A knee to the chest in the 96th minute, in midfield, during a duel for the ball. Extremely violent. Jesús de Miguel Alameda, 30, Tenerife striker, lost his life in this way after a collision with Andorra goalkeeper Jesús Owono. He fell to the ground, was given first aid and was transported to hospital. He did not survive. To understand what could have caused such an event, Professor Carlo Alessandro Russo Frattasi, orthopedic surgeon and specialist in Sports Medicine at the University of Turin, as well as a forensic doctor, was asked. The dynamics of the event are horrifying: “The chest is pressed against the spine and compresses the heart.”
And here we are talking about a 30-year-old, healthy footballer, monitored every day and who, nevertheless, takes a knee to the chest and his heart stops. "Here we are talking about an extremely high-energy trauma. The kind that almost never happens. You have two footballers, 70-75 kilograms each or even more, running towards each other at high speed. All that force is concentrated in a single point: the knee. All there. In those few centimetres". And what happens to the chest? "The chest is elastic. It flattens. It collides with the spine. In the middle is the heart. Which is a little bigger than a fist. It is completely crushed. And it stops for a mechanical reason, not cardiac. A tenth of a second later, a centimetre further, and probably nothing would have happened. In this case the knee arrived right there. Right in the area of the heart".
The ambiguity, however, is that after resuscitation, de Miguel's heart started beating again on the field. "The heart started beating again, yes. But during those minutes that it stopped, the brain didn't receive blood. There was no perfusion. And the brain is the organ that suffers the most of all. It only takes a few minutes without oxygen to cause very serious and irreversible damage. Apparently, that's what happened. The heart started beating again, but the neurological condition was impaired."
A shocking event, where no similar case exists: "In our studied cases, among traumatologists, I have not found anything so localized and so violent. I'll give you a practical example. If you are motionless and someone comes at 40 kilometers per hour and hits you in the chest with a knee, it throws you three meters away. And by throwing you away, it releases the force. Not here. Here it was a head-on collision. Like two cars crashing head-on. The hood of the engine is crushed and deformed. All the energy remains inside. Here, this is what happened."
