Sir Chris Hoy says he and wife Sarra are ‘lucky’ amid cancer and MS diagnoses
Sir Chris Hoy has described himself and his wife Sarra Kemp as “lucky” despite both of them living with incurable diseases.
In his first TV interview since announcing his terminal cancer diagnosis, Hoy, 48, tells the BBC that both he and Kemp are "lucky" that treatment is available to help them manage their conditions.
Kemp was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis (MS) in November 2023, less than two months after Hoy was told he had terminal prostate cancer. Hoy says she kept her diagnosis to herself until December that year, and had only told her sister.
"Throughout all of that she was there for me but didn’t at any point crack," he tells BBC presenter Sally Nugent. "And it was really only in December that she said, ‘This is the news I’ve had’."
MS is a lifelong condition that affects the brain and spinal cord. Symptoms include extreme fatigue, feeling off balance or dizzy, muscle cramps, spasms and stiffness, and problems with memory or concentration.
Hoy describes the moment Kemp told him of her diagnoses as "the lowest point" in his BBC One documentary, titled Sir Chris Hoy: Finding Hope, which will air at 8pm on Tuesday 5 November.
"That was the point where I suddenly thought, ‘What is going on?’ I almost felt like saying, OK stop, this is a dream, wake me up, this isn’t real, this is a nightmare.
"You were already on the canvas and I just felt this, another punch when you’re already down - it was like getting that kick on the floor."
The sporting icon, who is one of the UK’s most decorated Olympians, continues: "That was the bit where you think, if you didn’t have the kids, if you didn’t have that purpose and the absolute need to keep getting out of bed every day and moving on, it would have been really difficult."
Despite how hard it was to face Kemp’s diagnosis, along with his own, Hoy says the couple are "pressing on".
"She’s receiving treatment and she’s doing well at the moment, and aren’t we lucky that there’s treatment for it?
"She has medicine she can take and I have medicine I can take. So we’re lucky."
Since Hoy announced his terminal diagnosis, the NHS said visits to the NHS website for prostate cancer symptoms rose by a massive 672%.
NHS England revealed figures showing that, in the 48 hours after Hoy revealed his cancer was incurable, there were 14,478 visits to the page on prostate cancer symptoms - nearly eight times as many as over the same period the previous week.
Professor Peter Johnson, NHS England’s national clinical director for cancer, praised Hoy’s decision to speak about his prognosis, adding: "It could save lives by encouraging people to come forward sooner with their symptoms."
Hoy is now calling for the current screening process for prostate cancer to be changed as it could help save millions, he says.
There is no national screening programme for prostate cancer, but men aged 50 and over can ask their GP for a free prostate-specific antigen (PSA) test. Hoy believes the age limit should be lower, particularly for men with a family history of prostate cancer
He tells Nugent: "It’s logical to me, why would you not just get the test a little bit earlier, catch it before you need to have any major treatment? So to me it seems a no brainer.
"Why would they not reduce the age, bring the age down, allow more men to just go in and get a blood test?"
Watch: Sir Chris Hoy says 'selfless' wife, Sarra, kept MS diagnosis a secret during his cancer treatment
Read more about cancer:
How to prioritise recovery after cancer treatment (Yahoo Life UK, 4-min read)
NHS to review guidance on prostate cancer testing after Chris Hoy’s appeal (PA Media, 6-min read)
'Urgent research needed' after rise in cancer rates in younger people (Sky News, 2-min read)
