CNN
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Grant Wahl, the football reporter who collapsed and died while covering the World Cup in Qatar last week, died of a ruptured aortic aneurysm, said his wife, Dr. Celine Gounder, on Wednesday.
“It’s just one of those things that has probably been brewing for years and for whatever reason has happened at this point,” Gounder said on “CBS Mornings.”
In a longer statement, Gounder said an autopsy performed by the New York City Medical Examiner’s Office determined that he died of “rupturing an undetected, slow-growing ascending aortic aneurysm with hemopericardium.
“The pressure in his chest that he felt shortly before his death may have represented the initial symptoms. No amount of CPR or shocks would have saved him,” she said, adding that there was nothing “nefarious” about his death.
Wahl, a former college basketball and football reporter for Sports Illustrated and his own newsletter, collapsed while covering the Argentina-Netherlands match on Friday and was later pronounced dead. He was 49 years old.
He has covered football for more than two decades, including 11 World Cups – six men’s, five women’s – and has written several books on the sport, according to his website.
His body was returned to the US on Monday for an autopsy, US State Department spokesman Ned Price said.
According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an aortic aneurysm is a balloon-like bulge in the aorta – the large artery that carries blood from the heart to the chest. In a rupture, the aneurysm bursts completely, causing bleeding into the body.
The CDC says that aortic aneurysms or dissections caused about 10,000 deaths in 2019. About 59% of those deaths were among men.
CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, said that an aortic aneurysm is generally rare and difficult to detect.
“It’s very difficult to track this type of problem,” he said. “This is probably something that has been around for a while, but it hasn’t caused many symptoms.”
In the days leading up to his death, Wahl said he wasn’t feeling well.
“It got really bad in terms of chest tightness, tightness, pressure. Feeling really hairy, bad,” he told co-host Chris Wittyngham on an episode of the Futbol podcast with Grant Wahl published days before his death. He added that he sought help at the World Cup media center clinic, believing he had bronchitis.
He further described the incident in a bulletin published on Dec. 5, writing that his body “broke down” after he got too little sleep, too much stress and a heavy workload. He had a cold for 10 days, which “turned into something more serious,” he wrote, adding that he felt better after being given antibiotics and catching up on sleep.
The tributes to her late husband are moving and bring her comfort, Gounder said in her CBS interview.
“He was so loved by so many people,” she said, and hearing him vent “is like a warm hug when you really need it.”
She said she first discovered something was wrong last week when she started getting messages from a friend who said Wahl had passed out and medical staff had tried CPR for 20 minutes. She tried to reach someone at the hospital in Qatar to find out more and kept asking if he had a pulse.
“Nobody wanted to answer the question,” she said. “I was scared.”
She also said that she went to see her late husband’s body; “I really needed to see it,” she said.
“Honestly, this has been so surreal… even now having seen the body, it’s really hard to believe it’s real, but I needed this,” she said.
Although she was not much of a sports fan, she said for Wahl, “Football was more than just a sport, it was something that connected people around the world”.
“There’s so much about culture, sports politics, football. For him, it was a way to really understand people and where they came from,” she said. “I want people to remember him as a kind and generous person who was truly dedicated to social justice.”
She recalled how her husband promoted women’s play and the recent statements he has made about LGBT rights. “That was Grant,” she said.
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