26-year-old cyclist quits Tour de France due to breathing difficulties

Champion cyclist Victor Lafay Friday withdrew from Tour de France after experiencing unexplained shortness of breath, according to Le Parisien. The 26-year-old, who plays for UCI Worldteam Cofidis, had managed to cross the Alps but did not have the strength to continue. 

"I find it hard to breathe,” he told Eurosport France. “I lack oxygen, I have pain in all my legs, no strength. All the COVID tests are negative, it could be something else. We are many in the group who have the same symptoms.” 

“I talked about it in the peloton, there are many who have it,” he added. “Castroviejo, he told me he has the same thing, Pierre Rolland too, Naesen who retired had also told me about it. We have all tested negative for COVID. So either we're negative but we still have it, or it's something else. We talk a lot about COVID, but there may be something else. In any case, we all have our lungs screwed up. And when the muscles are not oxygenated, after a while they can no longer work.” 

While the media have been quick to blame the heat for unexplained breathing issues or deaths in athletes, Lafay assured Le Parisien that the heat had nothing to do with it. 

“The heat, again, is fine,” said the young athlete. “We are well supplied, we hydrate ourselves, we have ice cubes. I didn't find it horrible today.” 

The difficulties faced by Lafay and his fellow athletes are becoming more prevalent since last year, leading many to draw a correlation to the COVID-19 injections. In fact, some family doctors now require injected athletes to undergo extra tests before being cleared for sport. 

In February, America’s Frontline News reported that a football team in Romania has banned all COVID-19-vaccinated individuals from playing for the very reason Lafay dropped out of Tour de France.  

Gigi Becali, who owns the European Cup-winning football club Steaua Bucharest, has said that the reason injected athletes are no longer welcome to play on the team is simply because they can’t.  

In an interview, Becali said vaccinated players are “powerless”.  

“You're going to laugh, but I might be right. Those vaccinated lose their strength. That's something scientific,” Becali told Romanian journalist Emanuel Rosu. 

Last month, Olympic swimmer Anita Alvarez, who expressed gratitude to the vaccine, fainted in the swimming pool during her routine for the second time at the FINA World Aquatic Championships and was rescued just in time by coach Andrea Fuentes. 

In May, sixteen people were taken to the hospital after running the Brooklyn Half Marathon, including four runners who collapsed and a 30-year-old runner who died of cardiac arrest. 

A compilation of 1,000 athletes collapsing and sports-related incidents from March 2021 to 16 June 2022 can be seen here.