God Used Cancer to Transform This Olympian’s Life
By Movieguide® Contributor
Olympic gold medalist figure skater Scott Hamilton had to trust God after he was diagnosed with cancer as his career started to take off.
Hamilton won gold in 1984, and following his Olympic career, “turned professional, joining Ice Capades for two years. He then formed his own show, which became Stars on Ice, and toured with them through 2001. He has also worked on television as a skating analyst,” Olympics.com reported.
However, a cancer diagnosis put everything on hold.
“So I was at the peak, pretty much what I thought was the peak, of my professional career, and I was diagnosed with cancer,” Hamilton told the “Green Room” podcast. “I was 50 cities into a 60 city tour, and then that was where the fork in the road really happened because I realized the tail’s wagging the dog in a big, fast, nasty way.”
“I just felt like, ‘Well now, if I’m able to get past this, I have a second chance at life. What do I want it to look like?’ That’s where I really felt, without understanding it at the time, the Lord was just absolutely saying, ‘I am giving you a little time out, and I really want you to just be still, and I’m going to start working on you in a really profound way,'” the Olympian recalled.
“I kind of got to a point where I realized that the way I was living and how I was living and just how I was with other people was just sort of surface,” he said of life at the time. “I was not living the way that I was supposed to, organically, legitimately, and authentically. I was not living. I was sort of reacting to my environment.”
God used Hamilton’s cancer to draw him closer to Him, and it’s a battle he continues to fight with the Lord’s help and guidance.
“The gold medalist previously beat testicular cancer in 1997 and two similar benign tumors in 2004 and 2010 before he was diagnosed with his latest in August 2016,” PEOPLE reported.
Following his 2016 diagnosis, Hamilton “heard a little voice when I first got the news, to get strong, so I decided to do that.”
That meant giving up sugar, eliminating unhealthy things that would feed the cancer and diving into his Bible.
“And then it shrunk again, then it grew, and then it grew, and it shrunk, and it grew, and then Covid happened, and I got tired of fighting the medical system, so I just said, you know what, this thing doesn’t exist. It’s gone,” he continued.
Five years later, the brain tumor has yet to be a problem. Now, Hamilton is supporting research into natural ways to fight cancer rather than fighting the disease with drugs.
READ MORE: HOW CANCER SUPERCHARGED OLYMPIC GOLD MEDALIST SCOTT HAMILTON’S FAITH