French international Hassane Kolingar suffers cardiac arrest after taking powdered tobacco at teammate’s wedding

Hassane Kolingar in action for Racing 92. Photo / Getty Images

Hassane Kolingar, loosehead prop for the French national team and Racing 92, has revealed he suffered a cardiac arrest after taking snus (a smokeless tobacco product) over the summer.

Kolingar returned to Top 14 action last weekend in a 25-25 draw for his club against Lyon, but feared he would never play again following the incident, which occurred at the wedding of his Racing 92 teammate Ibrahim Diallo and required him to be shocked four times.

“When I got there [to the wedding], I stuck a snus against my gum and sat down while waiting for the bride and groom,” Kolingar told Midi Olympique.

“It’s not illegal – there’s tobacco in it but it’s real s***, I think. At one point, I burst out laughing and immediately felt pressure in my chest. My heart was beating really hard and I was sweating a lot, seeing stars.

“I thought I was just having a hypoglycaemic episode and, so I would not ruin the ceremony, I moved aside. My eardrums were banging; I felt like someone was sticking needles in my head.

“I was in pain, really bad pain, and my eyes were rolling back,” Kolingar added. “I was going into cardiac arrest.”

Midi Olympique reported Yoan Tanga and Henry Chavancy were among a group of players to tend to Kolingar, who won three caps for France between 2020 and 2021, including a start against England at Twickenham in the final of the Autumn Nations Cup.

“It was a tachycardia incident, basically,” added the 26-year-old. “Because my pulse wouldn’t go down, the firefighters put me into a coma. To wake me up, they shocked me four times.”

Having been initially taken to hospital in Auxerre and transferred to the cardiology department of an institute in the Parisian suburb of Le Plessis-Robinson, Kolingar enlisted the services of a surgeon in Bordeaux to undertake a five-hour operation.

“The purpose of the operation was to clean the scar I had on my heart since birth,” he said. “To do that, [the surgeon] had to trigger a new cardiac arrest.”

With Stuart Lancaster’s Racing 92 in eighth place in the Top 14, with five wins from 13 league matches so far this campaign, Kolingar started in his side’s 36-24 loss against Toulon last weekend.