It was the drama of his life. Christophe Dominici, who died suddenly on Tuesday, November 24 at the age of 48, had lost his older sister when he was only 14 years old. It was one evening in the spring of 1986 that the life of the teenager he was rocking.
Christophe Dominici went to bed that night as his sister Pascale had just left to join a friend near the village where they lived. The next morning, his mother told him the terrible news: his sister had just died in a road accident. “On a straight line of the highway, his Talbot Samba with the sunroof went into barrels”, confided on this subject the former rugby player in his biography “Bleu à l’âme”. “Mom came into my room. ‘There has been an accident, Pascale won’t be coming back.’ It was only later that I realized what she meant”, he said in 2007, in the columns of Paris Match.
Pascale was 10 years older than him and was more than a sister, “his second mother, the one who really raised me”, confided the former Stade Français player in his biography. “Pascale helped me with my homework and taught me to dance. I was her spoiled little child. She had chosen my first name, Christophe, like Christ, water and fire”, confides Christophe Dominici.
A drama that deeply marked the champion, who had to watch over the body of his eldest. “Watching over the body of the one I loved so much. For hours, I waited. A movement, the blink of an eye. I shouldn’t have. For years, I lived with this mortuary image and cold, which looked so little like him …”, explained in Paris Match the legend of the France team.
This loss will cause him to fall into petty crime. “For the next five years, I made my parents miserable. I had become a bad boy. I started fighting with everyone, stealing Mopeds and car radios. Through these moments of violence, I felt the breath of life, this breath which seemed to have died out in me with the absence of my sister”, confided in 2007 Christophe Dominici to Paris Match.
Faced with this suffering and this violence, his mother then decided to make him play rugby. “Rugby saved me. But I also tell myself that if I had been happy at that time, I would never have found the strength in me to follow my dreams…”, concluded with philosophy Christophe Dominici. The rest we know: five French championship titles with the Stade Français and two Grand Slams and a World Cup final with the France team.
