{"id":574298,"date":"2026-08-04T07:56:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:56:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/574298\/"},"modified":"2026-08-04T07:56:20","modified_gmt":"2026-08-04T07:56:20","slug":"theyre-not-alone-chris-hoy-on-his-ambition-to-stop-men-dying-of-prostate-cancer-chris-hoy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/574298\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018They\u2019re not alone\u2019: Chris Hoy on his ambition to stop men dying of prostate cancer | Chris Hoy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sir Chris Hoy arrives a couple of minutes late and the apologies roll from him. I don\u2019t have a chance to tell the six\u2011time Olympic sprint cycling champion<\/a> that waiting an hour for a star interviewee is more common. Hoy is already deep into a story about how he and his wife, Sarra, were walking here when an unknown man stopped him on the street in Glasgow.<\/p>\n

The stranger had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer and he wanted to share what had happened to him and, I suspect, find new strength by talking to a compassionate public figure. Hoy has lived a full life with stage 4 cancer<\/a> for nearly three years. He has also worked tirelessly to highlight the fact that prostate cancer kills more people in this country than any other disease while, at the same time, to offer a tangible sense of hope when there is horror for men, and their families, after a terminal diagnosis.<\/p>\n

Hearing a discreet account of this encounter, it sounds as if the 50\u2011year\u2011old Hoy helped the man at a raw and vulnerable moment. \u201cIt\u2019s so isolating when you get a cancer diagnosis,\u201d Hoy says. \u201cYou\u2019re suddenly on borrowed time. You\u2019re observing the world and not living in it \u2013 because it\u2019s for other people. But then you realise you\u2019re not special and it\u2019s very common, sadly. I want to make sure that anyone in a similar situation will realise they\u2019re not alone.<\/p>\n

\u201cI also want to raise awareness that 10,000 men a year get the news that they have stage 4 prostate cancer. A lot of it comes down to a lack of awareness so we need to get men to understand the risk.\u201d<\/p>\n

In September 2023, Hoy saw his physiotherapist about a nagging pain in his shoulder. Without any other symptoms he assumed he had strained a muscle while lifting weights. The physio sent him for a scan, which identified a tumour in his shoulder. Two days later, a second scan brought shattering news. The primary cancer was in his prostate and had spread to his pelvis, hip, spine, ribs and shoulder. \u201cJust like that,\u201d Hoy wrote in his memoir<\/a>, \u201cI learn how I die.\u201d<\/p>\n

His life-expectancy was said to be between two and four years<\/a>. I ask Hoy how he is feeling now. \u201cI\u2019m doing really well, thank you,\u201d he says. \u201cAs well as can be expected, really.\u201d<\/p>\n

How often is he tested? \u201cOn average, between every three and six months. But if there\u2019s an area of activity you might have it more frequently. You have blood tests regularly and there\u2019re periods where you\u2019re in and out of the hospital. The regular blood tests are horrible because it\u2019s like the clock is ticking. At some point that afternoon or the next day, you\u2019ll get that email.<\/p>\n

Sir Chris Hoy waves to the crowd after winning gold at the 2012 Olympics in London. Photograph: Tom Jenkins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember when I was about to walk on stage for a talk. It was one of these \u2018An Evening With \u2026\u2019 events. It had sold out and I was just about to go out in front of a packed audience. I shouldn\u2019t have done it, but I checked my phone and the results were there. The PSA [prostate-specific antigen] had gone back up. It was like: \u2018Oh God.\u2019 And then: \u2018Put your phone down, put a smile on and do it.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Hoy makes a grimace before smiling more wryly. \u201cIn a way the concentration of being on stage helped.\u201d<\/p>\n

When did this happen? \u201cProbably last summer. Even the Tour de 4<\/a> [the charity bike ride in Scotland which Hoy led for the first time in September last year] was difficult. The treatment at that point had started to fail so I was changing to a different treatment. Only with hindsight do you realise [the difficulties].<\/p>\n

\u201cFor me, the worst is when you walk into the consultant\u2019s room. You\u2019re immediately trying to read their body language. Is it good news? Is it bad news? Let\u2019s get to the punchline. So it\u2019s why I\u2019ve switched to Zoom for these meetings about my results. You can switch it off and you\u2019re in your sanctuary, your home. You don\u2019t have to be in the hospital, walking past strangers, having that long drive home.\u201d<\/p>\n

He seems able to live in the moment better than most people, but does the fact that he is approaching the end of his third year of a supposedly limited life\u2011expectancy play on his mind? \u201cA little, but not really because these are average statistics you get in the very early days. You have to remember the people outliving those statistics can\u2019t be added to the data yet.<\/p>\n

Sir Chris Hoy and wife Sarra raised \u00a33.1m for cancer research with their Tour de 4 charity ride last September. Photograph: Tour de 4<\/p>\n

\u201cBut not everybody is as lucky as me to respond to treatment. Sadly, you have people like Dermot Murnaghan<\/a> [the television journalist who died from prostate cancer last month]. I\u2019d been confident and hopeful he and I would do the Tour de 4 for many years to come. So that was a big blow, a huge shock when I got the message from his family saying the time was coming.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hoy continues to live with real vitality \u2013 even if he endured a serious accident on his mountain bike in November. He was racing down a trail in south Wales when, at speed, he misjudged a steep jump. Hoy still shudders at the memory.<\/p>\n

