"In recent years I have often been inexplicably ill" - Oliver Naesen reveals celery was to blame for his lackluster 2023 season
Cycling
Oliver Naesen, who was seemingly on a decline, resurged at the Tour of Flanders this spring, taking a step up along with the whole Decathlon AG2R La Mondiale formation. But in the end it turned out that something else was behind Naesen's struggle.
"In recent years I have often been inexplicably ill," Naesen begins his story at HLN. "It sounds stupid, but it's the truth: one day I was perfectly healthy, and the next day I was deathly ill. Nauseous, vomiting, not being able to get out of bed."
"At first I wasn't really sick. I was mostly tired and couldn't get through it. Time and time again the response was: it must be the flu and then I would be given antibiotics. But it kept getting worse: last year I was sick forty times. Sometimes several times a week. Really crazy. At one point I wondered if I was having a burnout? People asked me if I was depressed. Of course not, I was just tired. But it continued. I worried: was it over with me? Was my body spent?"
The cause had to be found somewhere else, in something very innocent: celery. "My blood has been drawn countless times, but nothing has ever been found. The breakthrough came when I reacted very strongly to celeriac one day. My throat closed. Dorien happened to not be at home. I thought I was going to have to call an ambulance."
Problem solved, although that is certainly easier said than done. "Celery is in f*cking everything. On Sunday after Roubaix we ate fries. I looked it up: the only 'meat' I could order in the chip shop was a Bicky Burger, everything else contains celery. So that's what I learned this week."
Not really, and I’m a bit surprised it took them so long to figure this out with all the medical surveillance these guys get. If you’ve ever looked at restaurant menus or food labels a bit more in detail, you’ll have seen that along with peanut, soya, lactose, gluten, etc. celery is one of the 10-15 things that people are most allergic to and that must be listed clearly to warn sufferers. When you are inexplicably ill and better again so often, allergies are one of the first things that come to mind and any decent doctor will quickly send you on a path to test which one(s) you may suffer from. So, either he doesn’t have decent medical back-up or he’s not been sharing this with the right people. All’s well that ends well though.
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