Asiago’s Canadian defenseman Darcy Robinson  suddenly dropped to the ice during his team’s game in the Italian hockey league and died later at the hospital.

He wasn’t hit, he didn’t crash into something. He just dropped at 3:25 of the first period of the game against Renon on Thursday night. His death was legally declared at the local hospital, the team’s spokesman said.

The doctors under whose supervision the 26-year-old hockey player passed away didn’t give any details regarding the cause of Robinsons’ premature death.

The Italian league postponed the entire first round of the season. The local prosecutor's office opened an official inquiry Friday, the ANSA news agency reported.

The game was interrupted and called off at 7:32 of the second period as the team officials returned from the local hospital with the bad news. The other league games of the night were also suspended after the second period.

Before moving to Asiago in the Italian hockey league in 2005, Robinson played with AHL Wilkes-Barre/Scranton and ECHL Wheeling teams in the North American minor leagues. The British Columbia, Kamloops native held dual Canadian-Italian citizenship.
He played junior hockey in Saskatoon and Red Deer.

Picked 233rd overall by the Pittsburgh Penguins in the 1999 draft, Robinson amounted six goals and three assists with 66 penalty minutes during last season for Asiago.

Similar fatalities

The tragic incident follows several similar deaths, but on the soccer field.

The most recent of them was the death of a 13-year-old Croatian soccer player who passed away in an almost exact manner. The teenager was in the middle of a training session in Varazdin, 100 kilometres northwest of the capital city Zagreb. After he collapsed on the field, his coach and the club doctor immediately intervened and managed to resuscitate the boy, but he died later in hospital.

Similar cases seem to occur more often especially in the European soccer leagues. The most well-known is the death of Sevilla’s FC midfielder Antonio Puerta.

The 22-year-old was struck by heart attack in the 35th minute of his side’s match against Getafe CF on 25th August in the Primera División and collapsed near the goal.

Puerta was resuscitated and after regaining his consciousness he was escorted out of the field and into Estadio Ramón Sánchez Pizjuán locker room. But there he suffered a second hart attack and after another cardiac resurrection he was brought immediately to the Virgen Del Rocío hospital were the doctors put him under intensive care.

Chaswe Nsofwa, a 26-year-old Zambian striker in the Israeli league, died the next day after dropping to the field during a practice session.

Cameroon midfielder Marc-Vivien Foe died at the 2003 Confederations Cup in France.