Olympic Figure Skater’s Cancer Battle ‘Redeemed’ Him—Here’s How

Published: March 24, 2026

By Mallory Mattingly

Former Olympic gold medal figure skater Scott Hamilton’s cancer diagnosis “redeemed” him after fame and fortune left him empty.

“I was living a life of fame and fortune, and nothing puts you in touch with your dark side faster than fame or money,” Hamilton said in a video shared on his Instagram. “Ask anyone. Ask everyone who’s been through it. Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees. You remember the Bee Gees? So Barry Gibb had a quote that I heard that was really remarkable, and it gave me a gust of wind in my sails. He said, ‘If you can survive first fame, you’re probably going to be okay, but if you don’t survive that first fame, it’ll crush you in every way possible.’ It’ll destroy you.”

“And you see, you know, I mean, this town, you’ve seen all the failed marriages, substance abuse,” the figure skater continued. “It’s just unnatural for people to live with that kind of familiarity and that much money, you know.”

He admitted that he lived that kind of life in his “own way.”

But “cancer redeemed me and I’m still a work in progress. I don’t pretend to be redeemed. I’m working hard on it, and I know I have a lot to rise above,” Hamilton said.

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In 2004, Hamilton was diagnosed with his first brain tumor. He said it “supercharged” his faith.

“I told my wife, [and] without skipping a beat, she just took my hands and started to pray, and it was the most powerful — I’ve had a lot of big moments, that was probably the biggest,” Hamilton told Jennifer Hudson a year ago.

Hamilton had the first tumor removed, but six years later, it returned. After nine more surgeries to remove the second tumor, he hoped that this would be his final run-in with a brain tumor. However, six years later, it once again returned.

“There’s a pattern emerging here,” Hamilton said with a laugh. “It came back again, and this time, I just felt like they’re giving me a surgical option and a medical option. All I felt in the back of my head was ‘Get strong.’ That was it. Just ‘Get strong.’ I had no idea what that meant, and they said, ‘Well, what do you want to do, surgery or [the] medical option?’ I go, ‘I’m going to go home, and I’m going to get strong.’ And they go, ‘What does that look like?’ And I said, ‘I have no idea. I’m just feeling this.’”

He did indeed “get strong.” He returned to the doctors to see how the tumor had progressed.

“I went in for the scan, and they said, ‘You’re going to get good news.’ And I go, ‘What is it?’ They go, ‘It didn’t grow.’ I was like, ‘Okay,’” Hamilton remembered. “I went back again three months later, ‘You’re going to get good news.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘It shrunk 45%.’ And I said to the surgeon, I go, ‘Can you explain that?’ And he goes, ‘God.’ Good enough for me.”

“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 explained.

Nearly six years later, the tumor remains the same size and is not a problem for Hamilton.

Sometimes God uses difficult situations to remind us where our focus should be — on Him.

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