Three-Time Olympian Suzy Favor Hamilton Has Stage 4 Neuroendocrine Cancer

Suzy Favor Hamilton, the American middle-distance runner who competed at three Olympic Games, has been diagnosed with stage 4 neuroendocrine cancer. She made the news public in an Instagram post on Tuesday, Nov. 10, World NET Cancer Day, writing that the diagnosis came earlier this year and that the cancer had already spread by the time it was found.

So far her cancer looks slow-growing, she wrote, and she has had what she called a successful debulking surgery at UCLA. “They expect I still have many good years ahead,” the 58-year-old said of her doctors.

Neuroendocrine tumors, or NETs, account for only about 25,000 new cases a year in the United States, by Favor Hamilton’s count, and she described a cancer that tends to stay quiet and get mistaken for something else, sometimes for years. The NET patient community has adopted the zebra as its symbol for exactly that reason. It comes from an old line taught to medical students, “If you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras,” and the International Neuroendocrine Cancer Alliance, which coordinates NET Cancer Day every Nov. 10, uses it as a reminder that doctors naturally look for the common explanation first.

The outlook for NETs that have spread varies a great deal with where the tumor starts, and Favor Hamilton did not say where hers began. Across all sites, Mayo Clinic puts five-year overall survival for distant NETs at about 57 percent, based on U.S. patients diagnosed between 2000 and 2021, and notes that tumors in the pancreas and lung tend to carry a worse prognosis than those in the appendix or rectum.

Favor Hamilton grew up in Stevens Point, Wis., and became one of the most decorated runners in college history at the University of Wisconsin, where she won nine NCAA titles. She went on to win seven U.S. championships at 1,500m, four outdoors and three indoors. Her Olympic career ran across three Games: the 1,500m in Barcelona in 1992, the 800m in Atlanta in 1996, and the 1,500m final in Sydney in 2000. That Olympic summer was the fastest of her career. She ran 1:58.10 for 800m and 3:57.40 for 1,500m within a week of each other in late July and early August, and both still stand as her personal bests.

Much of her post was aimed at anyone who has been told their symptoms are nothing. “If something in your body feels off and keeps getting explained away, keep asking,” she wrote. “Don’t put off your checkups and scans; they can make all the difference.”

Her announcement came just nine days after Ciara Mageean, Ireland’s European 1,500m champion, died of bowel cancer at 34, a week after her wedding. Mageean was 33 when she was diagnosed, and her death led Marathon Handbook to look at the bowel symptoms runners tend to write off as runner’s gut, along with the research on endurance running and colon cancer.

Favor Hamilton closed her post on a lighter note. “And most of all, treasure every day,” she wrote. “There is beauty all around us if we just look for it!”