World Cup final referee had heart surgery midway through tournament

Rugby
In an extract from Wayne Barnes: Throwing the Book, the referee of the World Cup final reveals how he travelled home in secret during last year's tournament to undergo heart surgery.
  • 11 Hours Ago
Training with [my fellow officials] Karl Dickson and Christophe Ridley is enough to give an old man a cardiac arrest. Karl only retired from playing a few years ago, Christophe is barely into his thirties.

So when my heart rate started going through the roof during a running session [at the Rugby World Cup] in Paris, I wasn’t overly concerned at first. Maybe I hadn’t slept well, maybe I hadn’t eaten enough for breakfast, maybe I’d drunk too much coffee. Whatever it was, I thought my heart would go back to normal if I just took things a little bit easier.

But 15 minutes into what should have been a nice gentle jog, I looked at my watch and my heart rate was up at 230 beats per minute. To add some context, my resting heart rate is around 50 beats per minute. When I’m busting a gut during a game, it may reach 175.

My legs were like wet spaghetti, I couldn’t fill my lungs. And I was refereeing the crucial pool game between Wales and Australia four days later.

You might remember that I’d had ticker issues in the past. Back in 2009, I’d been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation and had an ablation operation. A few years after that, I went into tachycardia, which basically means my heart was racing and unable to regulate itself, and my cardiologist Richard Schilling had to reboot it.

So naturally I wondered if the same thing was happening again. And while I wasn’t scared, as in, ‘S---, I’m going to die’, I did worry that my fifth and final World Cup might be over almost before it had started. I had already refereed a pool game between Ireland and Tonga, but that’s not how I wanted to sign off.

I rested on Friday morning and my heart calmed down. I didn’t even bother telling [my wife] Polly about it because I thought it had rectified itself. But the first thing she said when she arrived in Paris that afternoon and got a look at me was, “You’re not well. What’s wrong?”

I travelled down to Lyon the following day, and my heart hadn’t stopped racing by the Sunday, when the game was taking place. So now I was in a bit of a dilemma: if I told the bosses about my issue, my tournament – and refereeing career – would be over; but if I refereed the game, I was worried that I’d be miles off the pace. I didn’t think I’d collapse, I just thought I might let the players down.

? Full story: https://q.my.na/S5JY (The Sydney Morning Herald)