IF we continue to keep seeing footballers, and tennis players having heart attacks on TV, and more of us have friends taken out randomly by heart attacks and strokes eventually the genie will be all the way out of the bottle. I think we are already there. It's just a matter of how bad does it get.
the human mind has a tendency to look for patterns, even when there are none.
heart attacks in sportsmen has been an issue for a long time.
here's a rudimentary list of notable sportsmen having sudden cardiac death by the age of 40:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudden_cardiac_death_of_athletes#Notable_casesnote that the list goes back as far as 1906.
a paper written by the guys from American College of Cardiology in 2016 (
https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/2016/06/28/07/06/sports-participation-and-sudden-cardiac-arrest) reads:
In the United States, there are approximately 100 to 150 sudden cardiac deaths (SCD) during competitive sports each year. The estimated incidence of SCD among athletes versus non-athletes was found to be 0.44 per 100,000 person-years, and 13 per 100,000 person-years, respectively. Despite the higher risk of SCD in the general non-athlete population, SCD among athletes garners intense scrutiny by the media and represents an emotionally charged medical topic. Indeed, the incidence of SCD in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) athletes may be higher than previously thought