Elite grappler Vagner Rocha has recently opened up about one of the most shocking experiences imaginable; suffering a heart attack. Rocha was coming off one of the best performances of his career, winning a silver medal in the under 77kg division at ADCC 2024, when disaster struck. Rocha was only a matter of months removed from standing on the podium of the most prestigious no gi grappling tournament in the world when he was hospitalised with heart failure. It would be a life-changing experience for anyone but even more so for an elite athlete like Rocha, who has spent years pushing his body to the limits in competition.
Rocha revealed that there were actually some early warning signs indicating that something was wrong:
“After the ADCC, I started feeling kind of bad. It was kind of a heavy thing. I wasn’t feeling anything wrong, my weight started to go down, my legs were all swollen.”
He carried on training at this point and it wasn’t until a routine blood test promoted a doctor to conduct more tests, and eventually they discovered the issue:
“It showed that I was with a wrong beating, in English it’s called AFib (Atrial Fibrillation). The heart is literally beating, the bottom part is beating normally, and the top part was like this (fast rhythm)”
When he was hospitalised, he was able to see for himself that something was very wrong:
“My beating was, I was standing, it was 120, 130. It was doing nothing… I spent 5 days at the hospital, looking at my heart, 120, 130 without lying in bed… The doctor called me: “It seems that you had a heart attack already. Your heart is so big, so dilated for so long.”
The news that he had already suffered a heart attack came as a shock to Vagner Rocha, particularly because he had spent so long actually managing to train as normal:
“I was normal, I had training in the morning. I was fine, there was nothing wrong.”
The full interview with Vagner Rocha where he discusses his recent heart attack was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of Connect Cast:
