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Chris Hoy has recounted the heartbreaking moment he told his children of his cancer diagnosis.
The 48-year-old six-time Olympic cycling champion publicly revealed his diagnosis in February, but kept his prognosis private until he recently announced that he has two to four years left to live.
In his forthcoming memoir All That Matters: My Toughest Race Yet, Hoy said that the prospect of telling his children – Callum, 10, and Chloe, seven – about his condition was looming over him as he approached the beginning of his chemotherapy.
Hoy and his wife decided after some deliberation that they would deliver the news to their children at the kitchen table at dinner time, in the hope that their children wouldn’t have “awful memories” of being told, “sit down, we have something to tell you”.
“I remember trying to make it sound as casual as possible, despite my stomach churning and my head full of thoughts and emotions,” recalled Hoy. “I am hovering in the kitchen and Sarra is sitting down with them. ‘You know when Daddy went to the doctors,’ Sarra starts and they both look up inquisitively. I then take over. I explain the doctors have found the cause of my sore shoulder at last.”
“Have you heard of cancer?’ Callum, quick as a flash, eyes widening, says ‘yes’, but Chloe looks a little more confused. I go on. ‘Well, I have cancer in my shoulder, but the doctors have got medicine for me to try to fight it. The medicine is called chemotherapy.”
Hoy and Sarra did not tell their children there was a cure but said treatment was going to make him feel better.
The first thing his son Callum asked was, “Are you going to die?”, which was a question Hoy and Sarra had anticipated.
“We agreed to be honest and clear with the kids to the extent we could at this stage. ‘None of us live forever,’ I say. ‘We all die at some point and no one knows when this will be. However, we hope that I’m going to be here for many, many years because of this medicine I have.”
Hoy added that Chloe had just turned six at the time and “didn’t know the difference between lunch and dinner” so to try and explain any sort of timescale seemed “barbaric and torturous” for Chloe and the rest of the family.
Despite the difficult conversation, Hoy said it ended on a positive note, with him picking Chloe up and swinging her over his shoulder.
“The kids are looking concerned and a little cautious so Sarra adds, smiling, ‘Look at Daddy now. Does he look OK?’ ‘Yes, look at me, do I look all right?’ I ask, and they slowly look me up and down as though to check for any weaknesses,” writes Hoy.
“Am I looking sad?’ I add, smiling. They shake their heads and then I’m on my feet, putting Chloe over my shoulder as I gallop round the kitchen with her to prove my point. And then it’s over, we’re smiling and laughing together. I’m so relieved, exhaustedly so, and it’s gone way better than in my wildest dreams, a scenario that has played out hundreds of times in my head already before this day. With Chloe giggling on my shoulders, a giant weight has been lifted off them.”
Elsewhere in his book, Hoy revealed the double tragedy his family faced when Sarra was diagnosed with “active and aggressive” multiple sclerosis within weeks of his own devastating cancer news.
“I couldn’t believe what I was hearing; Sarra, so fit and well, able and healthy, was facing this absolute crisis in the midst of my own,” he wrote.
Hoy met Sarra, a lawyer from Edinburgh, on a night out in 2006, and they married in 2010. They welcomed Callum in 2014, and Chloe in 2017.
