It is just after 9am in a back room of the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow \u2013 a few minutes before Hoy’s charity mass participation cycling event, the Tour de Four, is due to get under way.<\/p>\n
The ride was set up, and given its title, in an effort to change perceptions around stage four cancer.<\/p>\n
Every time the door opens, a member of British Olympic and Paralympic royalty walks through it.<\/p>\n
Sir Mark Cavendish, Sir Jason Kenny, Becky James, Dani King, Sir Ben Ainslie, Sir Steve Redgrave, Dame Sarah Storey…<\/p>\n
In and among the clip-clop of cycling cleats comes another sporting knight.<\/p>\n
This one is wearing tennis shoes.<\/p>\n
Hoy goes over to check in with Sir Andy Murray about his readiness and is met with a typical sardonic quip from his fellow Scot.<\/p>\n
Hoy asks: “Are you feeling ready mate?”<\/p>\n
“Well, I’ve got the kit,” Murray responds.<\/p>\n
As it turns out, the two-time Wimbledon champion was woefully ill-prepared \u2013 completing the ride in tennis shoes and boxer shorts. Not typical road cycling gear, but typical of the response of Hoy’s friends to his diagnosis.<\/p>\n
“The response of friends has been quite overwhelming at times,” Hoy says.<\/p>\n
The friend response has been mirrored by that of the public.<\/p>\n
September’s Tour de Four raised more than \u00a33m for cancer charities across the UK.<\/p>\n
However, the highs of that success were followed in November by the UK National Screening Committee’s recommendation that a prostate screening cancer programme for all men in the UK was not justified.<\/p>\n
For Hoy, the fight to raise money and raise awareness is his new Olympic-sized mission and his response therefore was dignified, yet resolutely determined.<\/p>\n
“I was quite astonished,” he said. “I can’t believe that the answer to this situation is to sit on your hands and do nothing. There are 10,000 men a year in the UK who find out they have prostate cancer too late \u2013 it’s incurable.<\/p>\n
“We’re failing these men if we don’t do something proactive. Regardless, I’m going to keep pushing.”<\/p>\n
Again, we meet his Olympic-honed mindset, targeted on a bigger mission.<\/p>\n
“The Olympics was something that was my life for so many years and drove me on,” Hoy says.<\/p>\n
“I’m still incredibly proud of it now and I look back with great fondness, but this is something on an entirely different level.<\/p>\n
“It’s more important than riding bikes in anti-clockwise circles, put it that way.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It is just after 9am in a back room of the Sir Chris Hoy Velodrome in Glasgow \u2013…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":352819,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[445],"tags":[49,48,635,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-352818","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cycling","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-cycling","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=352818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/352818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/352819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=352818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=352818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=352818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}