The coach who died once and now leads Norway in a World Cup quarterfinal
5 min readJul 11, 2026 06:30 AM IST Ståle Solbakken has already died once. Saturday, he coaches Norway against England anyway. The first shock from the defibrillator did nothing. More than 150 joules had shocked the body that had already stopped breathing. It was the second shock, moments later, that gave his heart a new life on a training pitch in Copenhagen on March 13, 2001. He remembers none of it. “I remember nothing,” he told VG. The day has been erased entirely, a blank space where his own death should be. Club doctor Frank Odgaard began compressions immediately, continuing until the ambulance arrived, then used the defibrillator himself. Solbakken did not breathe for seven minutes. He was pronounced clinically dead. His parents flew in from Norway; his mother, he has said, began planning his funeral over the North Sea, before anyone knew whether his brain had survived what his heart had not. He surfaced thirty hours later in intensive care, thrashing, and was put back under. Doctors later tested the pacemaker they’d fitted by …
