Olympic gold medal-winning cyclist Sir Chris Hoy was diagnosed with cancer in September 2023, but announced last year that his condition was terminal
Sir Chris Hoy insists he is focusing on the positives and his hopes for the future, despite being diagnosed with terminal cancer. The British Olympic legend is determined to keep fighting with a leading professor suggesting there are still options on the table.
At a Q&A session for Community Socials Cancer Awareness Trust in London, Professor Sir Chris Evans, 67, was full of optimism, remarking: “This is clever stuff.”
He detailed potential steps for treatment, saying, “With Chris you’re gonna go through one or two steps and see how they go but there’s about 15, 16 things we can do. Which I hope he has none of them. And he probably won’t as he looks better than me.”
The professor also pointed out the positive outlook’s impact on patients: “Positive people with cancer do a lot better than the negative people with cancer, they respond better to whatever the treatment.”, reports Wales Online.
Diagnosed first in September 2023 with a shoulder tumour, Sir Chris had to share last October that his condition progressed to terminal status when a scan revealed primary cancer in his prostate spread to his bones. Initially given a timeframe of “two to four years” to live, Hoy is currently responding well to chemotherapy and even considers himself “lucky” in spite of his health struggles.
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In a personal reflection shared with the Sun, he talked about a significant change in mindset: “The biggest shift in my mentality in the last year and a half is learning to slow things down and still have the goals, still have the purpose, still have things to look forward to, but actually to appreciate the moment.
“Because the future doesn’t exist. The future is this abstract concept that we worry about that may never happen, we often worry about the wrong thing, often actually something comes out of left field, like cancer.
“You don’t have to be positive every day as it is impossible to be positive all the time. But I think, for me, it’s about choosing not to be negative more than being positive. I think it’s so important to still have big ambitions and goals and reason to drive you on and to have a focus and to not think too far ahead.
“I still have plans to still have big exciting things and I have got plenty of those coming up in family holidays and having Tour De Four [his charity race] means I want to be fit and I want to go well .
“I want to train for it, so every time I go on the bike I think about that and the purpose behind it. But while I’m on the bike, I’m looking around me and I’m trying to take in, I look thinking ‘this is beautiful’ even if it’s raining .
“I’ve got three or four friends who passed away very suddenly without any warning, without the chance to appreciate life, without the chance to say ‘aren’t we lucky?'”.
“So, yeah, for me now, it is very much is about the present, but still looking forward to the future.”