At a certain age, joked Sir Chris Hoy in October 2011, you don’t even buy green bananas. The throwaway remark was intended to underline the complexities and unpredictabilities of being a “senior” athlete – Hoy was then 35, seemingly blessed with eternal youth – but it seems grimly apposite in the light of the Scot’s announcement that he has terminal cancer and may have only between two and four years to live.
There has been universal warmth and admiration for the way Hoy has dealt with his diagnosis, revealed publicly in an interview with the Sunday Times. An upcoming memoir, All That Matters, will go into further detail, along with relating the multiple sclerosis diagnosis of Hoy’s wife, Sarra. The unflinching courage shown by Hoy, the acknowledgment of the tremendous difficulty of processing and communicating what has happened to their family, underlines that here is a remarkable human being, who engages with life – and death – in his own way, with a humbling degree of perspective.
