LONG READ Carlu Sadie: 'I was 2mm away from death, exactly the same as Steven Kitshoff'

“Please,” said the doctor, his gaze stern and his words heavy with caution. “Put the neck brace on immediately.”

Carlu Sadie shuddered. In those fraught seconds, his thoughts raced and his world crumbled. His rugby career seemed on the brink of collapse. His life in Bordeaux with the European globetrotters evaporated. So did the long-term contract he’d just signed with the Bulls back home in South Africa. His wife, Niritha, was already in Pretoria furnishing the house they’d bought for the following season.

Two days earlier, in January 2025, Sadie’s Bordeaux-Begles were playing Lyon at their Chaban-Delmas citadel. A scrum went down and Sadie, the near-140kg tighthead, felt a jolt in his neck. He had no pain and no symptoms. “It’s a prop thing… carry on,” he thought. At the next set-piece, the cracks struck again. Three of them this time. Bigger. The kind of sensation that makes your heart drop. Sadie went to stand up and couldn’t lift his neck. He describes feeling as though his head was loose, like a bottlecap which hasn’t been tightened, rattling around precariously at the top of his neck. This wasn’t a ‘prop thing’ anymore.

“I was supposed to fly out to South Africa the next day to join my wife. The game was a 9pm kick-off and when I got home, I phoned her at 1am and said ‘listen, I can’t travel, something is not right, I have to go for scans – cancel the flight’.

“I’d been sent home with a neck brace, and when I got out of the shower, went to dry my head and had that same feeling, tat-tat-tat in my neck. I phoned the doctor at quarter to two in the morning. That night, everything runs through your head. My wife phoned me and, I’ll never forget, kept me on WhatsApp call the whole night while I was home alone.”

Sadie was sent to a military hospital the next morning where a break was ruled out. There was still no diagnosis. He pushed for answers and was in hospital again the following day for an MRI scan and a dynamic x-ray. That’s where the mood changed.

“The doctor got my results and said I was going to see the neck specialist ASAP,” Sadie remembers. “Now you get the cold feeling running through your body. This guy is so busy you need an appointment months in advance – I sat outside his office for four hours so he could rush me in that day.

Mate, that’s not growing back. You were 2mm away from death.

“He looked at me with a straight face and said ‘are you okay?’ Yeah, no problem, I can pick up bags, do whatever. I’d taken my neck brace off to show him I could move my head and that’s when he told me to put it back on right away.”

At the top of the neck, the C1 and C2 vertebrae connect like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. They support the head and facilitate its movement. Sadie interlocks his massive fingers to show how they come together. He’s learned a lot about spinal anatomy this past year. Ligaments effectively strap the bones in place. Just like the great Springbok Steven Kitshoff before him, Sadie had snapped one of these ligaments clean off.

“Okay,” he said to the specialist. “How long does it take to grow back?”

The medic’s eyes widened. “Mate, that’s not growing back. You were 2mm away from death.”

“I was in complete shock,” Sadie says. “The only thing I could think of was, ‘the same as Kitshoff?’ It was exactly the same thing. Two weeks earlier, we were in the training centre and the boys were asking me, because I’m South African, what had happened to Kitshoff. I’d told them the chances of him playing again were not positive. Two weeks on, I get the same news.

“The specialist told me I would have to go for an operation, take some bone from my hip, put it in my neck, and put two screws in my neck. He said ‘at the moment, if you get a massive smack, you are dead; whiplash, you are dead.’ I asked him when we were doing the operation. I had to drive my car… anything could happen, a guy could smack into you from the back.

“He said ‘I’m going on holiday for three weeks and I’ll see you when I get back.’ What? Mate, you just told me my life is in danger, now you’re going to see me in three weeks? I got a real taste of life right there.”

Sadie phoned Niritha. The prop, hunched over his steering wheel in the hospital car park. His wife, alone in the unfurnished house they may never be able to make a home. The tears flowed freely.

“I’m in shock, crying in the car. My career is done. I called Yannick Bru, our coach, straight afterwards, told him I appreciated everything he’d done for me, given me this massive opportunity to play for Bordeaux and put me in a group I never thought I’d be part of.”

Jake White didn’t believe one word coming out of my mouth. His doctor was telling him my chances were slim.

