There is a type of toughness that is never publicly praised. It doesn’t show up at victory laps or press conferences. It manifests itself in the way a man rides a racehorse while wearing a hard plastic splint over his fractured arm and manages to place third in the Champion Hurdle. That’s Brough Scott, a man whose relationship with physical suffering is far more nuanced than his polished on-screen persona ever revealed, and a name that British racing has never had to question. The public version of Scott’s medical history starts on a stretcher in the snow on the evening…
Author: Michael Martinez
Watching one of the most influential men in international sports admit in a few sentences that he is essentially fighting against his own biology is somewhat startling. In a recent interview with Ring Magazine, Turki Alalshikh, the Saudi chairman who has spent the better part of a decade changing professional boxing from the outside, said something that would stop a room. He clarified that his goal is to make boxing more peaceful. Before he forgets his name, he wants to do it. In 2015, the 44-year-old received multiple cancer diagnoses. Given how aggressively public his boxing work has been, it…
Some deaths feel like news, and some deaths feel like weather; a change in the atmosphere causes people who have never met to start speaking in the same low voice. The second kind was the death of fifty-year-old Kai Bartlett on a Thursday afternoon in April, following what friends called a protracted and agonizing fight with cancer. From Maui, France, and Australia, as well as from those who had competed against him and those who had just observed him glide through the water with the kind of fluidity that makes you pause and gape, the tributes came in. Growing up…
There is something about the Kemp family that the British public has always found quietly compelling. They came through the glamour of the 1980s—Shirlie through Wham! and Martin through Spandau Ballet—and managed to maintain their prominence without ever quite turning into tabloid staples. However, due to a combination of Martin’s heartfelt Instagram tribute to his daughter and a very raw moment on the BBC’s Celebrity Race Across the World that left viewers reaching for their phones, searches regarding Harley Moon Kemp’s illness have been increasing recently. To be clear about what the available information actually shows: there is no confirmed…
In football management, there is a rare and typically awkward moment when the game becomes irrelevant. That moment for Dick Advocaat occurred in February 2026, somewhere between the private anguish of discovering his daughter was gravely ill and the historic high of Curaçao, a Caribbean island of 150,000 people, qualifying for their first-ever FIFA World Cup. He quit. No haggling, no long farewell. In essence, family comes first, according to this statement. It was the kind of choice that seems straightforward on paper but takes a different turn when you take into account what he was leaving behind. Advocaat had…
Gabriel Clarke’s story has a peculiar symmetry to it. A man who spent thirty years filming other people’s hardships—boxers taking punishment in the last rounds, football players bearing the burden of expectations on aging knees—is now at the center of something he cannot control or alter. In 2021, Clarke was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, a condition that strips the body of its ability to move, speak, and eventually breathe, while leaving the mind entirely intact. It’s a specific kind of cruelty, and the consequences are not difficult to envision for someone whose entire career was based on communication. Clarke…
Grant McOmie had blood clots and was admitted to the hospital. Doctors could quickly identify that part, at least. What they discovered next was not. A cancer that had apparently been growing without any notice to the outside world was hidden beneath the surface, unnoticed until those last few days. The most recognizable outdoor television voice in Oregon vanished in a matter of days rather than weeks. He was seventy-three. McOmie had been doing what most people only do on their best vacations for fifty years. In the same way that some people exchange business cards, he waded into rivers,…
Jeff Hordley’s daily attendance at Emmerdale, where he delivers some of the most emotionally charged scenes the show has produced in years while coping with a chronic illness that has no known cure and never fully goes away, is quietly remarkable. Cain Dingle is currently fighting prostate cancer on screen; new test results indicate the disease may have spread outside of the prostate, devastating him and Moira. It’s challenging, engrossing drama. The fact that the actor portraying those scenes has spent thirty years navigating his own medical reality off-camera is something that fewer people are aware of. In 1996, at…