one expected it."
Chaikovskya said although Grinkov had never experienced heart trouble, he had suffered from acute back pains and had canceled several professional competitions.
The news of Grinkov's death came so late that most Russian newspapers carried the news only on Wednesday. Many papers ran front page stories about the popular skater, who is survived by his wife and 3-year-old daughter.
"It is hard to believe that Sergei is dead. ... He was not only a great sportsman, he was an open, easy person. It was always a pleasure to talk to him," said Valentin Piseev, chairman of the Russian Skating Federation.