Even in despair, Sir Chris Hoy embodies the Olympic spirit

At his peak, Hoy personified the ideal of the gentleman athlete and is staying true to that reputation in face of shattering cancer news

It was during a cool-down lap at London’s Olympic velodrome, as Sir Chris Hoy soaked up the raptures on becoming the first British athlete in any sport to win six gold medals, that perhaps the truest measure of his greatness emerged. For there, in the middle of the mayhem, Britain’s support staff scrambled to form a guard of honour as he left the boards, an accolade they had never bestowed on any other rider.
The reception felt fitting for a cyclist whose very look, with his eyes concealed by a sleek aerodynamic helmet and his thighs like giant redwoods, crystallised the Superman aesthetic. You could even imagine the Union flag that he trailed behind him in triumph as a cape. And yet the team’s tribute was inspired not just by his historic feat but by his essential decency, a quality that resonated in every corner of an often brutal sport. “I love Chris Hoy very much,” said Hong Kong’s Wai Sze Lee, in halting English, when at last she had the chance to meet her hero in 2012. “Very gentleman.”
Hoy has spent his life making a generosity of spirit his signature. Even as he prepared for his role as flagbearer at the opening ceremony in London, he was indulging requests for photographs from people he had never met before. Kind, good-humoured, dependable, he seemed at his peak to embody Pierre de Coubertin’s ideal of the gentleman athlete, combining a ferocious competitiveness with a humility more associated with the amateur era.
Today Hoy is staying true to that reputation, relaying the shattering news that his cancer is terminal not with rancour but with supreme stoicism. Just hours before the revelation came, he was still commentating for the BBC at the world track championships in Denmark, as full of bonhomie as ever. And as he disclosed a barely conceivable double misfortune – that his wife Sarra had been diagnosed with aggressive multiple sclerosis and that they were struggling with how to tell their two children, aged 10 and seven – he betrayed not a trace of self-pity. “I still feel like we’re lucky,” he said.
Where others might perceive an unbearable cruelty in their position, Hoy sees only a sense of grace. There has always been an extraordinary nobility about the man. One of the lesser-known backdrops to his crowning glory in London was that he had learnt, only two months prior to the Games, that his father David had prostate cancer, the same disease afflicting him now. He was so distraught that when it came to informing British Cycling’s doctor, Richard Freeman, he had to hang up, unable to speak.
But when head coach Shane Sutton told him the next day, with customary sensitivity, that he was riding poorly and that the team were choosing Jason Kenny for the Olympic keirin instead, he did not offer his father’s ordeal as an excuse. Indeed, he did not even mention it at all, merely congratulating Kenny and submitting to his most brutal training regime yet. For two months he did not allow himself to watch a second of television, with Sarra mandating that he went to bed early and ate the superfood meals she had made so he could regain peak condition. In the end, he did not simply reclaim his London spot but save his most iconic performance for when it mattered most.
The moment that sealed gold No 6 was quintessential Hoy: with victory ebbing away, and Maximilian Levy mounting a seemingly decisive last-lap attack, he summoned an extra gear around the final bend to break the German’s will and cement his place among Britain’s Olympic immortals. The display captured a defining contradiction of his career, where, for all his decorum and courtesy off the track, he could muster the most terrifying fury if the race required it.
Sometimes, even in retirement, Hoy has sought to replicate the consuming intensity that fuelled him to his greatest feats. There is the story of how, in 2015, Sarra returned home to find him curled up in a ball on the garage floor at their Cheshire home, ruined by the ravages of one of his fearsome “turbo sessions”. These exercises in pure masochism – four rounds of 30 seconds at 100 per cent effort – had been savage enough in Olympic mode, with each stint leaving Hoy in so much agony that he would need 15 minutes before he could contemplate the next. So why go through such torture in his downtime? The only answer is that Hoy is compelled, at some level, to explore the very extremes of human existence.
This is why, coping with his loss of identity as an all-conquering cyclist, he has still taken on the most arduous challenges, swapping two wheels for four by entering the Le Mans 24 Hours. It is why he has maintained his stratospheric fitness levels, with one post-retirement picture of his physique prompting Mark Cavendish to write: “When I grow up, I want to be Chris Hoy.”
The discovery that he has only two to four years left to live is a gut-wrenching jolt, shaking all we imagined we knew about Hoy and all he thought he knew about himself. It is heartbreaking to think of all the times, since stepping away from the bike in 2013, that he has spoken about his children. “Having kids has been the biggest part of my retirement,” he has said of his son Callum and daughter Chloe. As an illustration, he wrote a 10-part children’s book series about the adventures of a cycling-mad boy who could fly through time and space if he pedalled fast enough. It was both a reflection of his own origins in the sport – he had first wanted to ride a bike after watching ET – and of the inspiration he hoped to impart.
Despite the desperate hand that fate has dealt, Hoy need not worry on this front. He understands, acutely, that the heights he has scaled are indelible. “Until I’m an old man, until the day I die, I will be inherently linked to the Olympic Games and I can always take pride in that,” he once said. “No matter what direction my life takes in the next 40 or 50 years, my name will be there next to a little date in the history books – and it will be there forever.” It is, at this bleakest of hours for Hoy, his family, and the British public who idolise him, as powerful a consolation as any.