Referee Wayne Barnes’ resting heart rate is 50 beats per minute. Moments before he officiated last year’s Wallabies-Wales match, it was racing at 180.
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.
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.
A camera crew was following us around for a documentary, but once they’d got a bit of footage of us talking about our first-half performance, I asked them to leave. I woke up the following morning thinking my World Cup was probably over, which was a devastating feeling. I’d muddled through Wales-Australia, but it wouldn’t have been fair on the teams to referee another game in that kind of condition. However, I thought I might still have one trump card up my sleeve: Richard Schilling.
While I was out for the count, Richard restarted my heart, and when I saw him again, he told me it had all gone to plan. Richard told me my left ventricle was still enlarged, that he might have to perform another ablation somewhere down the line, but that I’d be OK for the rest of the tournament.
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