Pierre Mignoni, who has resumed his post as Toulon coach after a sudden mid-season pause, said Friday he had suffered a “breakdown” and had learned that coaching could kill.
“My body gave out on me,” said Mignoni about his decision to step aside following a loss to Clermont in the French Top 14 on February 14.
“I experienced what you might call a breakdown, a work overload. I felt it coming on, but you always have this feeling of being a superhuman. You’re always taking care of others and not much of yourself,” said the 49-year-old former France scrum-half who has been in charge at Toulon since 2022.
“It’s a fabulous job; you don’t count the hours and you tell yourself it’ll be alright. But it’s not so much the workload on the field that’s heavy, it’s the mental load. And at one point, it really hit me hard. It wasn’t the defeat that put me in this state; it was the final straw, and my body gave out.”
Mignoni said Pierre Dantin, the club’s ‘high-performance consultant’ told him to take a break.
“I’m someone who doesn’t sleep a lot, about five or six hours a night, but I slept for five days straight. I felt like my head weighed 20 kilos and I couldn’t walk anymore. It took me a week to walk again, to walk around my garden.
“The doctor even thought I’d had a stroke. I had a brain MRI after my five days of sleep to rule that out.”
Mignoni said he felt “much better, otherwise I wouldn’t have come back”.
“But,” he added, “I don’t want to go through that again.”
He said he was going to change the way he worked and delegated.
“I used to get up at 5am to be in the office by 5:20am, until 6 or 8pm, sometimes 10pm. Now I’m going to forbid myself from getting up at 5am. I’ve already pushed it back an hour.”
Mignoni added, however, that “I’m still a coach and I’ll always be on the pitch. I simply need to work better with my staff”.
He said he had considered his future but the club president supported him.
“I asked myself if I had the strength and the desire to continue. Bernard Lemaitre immediately told me that it was unthinkable for him that I would leave.
“He wanted me to take a break, even three months if necessary. Accepting that your coach takes a break is very rare.”
He said he recovered “step by step”.
“I only started seeing people again last week. Before that, I didn’t want to be seen. It’s not a question of shame,” he said.
“I was happy to be back, a little emotional,” he said. “But I have to be careful, I’m still being monitored.
“I’ve been having a great time, I feel fresher. I took three weeks off, I’d never done that before, not even during my holidays. The players seemed happy to see me again, a little emotional, which is nice.
“I’m not Superman, even though I didn’t think I was. Six months ago I said that if I had to die on the sidelines, I didn’t care. I thought it could never happen. Now I know it can.
“How many times has my wife told me to stop?” he asked. “I told her not to worry.”
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