David Ginola says he owes his life to his friends who gave him CPR and insisted emergency services persisted with resuscitation attempts after he suffered a heart attack.
The former Tottenham and Newcastle winger collapsed while playing in a charity match in Mandelieu in southern France in May 2016. Ginola swallowed his tongue and stopped breathing, leaving him clinically dead on the pitch for eight minutes.
But his friend and fellow footballer Frederic Mendy did not give up on him, valiantly performing CPR to keep the blood pumping while medics arrived with a defibrillator. Even then, Ginola was not safe, with initial attempts unsuccessful in restarting his heart.
“A firefighter shocked me three times with the defibrillator then told my friend I was dead,” he told The Sun. “She said if the heart doesn’t start again after three times, it is over. She was wrong.
“But my friends could see I was fighting and told her to keep going. She shocked me two more times and then my heart started again.
“I met that firefighter a year later in Nice and she cried when she saw me. She said it was like seeing a ghost. I have to thank her and my friend.
“The doctors said that if Frederic had not acted so quickly and performed CPR for over eight minutes, I would have been dead or left in a vegetative state as my brain was starved of oxygen.”
Ginola, who was 49 at the time of his heart attack, later underwent a quadruple bypass operation at the Monaco Cardio-Thoracic Centre in his native France. Now 56, Ginola is determined to raise awareness of CPR and has become an ambassador for the British Heart Foundation.
Ginola, who went on I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in 2021, has now made a complete recovery physically. He lives in the south of France with his partner Maeva Denat and his daughter Ever. But the psychological scars remain.
"It has been complicated to handle psychologically," he told French newspaper L’Equipe in 2016. "The fact that I am still here. The clinic told me that nine out of ten people who return after that happens are in the state of a vegetable. I must have a lucky star – that must be my mother up there watching over me.
"Maybe people gave me a kick in the ass and said, ‘This is not your time.’ I have hundreds of questions, but not necessarily for other people, rather for myself. Compared to life, the little things seem insignificant.
"It was a relatively major procedure. But the only question for the medical team was the state of the brain. Generally, when someone goes through something like this, you end up in a rest home."
