At the beginning of May, South Africa’s Richard Murray shared the sad news that he suffers from a heart condition called Atrial Fibrillation (AFIB) and that he would need to undergo a procedure to deal with it. Yesterday, Murray told his Instagram followers through a video from his hospital bed that “the procedure went well.”
“A big thanks to everybody for the support and everything…all the kind messages,” Murray says in the video. “I’m here in the hospital. The procedure went pretty well. Happy with that. Now I just need to recover and try to eat, because I can’t move my head from the pillow for the next six hours.”
With only a little more than one month to go, Murray has no idea yet whether he will be present in Tokyo: “Whether I can compete at the Olympics or not, is still a massive question mark for me. I’m going to obviously do everything and I want to try and be as healthy as I can. I don’t want to push myself. Health always comes first. That’s number one, as a professional athlete you should know, health comes above everything else. I will see how things go. Hopefully I can compete in the Olympics Games this year. If not, perhaps we will be looking at Paris 2024, which is only three years away, so we will see how it goes.”
In the video below, Murray explains what AFIB is, how he found out he suffers from this heart condition, and what his options were in terms of treatment.
