Maradona has stomach stapled

ARGENTINIAN football legend Diego Maradona had his stomach stapled to reduce his ballooning waistline, his Colombian doctors said at the weekend.

The Argentine World Cup-winner had the operation, also known as a gastric bypass, at a clinic in the Colombian coastal city of Cartagena on Saturday.

Maradona, 44, arrived in Colombia weighing nearly 20 stone and Dr Carlos Chaux, who headed the medical team, said the two-hour operation was successful.

The surgeon also revealed that Maradona will be on a liquid diet for the next three months and his target is to reach his normal weight of 11st in 18 months.

“Everything went well,” Francisco Holguin, head of Cartagena’s Medihelp clinic, where the operation was performed, told reporters.

He said the former superstar, who is 5ft 6in, weighed 267lb when he checked in, and will spend three days in the clinic recovering.

The former midfielder only stopped playing professionally in 1997 but has grown almost unrecognisably fat in recent years despite spending much of his time in a Cuban clinic fighting cocaine addition.

Maradona will be fed intravenously for two days before going on a two-week liquid diet to be followed by solid foods, his doctors said. He is expected to remain in Colombia for about two weeks.

A gastric bypass reduces the stomach’s capacity for food and bypasses part of the small intestine, forcing individuals to eat less.

Maradona, who propelled his home country Argentina to World Cup victory in 1986, spent more than a week in the intensive care unit of a Buenos Aires hospital last April with heart and breathing problems. He was then confined to a psychiatric clinic by his family.

In September, he returned to Cuba, where he has lived since 2000, to undergo more treatment for drug addiction.