{"id":545805,"date":"2026-04-23T03:43:17","date_gmt":"2026-04-23T03:43:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/545805\/"},"modified":"2026-04-23T03:43:17","modified_gmt":"2026-04-23T03:43:17","slug":"lewis-moody-former-england-captain-announces-mnd-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/545805\/","title":{"rendered":"Lewis Moody: Former England captain announces MND ride"},"content":{"rendered":"

Moody, who was diagnosed after noticing a weakness in his shoulder while training in the gym, says the progression of his disease seems gradual.<\/p>\n

“I’m good at the moment,” he said.<\/p>\n

“The only sort of significant noticeable change is still in my hand. The shoulder strength is diminished, but not significantly reduced since diagnosis.<\/p>\n

“Without a shadow of a doubt, the hardest thing is noticing little things every day. The other day I noticed a slight difference in my finger strength – whether it was opening a bottle top, holding a fork, cutting your food.<\/p>\n

“Those little things mentally are a challenge when they present themselves, but I think within a day you can move past it and just focus on functional things I can do, rather than things that I’m less able to.”<\/p>\n

Moody, who set up his own charitable foundation shortly after he retired and raised millions of pounds to fund research into brain tumours,, external<\/a> says recruiting for June’s cycle and a new cause was straightforward.<\/p>\n

Jonny Wilkinson, Mike Tindall, Martin Corry, Ben Kay, Phil Vickery and Andy Gomarsall – all fellow members of the squad that won England’s only Rugby World Cup – will take part in the ride, along with the ex-Leicester and Bath flanker’s former team-mates Tom Croft, Geordan Murphy, Leon Lloyd, Ben Youngs, Tom Youngs, Lee Mears, Danny Care, Dan Hipkiss and Louis Deacon.<\/p>\n

Moody’s teenage sons Dylan and Ethan will also be part of the peloton.<\/p>\n

“I have done a challenge every year since retiring, some years more than one,” said Moody.<\/p>\n

“I really wanted to make sure that I got another one in. I don’t know how many I have got left to do so that was the reason for it being so soon, to make sure that physically I feel like I can contribute.<\/p>\n

“I couldn’t be more grateful of my former colleagues. I chatted to Vicks [Vickery] the other day, he said ‘mate, I absolutely hate cycling, but I am 100% going to do this with you’.<\/p>\n

“I’ve never seen Wilko [Wilkinson] on a bike. He’s probably hired a group of people to get him ready for the conditioning side of it. I dread to think how he’s going to turn up looking. He’s in unbelievable nick anyway.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Moody, who was diagnosed after noticing a weakness in his shoulder while training in the gym, says the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":545806,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-545805","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=545805"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/545805\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/545806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=545805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=545805"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=545805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}