When Chris Hoy’s shoulder starts hurting, at first he thinks it’s the usual: “the sort of aches and pains I’ve grown accustomed to when pushing myself in the gym and on the bike”. The cyclist, who became the first British athlete to win six Olympic golds, continued to practise hard despite retiring after the London Games of 2012. Perhaps his middle-aged body is no longer up to it, he thinks.
In September 2023, aged 47, he receives the diagnosis: terminal cancer. It has spread from his prostate throughout his body. He is told he has two to four years to live.
He doesn’t know how to cope. Both on the cycling track and off it, he writes, “I’ve always had a plan and a goal. I work towards things, applying and tweaking as I go, with an end in mind.” None of this applies to dealing with incurable cancer. He breaks down when telling his wife, Sarra, and initially has no idea how to tell their children, Callum, then nine, and Chloe, six. From this point on, a wise, realistic, yet ultimately positive account of how to handle a death sentence unfolds.
Initially Hoy is bereft, and possibly depressed. In the first few nights he cries more than he has “over the rest of my lifetime combined”. He imagines all the moments of his children’s lives that he will miss. He thinks he will never again feel happiness. He feels obliged to seize every remaining moment: “I try to impress upon the kids just how much I love them (‘NO! I love YOU more!’)… I catch myself even in the most mundane moments somewhat ridiculously thinking this is the best glass of water I’ve ever tasted or look at that amazing cloud/bird/tree.”
He seeks wisdom in sports psychology – an essential element in the success of British cycling in the Hoy era. He reconnects with the psychiatrist Steve Peters, who as consultant to the UK cycling team helped Hoy not just with winning but “to recognise who I wanted to be and how I wanted to live my life, how to tackle challenging moments and do it all with a positive outlook”. As a cyclist, Hoy was always making plans to hit objectives. How can he make one now for what remains of his life?
Peters encourages him to see a future that might last surprisingly long. Cancer treatments are among the few things in the world that are improving. Survival rates have increased, and may jump again as immunotherapy treatments – related to those behind the Covid-19 vaccines – continue to spread. Hoy accepts that all this will come too late to save him, but his goal is to live as long as possible, and not to waste that time worrying about his cancer.
He uses his cycling experience to deal with his chemotherapy treatment, which is exceptionally aggressive because of how far his cancer has spread. “I decide to view chemotherapy like a gruelling 18-week training block, three weeks at a time,” he writes before it starts. “Peters tells me I have to approach it with the mindset that I’m going to blitz cancer.” Hoy almost wants to skip his way into chemo sessions, to welcome the fact that by undergoing them, he will be fighting back against the cancer.
When he and his wife walk the corridors towards the room where the chemo happens, they see “women with headscarves on, men with haunted eyes… some really poorly looking souls, and that doesn’t help my morale”. (One of my own first memories of my wife’s cancer journey – which was terrifying but ended happily – was of a weeping Russian woman running out of her oncologist’s office shrieking in despair.)
Hoy’s chemotherapy sounds like medieval torture. The world’s most successful practitioner of a brutal endurance sport admits: “It’s hard, it really does test your mental resolve.” But, he writes:
I try to take the lessons learned from a life spent pushing the physical limits while controlling the negative thoughts. I remind myself I could always do one more lap, one more set, one more rep, even one more turn of the pedals, therefore I can do this now. I find myself able to look up at the clock and take it minute by minute, breaking it down to a single lap of the clock face, one at a time. I do one minute, then another, then another…
Afterwards he goes home and literally gets straight back on the bike for a brief pedal.
Humans have accumulated millennia of wisdom in how to cope with misfortune, and 21st-century sports psychology probably does not add much to that. Still, Hoy arrives at some genuine insights of his own. Firstly, how essential it is for anyone with cancer to be surrounded by loved ones – and in our increasingly lonely society, many people aren’t. Just doing the paperwork and the phone calls involved in treatment is generally beyond a single sick person. Sarra does it for Hoy.
His friends rally round. Anyone dealing with cancer in the family soon discovers the dos and don’ts for friends’ responses. One no-no is for the friend to emote at length, recounting how hard they have been hit by the sick person’s diagnosis, and then demanding frequent updates, usually after each chemo session when the sick person is at a low. Other friends don’t know how to respond, and just disappear. Hoy’s advice: “Messaging without expectation of reply is the most helpful thing: the knowledge that someone is thinking of you but not expecting you to react in return.” Another top tip is to offer play dates to take the kids away on hard days.
Hoy snaps out of his depression. Top athletes spend their careers planning for future triumphs, but he learns to focus on simple pleasures in the now: a cup of coffee, or watching comedy on TV with Sarra. Many pages are spent recounting his love of motor sport. Before getting sick he became an accomplished amateur driver, completing the Le Mans 24 Hours race.
He doesn’t entertain the Lance Armstrongian delusion of beating cancer with the power of positive thinking, but he says: “I’m just out here trying not to be negative, simple as that.” He feels lucky to have led a blessed life until now. “When things feel a bit unfair, I remind myself not to think ‘why me?’ but instead ‘why not me?’. This is just life, it happens to countless other people around the world, so why wouldn’t it be the same for me and my family?”
The positivity persists despite another revelation, late in the book: about three months after his own diagnosis, his wife is diagnosed with “very active and aggressive” multiple sclerosis. On a speakerphone call just before last Christmas, “I listened to Sarra calmly telling the doctor that her husband had recently been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and simply saying, ‘I need you to help me outrun this.’”
There are heartrending moments. Part of Chris Hoy’s impulse in writing the book is to leave behind a document for his children to read one day. In the final pages he says a public goodbye to them: “Look after your mum… I hope that you will always feel the unconditional love and pride I have for you and know that you brought sunshine into my world, simply by being yourselves.”
Let’s hope that farewell will prove very premature.
Simon Kuper is a columnist for the Financial Times
All That Matters: The Inspirational and Uplifting Memoir of Hope from One of GB’s Greatest Olympians
Chris Hoy
Hodder & Stoughton, 240pp, £22
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This article appears in the 20 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Combat Zone