Then, something remarkable happened. Bru spoke to Laurent Marti, the Bordeaux president and financial power behind the superclub. They loved Sadie’s work and wanted to keep him, busted ligaments and all. Astonishingly, they hatched a plan to buy a prop with a severely damaged neck out of his new contract.

Back at Loftus, Sadie says Jake White was incredulous. The Bulls supremo smelled a rat. No club would spend this kind of money on a tighthead in such career-threatening peril. Sadie sent the Bulls doctor his scans and the verdict was grim. Yet Bru and his team were confident he would play again.

“Yannick asked me to stay on. I said, ‘my neck is broken, the same as Kitshoff, the chances of me coming back are slim’. Yannick didn’t care. The same neck specialist had done a Bordeaux prop before, a Georgian who they say came back even stronger, like a monster.

“He told me to go to South Africa and sit down with the Bulls CEO. Now I’m scared. I’m wearing the neck brace, worrying about turbulence on the plane. Jake White didn’t believe one word coming out of my mouth. His doctor was telling him my chances were slim. But in France, everyone is telling me I’m going to be okay, the physios have done it before, the specialist and rehab guys are in Bordeaux.

“A long battled started. Laurent Marti said ‘if you want to stay, let’s make it happen’. There was no doubt in my mind. The Bulls wanted me to have my operation in France and do the rehab in Pretoria. Eventually, Laurent said ‘what do you want?’. They told him the amount and he paid it. And I was out of my contract.”

This whole ordeal forged an extraordinary bond between athlete and club, player and coach. Sportspeople often talk of playing for something bigger. ‘Family’ values and culture buzzwords are touted liberally by organisations the world over. In Sadie’s case, the rhetoric carries true, tangible meaning.

“Knowing what they did, you go the extra mile for them,” he says. “You know when you wake up in the morning, the club is a place you want to go, somewhere you want to be. That’s how I feel about Bordeaux.”

When he went back in for his pre-op meeting, Sadie’s neck specialist was in buoyant mood. He’d operated on 16 rugby players with the same injury and 14 were back on the field.

“I told him I would do anything he told me,” the prop recalls. “I will sleep on the couch in here, I don’t give a rat’s ass.”

The first, and gravest, hurdle was the procedure itself. Another cold blast of reality between Sadie’s eyes.

He said there’s a 50-50 chance you might die on the table. When I’m putting the two screws in your neck, if I touch the spinal cord, you’re done. If I touch the arteries, you are bleeding out on the table.

“He said there’s a 50-50 chance you might die on the table. You’ve got two arteries taking blood to your brain and then you’ve got the spinal cord. When I’m putting the two screws in your neck, if I touch the cord, you’re done. If I touch the arteries, you are bleeding out on the table. My wife is seeing this doctor for the first time and is crying. We know it’s a big operation.

“The operation was supposed to be 80, 90 minutes. Four-and-a-half hours later I’m not out and no-one is talking to her. She didn’t speak much French. In France you can book in to hospital and get your own bed. They are telling her to get out of the room, he’s not coming to this room.

“She told me she started praying – ‘please God, let me just see him’ – and as she finished, I came back through the emergency room doors and the doctor said everything went well.”

After some convalescence, Sadie was sent for rehab. A legendary local physiotherapist called Luc Senegas became his sensei. Senegas specialises in cervical and lumbar spine rehabilitation. He is ex-military and to the uninitiated, his methods sound eccentric. Stricken rugby players swear by him.

“He’s an amazing fella,” Sadie says. “I would get in at 8am, and he would have me lie on a mat with my head on a pillow, and ‘pick’ my whole body up with my head, hold it for six seconds and relax. Ten reps, eight sets. Okay, sweet.

 

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“But you get so tired. I wasn’t able to train at all and I had picked up a load of weight. I was 15kg heavier, over 150kg. You start sweating, everyone looks at you like you are struggling, you feel you are worth nothing, you are so far off getting back to rugby.

“I do the 80 reps and think I’m done for the day. He tells me that was the warm-up. Then he just started building it.

“He averaged about 400-500 reps a session and I saw him five times a week for nine weeks. My wife came along with me to help me count the reps, because sometimes you do so many that you forget, and you start getting angry. She kept pushing me. She is the reason I am back on the field.

