it's a nonsense claim. its a screenshot of a letter to the editor that you can't read without paying and no abstract. there's no original research done. it uses goodsciencing.com (
seriously) as the source for the 1598 athletes. the neat little graph is a screenshot from
euromomo.eu where they have a disclaimer that says:
Quote:
Because of the unexpected and varying mortality experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic, the calculated baseline applied in the EuroMOMO estimation of excess number of deaths do not include data from 2020 and onwards, as these data will distort the estimated level of baseline number of deaths.
Due to the exclusion of data from the COVID-19 pandemic, the trend incorporated in the statistical estimation of the baseline are presently forecasted beyond the intended duration. This prolonged forecast has introduced an increasing bias over time, which can cause incorrect estimations of the excess mortality, particularly when the numbers are cumulated.
Because of this enhanced bias when cumulating data, the cumulated outputs should not be considered reliable at this point and must be interpreted very cautiously.
they pulled a graph from this website and cropped off the big caution disclaimer in yellow. here, see for yourself. go to the link and scroll down to "excess mortality."
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps/