STRAIN OF SPORT ON HEART

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19803, 19 May 1934, Page 16

STRAIN OF SPORT ON HEART

FIERCE CONTROVERSY AT HOME An assertion by correspondents in a London newspaper that althletes are liable to succumb in early middle life to heart strain has raised a fierce controversy in the London Press. It was contended that scullers, cyclists and runners had died of valvular disease of the heart round about forty. Leon Meredith, the long distance road rider, and Zimmerman, the crack American cyclist of some years ago, were quoted as cases in point. A crashing rejoinder came from Montague Holbein, the veteran Channel swimmer and cyclist. He declared that Shortland did not die at forty years of age, but was in his fifty-ninth year, and he passed away through natural causes. Describing his own career, Holbein said: “I had ten years of very strenuous cycle road racing. I won the North Road Club open 24-hour road race four years in succession. I have 26 road records, mostly of 12 and 24 hours. I was second in the first Bordeau to Paris race. “I have been an athlete from the age of 15, engaging in walking running, cycling and swimming. At the age of 47 I swam forty miles in the Thames in 13 hours, and was second in a 24 hour swimming race in Paris. At 41 years of age, in 1902, I attempted to swim the Channel and failed by some five hundred yards after a swim of 22 hours 21 minutes. In all I attempted to swim the Channel nine times. “I finished up 37 continuous years of all-round athletics in 1913, when I made my last attempt at swimming the ! Channel on my fifty-second dirthday. “Now I am in my seventy-third year j and have been passed by a doctor as | perfectly sound and with no enlargement of my heart.”