Sports presenter Steve Rider diagnosed with prostate cancer

Given he lives a stone’s throw away from Wycombe Wanderers FC, joining Jeff Stelling’s latest Football March was always on the agenda for sports broadcaster Steve Rider.

The 73-year-old former BBC sports staple joined more than 350 others on the 26.2-mile walk to Adams Park on September 17, but what those walking alongside him didn’t know, was that he himself was beginning his own prostate cancer journey.

Steve was anxiously awaiting results from a biopsy just a few days earlier. Those results would show a prostate cancer diagnosis.

He said: “My assumption was that the specialist was going to say, ‘it’s not too great but let’s keep an eye on it for the next six months, regular checks and so on’. But he said, ‘it’s cancer and we’ve got to do something about it.’ He asked how my schedule was. I said I was finishing off a series for ITV in three weeks and he said that was okay. I then said I had a couple of weeks off after that and was going off to play golf in Portugal. And he said ‘no, no you’re not. You're going to have to get this done.’

“That was the moment I thought ‘oh blimey, I have been lucky’ because if I’d let something that urgent drift then goodness knows where I’d have been.”

Steve, who rose to prominence in the mid-1980s presenting BBC sporting staples like Grandstand and Sportsnight, is a well-known broadcaster in the fields of rugby union, golf and motor sport, the latter he still regularly presents on ITV.

It was during a catch up with mates at the pub earlier this summer that Steve’s own trajectory began to change.

He added: “I’m 73 now and was always conscious of a need to keep an eye on things and keep yourself regularly checked because the message put out by people like Prostate Cancer UK is very persuasive.

“When people get together in a pub in a village, especially if you are a group of chaps and someone has a health issue, then there are question marks, and everyone gets a bit more attentive to the problem."

Steve also saluted Jeff’s sustained support of Prostate Cancer UK, as he joined him on his 34^th marathon march in September – the current Football March fundraising figure edging closer to a quarter of a million pounds.

He said: “In my career I worked a little bit with Bill Turnbull in commercial radio and of course we worked at the BBC and on the odd occasion, we’d do something together. Jeff started his broadcasting career at LBC in exactly the same position that I’d vacated about two years earlier. So the whole synergy of it the walk was irresistible, and I thought ‘come on, get your trainers on’.

“Jeff is an absolute star. I’ve got huge respect for what he has done, so it’s been on the radar for a while to try and do my bit.

“Then, when I started with the diagnosis and realised that he was finishing up about three miles from where I live, I was more than happy to join him. It was also a great opportunity to talk to other people that have been through the same process, sometimes with some fairly sad results. But also many people on that walk were optimistic and have got a very positive message to get out there.

“It’s been a weird couple of months where everything has now come together. Nick Owen’s situation was reported at the same time and he was a contemporary of mine. So you are being told loud and strong ‘don’t muck about, get yourself sorted’. I’m so glad I did.”

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