Boat Race 2011: Oxford's Simon Hislop fit to race after fight with cancer - Telegraph

Boat Race 2011: Oxford's Simon Hislop fit to race after fight with cancer - Telegraph

The Oxford stroke-man, trying to ignore the lenses and concentrate on the race ahead, will be Simon Hislop. If you’d told him last year that he’d be sitting at the start of the Boat Race having suffered from testicular cancer, he would not have believed it.

Hislop, then a medical student and oarsman at Imperial College, was diagnosed last spring. “I found a lump on one of my testes – I’d covered the subject in my studies so knew what it was,” he said.

The sensible student visited the Imperial GP, who suspected it was benign, but sent him for an ultrasound as a precaution. The doctor at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital was also reassuring, until the scan undermined him.

That was on Thursday, a few weeks before a big rowing event. By Friday Hislop was discussing options with the consultant oncologist and surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital. An operation was scheduled for the Monday. Less than a week after finding a lump, and only a couple of days after telling his family the diagnosis, the cancer had been removed from his body.