The wife of prominent soccer journalist Grant Wahl said Wednesday that the writer’s death last week while covering the World Cup was caused by the sudden rupture of an aortic aneurysm.
“[The autopsy] showed that he had an aortic aneurysm that ruptured,” Gounder, an epidemiologist and CBS News medical contributor, said during an appearance on “CBS Mornings.” “The aorta — that’s the big blood vessel that comes out of your heart — is sort of the trunk of all your blood vessels. An aneurysm is a ballooning of the blood vessel wall, and so it’s weak.”
Wahl, 49, collapsed in his seat Friday while covering the quarterfinal match between Argentina and the Netherlands in Lusail, Qatar. Paramedics, called by other reporters to the scene, attended to him for several minutes before he was taken to a hospital.
The condition “is just one of those things that had been likely brewing for years,” Gounder said. “For whatever reason, it happened at this point in time.”
The U.S. State Department helped to quickly repatriate Wahl’s body, which “arrived home Monday,” Gounder wrote in a post published Wednesday on Wahl’s website. The “transition was handled with the utmost care and sensitivity. This was an international matter that required coordination from multiple agencies domestically and internationally, and there was full cooperation from everyone involved. Our sincere gratitude to everyone involved in repatriating Grant, in particular the White House, the U.S. Department of State, FIFA, U.S. Soccer and American Airlines.”
Immediately after Wahl died, his brother, Eric, posted a video to Instagram in which he said Wahl had faced death threats for his coverage of the World Cup, which had been critical of the Qatari government for its treatment of migrant workers during the construction of stadiums for the tournament, and said he believed Wahl had been killed in retaliation. Wahl had also written earlier in the tournament that he had been detained by security and forced to remove a rainbow soccer ball T-shirt he had worn to a stadium in protest of the criminalization of homosexuality in Qatar. Eric Wahl posted on Twitter on Tuesday that he no longer suspected foul play in his brother’s death.
Gounder, who serves as a physician at Bellevue Hospital in New York and as a clinical assistant professor at New York University, and who advised the Biden administration on the coronavirus, reaffirmed in her post on Wahl’s website that his death was not suspicious.
He died, she wrote, “from the rupture of a slowly growing, undetected ascending aortic aneurysm with hemopericardium [blood in the pericardial sac]. The chest pressure he experienced shortly before his death may have represented the initial symptoms. No amount of CPR or [defibrillation] shocks would have saved him. His death was unrelated to COVID. His death was unrelated to vaccination status. There was nothing nefarious about his death.”
Wahl spent more than two decades covering American and global soccer for Sports Illustrated and was one of the most prominent journalists covering the sport in the United States. He was covering his eighth men’s World Cup and wrote last week about struggling with his health and seeking medical treatment for chest pain.
Gounder told CBS she has been buoyed by the outpouring of sympathetic support as well as personal and professional remembrances of her husband.
“I want people to remember him as this kind, generous person who was really dedicated to social justice,” she said. “I think that’s another aspect of soccer that was really important to him, promoting the women’s game, the recent statements he had made about LGBTQ rights — that was Grant.”
In her post on Wahl’s website, she added that the couple’s families and she would “forever cherish the gift of his life; to share his company was our greatest love and source of joy. Grant curated friends from all cultures and walks of life, for whom he was a generous listener, an enthusiast, a champion of others. To know Grant was to know a true Renaissance man; he was endlessly curious about the world, and a lover of literature, art, music, food, and wine. He was equally in his element cooking a quiet dinner of sole provencal for two, walking his beloved [dogs] Zizou and Coco through Manhattan, gathering friends for a raucous dinner party, and traipsing across Moldova chasing a story.”