“And now?”
German triathlete returns one year after a heart attack
04/29/2025 – 3:24 p.m.Reading time: 2 min.
A year after a heart attack, Triathlete Lasse Priest celebrates his comeback – in Italy he takes the step back into the race.
A year ago, a competition for Lasse Nygaard Priest ended unexpectedly – and almost dramatic. At the World Cup in Chengdu on April 29, 2024, the then 28-year-old gave up after swimming and cycling. “I felt so bad that I got out,” he recalls today. What he didn’t know at the time: he might have suffered a heart attack.
First of all, priests traveled. In Japan, Uzbekistan and Italy, he stayed far behind his expectations. Only in -depth medical examinations brought certainty. “The burden afterwards was an immense risk,” he says in retrospect. Martin Engelhardt, President of the German Triathlon Union (DTU), explains: “The heart attack-in a simplified amateur language, was determined a circulatory disorder of the heart.”
Priest made the diagnosis hard. “I was sitting there first and thought: ‘And now?’,” He says about the moment in the Heart Center Bad Krozingen. Olympia, mixed relay, training-all of this suddenly moved into the background. Instead, questions about life expectancy and future lifestyle dominated his everyday life.
A complete ban on sports followed. From 30 training hours a week to zero – a hard cut. Time was also psychological. “Something like that actually accompanies you in every situation, even when climbing stairs,” says Priest. But through the “very, very, very, very great” medical care, he slowly won back security.
In January, Priest started training under strict requirements. Before the comeback, the DTU also obtained the assessment of the Cardiology Working Group. The result: no objections – with intensive sports cardiological monitoring. However, Engelhardt warns: “General conclusions for the population cannot be derived from this.”
Now Priest is facing the competition before returning. At the Ironman 70.3 Venice-Jesolo, he will start on Sunday: 1.9 kilometers swimming, 90 kilometers cycling and a half marathon are waiting for him. For this he travels from Freiburg to Italy by car, perhaps with a stopover in Milan, where his girlfriend’s parents live.
“There is already a little excitement,” he says. But he doesn’t want to make the pressure too big. “You do it because you want it, just because you feel like it,” says Priest.