Sporting Madness

Another tragedy has struck a promising hockey prospect with a great future in front of him. Not even four months after the death of Calgary Flames' prospect Mickey Renaud , Canucks' defenceman Luc Bourdon dies in a motorcycle crash in New Brunswick . According to the Globe and Mail 's story , the police have said that a motorcycle hit a transport truck head-on. They didn't release the victim's name, but Bourdon's sister confirmed it was him. This is terribly sad. Bourdon, a first-round draft pick (10th overall) back in 2005, had so much potential, and really seemed to be entering a phase of his career where he could be an everyday NHL defenceman. In fact, if he hadn't been in the Canucks' organization which boasts one of the deepest defence corps in the league, he probably would have played a full season at the NHL level last year. It's a big loss for the team, as he was probably their most promising minor-leaguer last year. More importantly, though,...

Just a week after I wrote this piece about heart failure and athletes dying young, another student-athlete has died. Neate has more on the tragic death of 19-year-old Ereck Plancher, a receiver at the University of Central Florida. As the Orlando Sentinel's Andrea Adelson writes , this is anything but an isolated incident. "The same story seems to play out every year: a seemingly healthy college football player dies suddenly as the result of a workout, and there are no immediate answers why," she wrote. "The last year there were no noncontact college football deaths was 1999. Since 1966, there have there have only been seven years when there were no noncontact college football deaths." The Sentinel also provides a list of athletes who have died recently after workouts. Those are some scary numbers, up there with the ones I found from the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation's national registry of young athlete deaths . Their researchers estimate there ...