Footie legend David Ginola opens up about his devastating on-pitch heart attack and quadruple bypass
FOOTIE legend David Ginola has told how he died for eight minutes after a huge heart attack.
The former Spurs and Newcastle winger, 49, was playing in a charity match in May when he collapsed.
He swallowed his tongue and stopped breathing, leaving him clinically dead until paramedics arrived with a defibrillator, and surgeons needed to perform a quadruple bypass to save his life.
Talking for the first time about the horror to The Sun on Sunday, French ace David said: “I was running back to the halfway line when boom, my heart just stopped and I hit the ground face-first.
“The players thought I was joking but then my friend said, ‘Look at him, he is not OK, he is not fooling around.’
"I swallowed my tongue and my friends fought to get it out of my throat, but my teeth kept clamping down on their fingers.
“Someone called the emergency services and they said, ‘Forget the tongue, he is dead, his heart has stopped, you need to concentrate on pumping his chest.’
“My heart stopped for eight minutes at least. There was no pulse. I was dead. Then the air ambulance arrived and they hooked me up to a defibrillator.
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“They sent three electric shocks to my chest and when the third didn’t work they started to lose hope.
“But my friends told them, ‘Do not give up, David is fighting hard.’ Somehow they could see that my body was fighting to stay alive.
“After the fourth my heart started again. The ambulance worker turned to my friends and said, ‘I have a pulse.’ Everyone started cheering and crying.”
Dad-of-two David continued to play amateur football after his glittering Premier League career, which included a Player of the Year award in 1999, ended in 2002.
But post-retirement he started smoking and drinking more. And he revealed that, while a genetic defect caused the heart attack, the lifestyle did him no favours.
The night before the May 19 charity match, held at the home of a wealthy pal in the southern French town of Mandelieu-La Napoule, he stayed up late at a Chris Brown concert.
He had also been playing in a golf tournament and had enjoyed a couple of glasses of rose wine with lunch, as well as a few cigarettes.
Twenty-five minutes into the game, his heart gave out.
He said: “It’s strange because there were no warnings.
“I don’t remember anything but I have been told I was doing flick-overs during the game and scoring goals.
“At one stage, I felt a heavy pain in my groin and my friend said I should stay on the bench but I said, ‘No, I want to play.’
“I scored a goal and on the way back it was just boom.
“My friend, the footballer Frederic Mendy, did CPR and it is him I have to thank for being alive today, because he kept the blood going to my brain.”
David went by air ambulance to a specialist cardiac hospital in Monaco where surgeons performed a six-hour quadruple bypass as his arteries were so blocked.
Doctors told his family, including his model wife of 25 years Coraline, 48, and children Andrea, 25, and Carla, 22, that his brain had been starved of oxygen so long he might be left in a vegetative state.
But David revealed: “When I woke up the surgeon asked if I knew where I was then told me to look at my chest, which had been sawed open. I said ‘Wow, what happened?’ That’s when he knew I was OK.”
David has a history of heart problems in his family.
His mother Mireille died from a heart attack in 2005 aged 74 and his dad Rene, 82, had operations to clear his blocked arteries.
David admits he was not so careful with his diet after retiring.
The heart-throb, famed for his good looks off the pitch which saw him become the first man to front L’Oreal hair products in 1997, left his last club Everton aged 35.
Rather than sign for another team, he decided to move to Saint- Tropez in France.
He said: “I quit football because the options I had were not that attractive and it was a mutual decision with my wife.
“But I regret it now because I did not have any big injuries and I could have played for another two or three years.
“When you leave the game you don’t have to train like mad every day. You want to enjoy things you couldn’t do before like going to lunch with your friends and drinking a little bit of wine. If you want a cigarette or a beer you can do it.
“When I left Everton in 2002, the holiday season was just starting in the south of France.
“It was a fantastic summer but six months later it was winter time and everything was shut down.
You think, ‘OK, I’d love to go back to football now.’ But it’s too late.
"It was then I started to get depressed. I gained some weight, not a huge amount.
“I didn’t want to run any more. I stopped doing the things that are good for your heart.
"When you stop playing it’s like a little death. It’s very hard to take.”
Yet it was not until March this year that David had any health problems. While skiing with friends in Val d’Isere, he became faint.
Doctors now think this was a mini heart attack but even then he refused to see a doctor.
David said: “People would tell me, ‘You are in great shape, you have nothing to worry about.’ I was burying my head in the sand.
“For me dying was like watching TV and the screen suddenly goes blank. I didn’t feel anything. I never thought about death before but I think about it now.
“I’ve been asking myself why I deserve a second chance. I’m more sensitive, more philosophical.
"I don’t keep my feelings in any more. I feel very lucky, like I am here for a reason.”