Jonah Lomu was the New Zealand winger who scored four tries against England in the 1995 World Cup semi-final, running straight over full-back Mike Catt for one of them. New Zealand’s sports minister at the time of his death, Jonathan Coleman, called him rugby’s first global superstar. He said Lomu had inspired Polynesian men, and in later years, through his fight with kidney disease, people with chronic illness too.
He is back in the news because of Lomu, a documentary showing that even the All Blacks management did not know how sick he was. His widow, Nadene, went to court in an unsuccessful attempt to stop the film, and did not take part in it.
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Where the four tries came from
Lomu made his Test debut against France in Christchurch in 1994, at 19 years and 45 days old, the youngest man to play for the All Blacks. At the World Cup a year later he scored seven tries in four matches, four of them in that semi-final against England in Cape Town. Nobody had done that to England for New Zealand in ninety years.
That tournament is widely credited with helping attract the commercial deals that let rugby union enter the professional era. His Test career ran from 1994 to 2002, when he finished with 37 tries in 63 caps and a share of the World Cup’s all-time try record: 15, level with South Africa’s Bryan Habana.
What the illness actually was
Nephrotic syndrome forced Lomu’s retirement in 2007. It is what happens when a kidney’s filtering units let protein leak into the urine instead of staying in the blood. John Sayer, a nephrologist at Newcastle University, has written that the condition was first described in 1821 and still has no cure. Treatment means high-dose steroids, drugs against blood clots, and tablets to control the swelling that gives it its name. The worst cases need dialysis, machine-cleaned blood several times a week, or a transplant.
Lomu received his transplant in 2004, aged 29, from his close friend Grant Kereama. Sayer notes that a transplant restores something close to a normal life expectancy, but that transplanted kidneys wear out faster than the ones people are born with. Lomu’s lasted seven years before it began to fail.
Why his coach thought he was lazy
The team doctor at the time, John Mayhew, did not tell head coach John Hart the extent of Lomu’s illness for about two years, and Hart assumed his star wing was simply unmotivated. Hart’s verdict now is that Lomu played as a rugby superstar in a body running at 70% capacity. “You’d never see another like him,” he says, wondering what a fully fit Lomu might have done.
What the new film corrects
The documentary’s directors are the Irish film-maker Gavin Fitzgerald and his New Zealand-based co-director Vea Mafile’o. They say the usual account of Lomu’s life is told, in Fitzgerald’s words, through a “western lens”: a tough kid from a hard neighbourhood who found rugby and let it save him. Fitzgerald sees a clash of cultures at the centre of the story. Lomu was sometimes not Tongan enough for Tongans, he says, while being told to act more like a palangi, a white person. Mafile’o, whose roots lie two villages from Lomu’s family’s in Tonga, wanted to celebrate him properly. She says the film has “released them from a lot of shame.”
Not everyone welcomed the project. Lomu’s mother and brother support the film, but his widow fought it in court. Fitzgerald also faults the rugby authorities. Lomu, he says, could have been “protected a lot better by the institutions,” given all he gave the game.
Mayhew, who died in April 2025, said in the film that he was “disappointed he didn’t have the life he deserved to have,” and wondered “whether he was ever truly happy.”