“Luc would put your neck backwards, put weight on your neck in a scrum position, did side bridges against the wall. The rep counts got higher and the weights got heavier. I could easily pull 70-80kg with my neck. Luc measures your neck every week and can see it growing. I went from a 51cm circumference to 60cm.”

On week nine, with over 100 hours of rehab complete, Senegas called Sadie aside. He had one more obstacle to clear. Get through this, and he could return to rugby. Sadie’s heart beat a little faster.

“Luc told me, ‘you are going to flip upside down, do a handstand and then lift your hands’. I looked at my wife, who was there with me, and told her this guy was crazy. There is no way, six months post-op, I am going to do this.

 

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“I was heavy. Proper heavy. I couldn’t run, the club wanted me gymming to get as strong as possible in the shoulders and the neck and I just couldn’t drop the weight. I was getting so negative.

“I went down, did the handstand, and I lifted my hands. He looked at me and he said ‘you’re done. Your rehab is done, you can play again.’ I still had two months left on my programme. ‘You are done, mate, I promise you. If you can balance 150kg on your head, you don’t have any problems.’ I am forever grateful to him. Even today, he sends me messages and programmes, and he has started working with the scrum coach at Bordeaux.”

Sadie missed Bordeaux’s glorious run to the summit of Europe. He returned to play in August, eight months after the cracks in his neck. He has dropped nearly 15kg and is the lightest he’s been since school. You can’t survive in Bordeaux’s beautiful chaos without an engine. Not when Matthieu Jalibert is plucking rabbits from hats, or Damian Penaud and Louis Bielle-Biarrey are lancing defences out wide.

“You never know what’s coming with ‘Jalib’, and when they make a line break, you can just walk back to the halfway line,” he laughs.

You never see anyone talk about our pack, it’s always the backline in the media. If you do the job, you can give the ability to Louis or ‘Dams’ or anyone

Yet the destructive scrummaging which set Sadie apart as a kid from an unfashionable Western Cape town, earned him prominence at the Sharks and the Lions and ultimately a ticket to rugby’s great, unrelenting hamster wheel in France, has never dimmed.

In Bordeaux’s two Champions Cup matches against Northampton and Bristol last month, Sadie touched the ball once. The scrum penalty count with the South African on the field was six-one to the champions. He put Danilo Fischetti, Italy’s premier loosehead, in the bin within 20 minutes of their 2025 final rematch.

“You have to be fit if you want to play UBB’s style because at training they push three or four minutes of continuous ball in play and you have to have a certain number of metres.

“You will not see the props getting much ball because the plays are designed for the stars to get it. You know if there is a certain play you have to hit that breakdown no matter what and it has to be quick. So when you get the ball it’s almost a special moment for the props.

“The forwards said before Northampton, ‘we know we have x-factor backs, what about us? We can do it as well. We are not only there to clean the breakdown and make their plays.’

“If you can get the set-piece right with the boys we have in the backline, it’s a special combo. We lacked that at the beginning of the season. Now we are getting the system in place. You never see anyone talk about our pack, it’s always the backline in the media. If you do the job, you can give the ability to Louis or ‘Dams’ or anyone – they will do the damage.”

There’s a strange resonance to Sadie’s story, and how it intertwines with Kitshoff. A gym obsessive, he’d scrapped his way to a professional deal with the Stormers in his late teens. The ‘Spicy Plum’ was waiting for him. And salivating.

“I went into a scrum session and I had Kitshoff and Bongi Mbonambi against me. I’d been scrumming against 19-year-olds. We go into the scrum… crouch, bind and on the set he hits me so hard I get winded, I’m trying to breathe, I’m seeing stars. He stands up, looks at me and he’s like, ‘welcome to the big league’.”

And in the big leagues, Sadie remains. He’s played 19 games already this season but no longer moans about the perpetual nature of the French rugby calendar. He and Niritha have built a wonderful life down in the Aquitane region. He’s lighter, happier and thriving for a team who show no signs of relinquishing their grip on the Champions Cup crown.

“I always said in the past as soon as it gets to training or the season gets long, I wish it stopped. You complain so easily and it gets taken away so quickly. I’ll never complain again.”