Inside the Big Issue: Sir Chris Hoy

The final touches are being added to a new mural showing Sir Chris Hoy pedalling to one of his many victories ahead of the 2026 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow. It’s been created on a wall in the hangar-sized home of Glasgow the Caring City, a Govan-based charity that supports families experiencing poverty, as well as organising international disaster relief. Earlier, some of the young people who rely on the charity’s services painted smiling faces to make up the crowd of spectators in the background.

Now, artists are carefully printing a quote from Hoy onto the track: “It’s only when you are in really difficult situations you find out what you’re made of and what you can deal with.”

The message speaks to his years of dedication to cycling. He won a silver medal in Sydney in 2000; a gold in Athens four years later. In Beijing in 2008 he was the first British competitor in 100 years to win three golds at the same Games. At London 2012, Hoy carried the flag for Team GB at the opening ceremony and went on to win another pair of golds, becoming Britain’s most successful Olympian (fellow cyclist Jason Kenny has since topped that tally). In between there were also 11 world titles.

But the message also speaks to challenges off the track. In September 2023 Hoy announced he’d been diagnosed with prostate cancer. In October 2024 he issued an update, that the cancer had spread to his bones and he’d been given between two and four years to live. So Hoy is dealing with a lot. But is clearly made of special stuff. He sat down to talk to Big Issue for this week’s Big Issue magazine.  

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What else is in this week’s Big Issue

How homeless people were disproportionalely likely to be sentenced for their part in the 2024 riots

It’s now two years since riots spread around parts of Britain following the Southport murders. New Big Issue analysis shows how people experiencing homelessness were swept up in the disorder and the consequences they faced.

This Leeds pub crawl brings home the shocking disparity in Britain’s life expectancy

Research has uncovered a bleak reality lurking in the backdrop of the Otley Run. There is a 14-year difference in life expectancy for residents who live at either end of the pub crawl. We head to Leeds to find out why.

I used to play with Jude Bellingham until my mum got sick. Street football gave me hope again

Kevin Gonzalez Quintero was in the England youth team with several of the current England squad. He had to quit to look after his mum – but he’s never stopped playing.

Children’s Laureate Patrice Lawrence reveals the book that changed her life

As a child, Patrice Lawrence loved books. But she never saw herself in them. “There wasn’t much choice. It was Enid Blyton or bust, basically,” the new Waterstones Children’s Laureate tells Big Issue. Growing up as a black child in 1970s Sussex, having spent her early years in private fostering and later watching her father struggle with homelessness, she rarely saw families like her own in the stories she read. As an author, she’s changing that.

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