Sport obsession may have been a factor in death

The family of Emmet Neville, a talented all-rounder who died nine years ago at just 21, believe sudden cardiac death was to blame for his passing, writes Noel Baker

IT was like the famous scene from Rocky, where Sly Stallone’s character runs up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, transposed to the northside of Cork City.

Emmet Neville was a superfit sportsman who had captained the Glen Rovers hurlers at U21 level, had captained St Nicholas’ U21 footballers and was also playing basketball for Neptune. The only issue was that in his own mind, he was not getting enough minutes on the basketball court — so something had to be done.

That zeal took the form of a punishing training schedule, as his sister, Maria Ricken, recalls.

“The week before Emmet died he had been in the Canaries for a week with St Nicholas’,” she says.

“He was playing with Neptune but he wasn’t playing as much as he wanted to.

“All Saturday and Sunday he did circuit training at Neptune, trying to prove he was as fit as he could be. On the Monday he did normal training with Neptune, then he did more circuit training.”

His training including running up and down the steep steps at Neptune, over and over again. Maria says she “couldn’t walk up them, never mind run up and down them”.

When he came in from his extra training that Monday night, he asked his mother to make him a sandwich. He said he was tired. By 5am the following morning, he was dead.

That was in Jan 2003, and Maria — Emmet’s big sister by two years — was in the bedroom next to his. She remembers hearing a sound during the night, like a dry retching.

“I went in and he was on the floor, looking up at me. He was looking at me when I came in the door but after I looked out, to call my mum and dad, his head was down. It happened very fast.”

Emmet had been diagnosed with epilepsy following a seizure on a basketball training camp when he was 15. However, he only required mild medication and, in the following half-dozen years, he had only four or five seizures.

His death was officially reported as possible epilepsy, but the family believes it was a sudden cardiac death, given the circumstances and with the first autopsy report finding no obvious cause of death on the exterior.

A specialist in Dublin looked at ECG scans taken when Emmet was diagnosed with epilepsy and believes she can see signs of Wolff–Parkinson–White syndrome — a possible trigger for sudden cardiac death.

Maria said: “I’m not saying it’s anyone’s fault.”

However, she believes Emmet’s obsession with sport — and the extreme fitness regime he put himself through that weekend in 2003 — was contributory to whatever lay dormant in his system and which ultimately killed him.

She believes every sports-person should be screened and it should be subsidised, if possible. As to whether or not such measures could have saved her brother, she will never know.