He was warned that if surgery was unsuccessful his leg might have to be amputated, but Hoy plays down the situation now. \u201cIt\u2019s shocking at the time, but they have to tell you what could happen from a legal perspective. It wasn\u2019t a little fracture of the leg. It was a full reconstruction of the tibial plateau. A friend of mine who\u2019s a doctor saw the X-rays and said: \u2018Oh. That\u2019s the kind of X-ray you\u2019ll see when someone\u2019s parachute hasn\u2019t deployed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hoy describes his post-op recovery as \u201ca miserable, incredibly difficult time\u201d, saying: \u201cI was keeping my head above water and everything was going OK and then you have this freak accident. You have a lot of time sat around thinking, which you don\u2019t want to be doing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018It was a huge honour to be with him.\u2019 Sir Chris Hoy joined his teenage hero Miguel Indur\u00e1in on a charity bike ride across Spain. Photograph: Courtesy of Laureus<\/p>\n

He looks down at his right leg and says: \u201cIt\u2019s just metalwork from here [just below his knee] down to here [near the ankle]. It\u2019s not what I needed and yet the irony is that mountain biking gives me so much physically, mentally and socially. Being out in the fresh air and being in the moment is so good for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Hoy was soon back on his bike and last month, despite another injury to his \u201cgood\u201d leg, he cycled across Spain with riders including his teenage hero Miguel Indur\u00e1in, a five-time Tour de France winner<\/a>. \u201cI was on holiday in Greece and feeling great. I had this big charity ride across Spain coming up, coast-to-coast, with Miguel and others. Amazing. I was sitting cross-legged on a paddle board with my son for quite a long time, just watching the sunrise.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I stepped off the paddleboard, my weight shifted, and there was sharp pain: \u2018Oh. That didn\u2019t feel good.\u201d It was a torn meniscus and there was this little piece floating about in the knee.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was four days before I went out to Spain but so many people were coming I couldn\u2019t say: \u2018I\u2019ve got a knee injury, I\u2019m not coming.\u2019 I thought I\u2019ll take my bike and see what I can do. I was hobbling through the airport using my carry-on case as a crutch, thinking: \u2018This is ridiculous, I can\u2019t even walk.\u2019 But on the bike you never fully extend your knee. So, tentatively, I was like: \u2018This doesn\u2019t feel too bad.\u2019 And long story short, I managed to get through the week and we raised \u00a3200,000 and had an amazing experience.\u201d<\/p>\n

He somehow rode alongside the mighty Indur\u00e1in with a torn meniscus? \u201cYes. He\u2019s not your average 62-year-old. He still does these crazy 10-hour rides and he\u2019s as fit as a butcher\u2019s dog. It was a huge honour to be with him.\u201d<\/p>\n

Such drive, against all odds, stands in stark contrast to the laxity that epitomises the failure of successive governments to take coherent action against prostate cancer. \u201cI can\u2019t see how the government are not coming up with some form of proactive decision,\u201d he says. \u201cThey say that the risk of testing every man<\/a>, and the number of men who would have elevated PSA levels, would then lead to too many being unnecessarily treated, and then having to deal with the consequences of surgery or treatment. To me, that\u2019s a treatment issue, not a screening issue. France has a screening system. I don\u2019t know why we don\u2019t. It just doesn\u2019t make sense.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018France has a screening system, I don\u2019t know why we don\u2019t. It just doesn\u2019t make sense.\u2019 Photograph: Murdo MacLeod\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Hoy has other pressing concerns. Sarra was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis two months after he heard he had stage 4 cancer. But, worrying about him, she kept the news from her husband for almost a month. \u201cShe\u2019s incredible,\u201d Hoy says. \u201cShe\u2019s receiving treatment and doing really well. Sarra took up cycling to do the Tour de 4 and she\u2019s physically fitter than she\u2019s ever been. She\u2019s adamant that [MS] won\u2019t get in the way. She\u2019s doing all she can to support me and the family.\u201d<\/p>\n

How are their children, 11\u2011year\u2011old Callum and eight\u2011year\u2011old Chloe? \u201cKids\u2019 concept of time is very different to ours and they know how to live in the moment. They were more concerned when I broke my leg than about my cancer diagnosis, because they could see me in pain. I was unable to get up.<\/p>\n

\u201cCancer is an abstract concept for kids and we\u2019ve tried not to allow it to change family life too much. They understand the situation but, equally, they\u2019re living in the here and now.\u201d<\/p>\n

Next month, with Tour de 4, he and Sarra hope to raise even more than the \u00a33.1m they made last year for cancer research. Hoy is inspired by the rapid progress being made in medical science in terms of treating, and potentially, finding a cure for the disease. \u201cFrom what I\u2019ve been told by people at the forefront of new treatments, this is the most exciting time for prostate cancer drug development in the last 25 years. They\u2019ve seen a real upturn in new treatments and new therapies.\u201d<\/p>\n

This additional source of hope means Hoy is still full of ambition. He has just completed work as a pundit for TNT at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, where the cycling was held at the velodrome named after him.<\/p>\n

\u201cI also have ambitions to help decision-makers do something proactive. A change of prime minister, with Andy Burnham, might help. I\u2019ve met him a couple of times and he\u2019s good friends with [the former GB cyclist] Chris Boardman. I would love to speak to Andy and see what he thinks we could do.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have all kinds of goals and the biggest are raising as much money as we can for these amazing charities, changing perceptions of what is possible during a stage 4 diagnosis and also trying to one day have some proactive gateway to screen men \u2013 so less men die of prostate cancer as a result of my diagnosis. That would be quite something.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sir Chris Hoy arrives a couple of minutes late and the apologies roll from him. I don\u2019t have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":574299,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":["post-574298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=574298"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/574298\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/574299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=574298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=574298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=574298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}