Sarra and Chris Hoy on their biggest battle yet: ‘It doesn’t seem real’

The wife of the six-time Olympic champion is dealing with his terminal cancer while coming to terms with her own life-threatening diagnosis

It’s life-changing news that would be unbearable for any family. This week, Sir Chris Hoy announced that the primary cancer found in his prostate last September had spread to his bones, pelvis, hip, spine, shoulder and rib. The six-time Olympic gold medallist has been given between two and four years to live by doctors.
But terminal cancer wasn’t the only blow which the Hoy family have been privately battling with. In Hoy’s forthcoming memoir All That Matters, he reveals that just weeks after his cancer diagnosis, his wife, Lady Sarra Hoy, was diagnosed with a “very active and aggressive” form of multiple sclerosis (MS).
As well as Chris’ parents David and Carole and his sister Carrie, she is the woman who supported one of Britain’s most successful Olympians to greatness, cooking him super nutritious meals while he was training, and often pictured kissing him from the stands after yet another historic win. After taking gold at London’s velodrome in 2012, Chris said: “Sarra has been the one that has really got me through it all.”
But while Chris revealed his cancer diagnosis back in February, before this week, few people outside the family knew about Sarra’s MS. She even kept it from Chris for over a month, while he was undergoing treatment for his cancer, which was first diagnosed in September 2023.
“It’s the closest I’ve come to, like, you know, why me? Just, what? What’s going on here?” says Chris of Sarra’s news. “It didn’t seem real. It was such a huge blow, when you’re already reeling. You think nothing could possibly get worse. You literally feel like you’re at rock bottom, and you find out, oh no, you’ve got further to fall. It was brutal.”
Sarra, 44, had visited her GP after experiencing a tingling sensation in her face and tongue. After undergoing a scan just before Christmas, she was found to have the degenerative and incurable disease MS. According to Chris, on bad days she can struggle to carry out simple tasks, such as opening the front door with her key. But, like Chris, she has remained positive in the face of her illness, and continues to run and attend gym classes. 
Hoy even revealed that Sarra, a former lawyer from Edinburgh, says “all the time ‘How lucky are we?’ We both have incurable illnesses for which there is some treatment. Not every disease has that. It could be a lot worse.”
The couple have now told their two children, Callum, 10, and Chloe, 7, that their father has cancer. But they have chosen to keep the fact that their mother has MS from them for a bit longer. “I never want to lie to them. But there are certain things you don’t need to tell them straight away,” says Chris.
The 48-year-old former track cyclist revealed his greatest fear is his children learning about their parents’ health struggles from schoolmates, and someone saying: “I saw your daddy on the news last night and he’s going to die.” In the hopes of avoiding this, the family have taken a two-week holiday, hoping that the attention will have calmed down by the time they return.
Multiple sclerosis is the most common disabling disease of the central nervous system in young adults. It results from damage to myelin, a white fatty substance that forms a protective sheath around nerve fibres in the brain and spinal cord and acts as an insulator to ensure that nerves transmit electrical impulses efficiently.
It affects more than 130,000 people in the UK and is notoriously unpredictable. Some people with MS are crippled or blinded by the condition, or unable to swallow or speak. Others have more mild symptoms – fatigue, tingling, blurred vision – and are able to live a relatively normal life, but it is a degenerative disease so symptoms usually worsen with time.
There is no cure for MS but scientists have made huge progress in treating the condition. Disease-modifying drugs slow its advance and help reduce relapses and new therapies are constantly being tested. In 2023, a small trial at Cambridge University found that stem cells injected into the brain appeared to stop the disease from worsening. Hoy says that the couple have chosen low-risk, less effective treatments for Sarra’s condition instead of more potentially effective, but riskier, new treatments. Actors Selma Blair and Christina Applegate, and TV personality Jack Osbourne have all spoken publicly about their battle with MS.
It’s not the first time that the couple – who met on a night out three months before the 2006 Commonwealth Games – have faced testing times. In 2014, their son Callum was born 11 weeks premature, weighing barely a kilogram, and spent his first nine weeks in hospital.
“Initially, my biggest fear was just that Callum wouldn’t live, it is a fight for survival,” said Sarra. “You’re literally taking it hour by hour, then day by day, then the hard part becomes trying to let go of that fear. Once that passes and you think ‘this is actually happening, he’s putting on weight, he’s wearing clothes now, he can breathe by himself’, you have to begin to come to terms with the fact you can let your guard down a bit. That’s very hard to do and the fear doesn’t leave you for a long time. I would relive it, have flashbacks and cry every day probably for two years. But time is a healer.”
Their daughter Chloe was also born four weeks premature. Sarra became an ambassador for Bliss, the charity supporting babies who need neonatal care. She has also launched fundraising initiatives to support children with eye cancers and has been involved in campaigns to improve outcomes for premature babies.
Following their double announcement of tragic news this week, the family has received an outpouring of support from fellow athletes and celebrities. Former prime minister Gordon Brown said that courage had “defined” Sir Chris’s career and “now characterises how Chris and Sarra both face their health diagnoses and embrace life”.
Sarra previously made the headlines when she joined queues and waited 11 hours to pay her respects to the late Queen’s coffin as it lay in state at St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh in September 2022. “I grew up in a military family… I had met the Queen on a couple of occasions,” she said. “The Queen was woven into every fabric of our lives… she has been that level, steadfast force in all of our lives… She has made a connection with people not just as a head of state… but also on a personal level.”
Perhaps Sarra has been inspired by the Queen’s dignity and strength in her stoic response to this double blow of cruel misfortune. Clearly the couple, who recently celebrated their 14th wedding anniversary, plan to keep living life to the full. Sir Chris has said he is “optimistic, positive”; and continuing to “work, ride my bike and live my life as normal”. 
Sarra’s Instagram is full of family holidays to Wales, a trip to Paris for the Olympics in July, and watching tennis at Wimbledon from the Royal Box. 
Sarra has yet to speak out publicly about either her or Chris’ illnesses, but in March she posted a picture on Instagram of herself wearing earrings that spelled out “F— It”. She wrote in the caption: “When life doesn’t quite go the way you had planned, you have to remind yourself – WAIT, THERE WAS NEVER A PLAN! This is life, right here right now. Live it.”