Yuvraj Singh has embarked on one of the toughest phases of his life and shared how his battle with cancer began even as he continued to play for India.
At the peak of his career, Yuvraj was instrumental in India’s victory in the 2011 World Cup. However, he struggled with severe fatigue, nausea and constant discomfort throughout the tournament. At the time, the disease was undetected and he pushed on, driven by the demands of international cricket.
Soon after the tournament his condition worsened and tests revealed a rare form of cancerwith a tumor in the chest. What should have been a stable phase of his career turned into a struggle for survival.
“Not dealing with that was something I was going through because as a sportsperson you can’t be sick. You should be playing for India. But I ended up getting sicker and sicker as I kept playing cricket,” Yuvraj said in an interview with Michael Vaughan on The Overlap YouTube podcast.
He explained how athletes are forced to ignore such symptoms. “As a sportsperson, you don’t think about being sick. You should be playing for India.”
FROM WORLD CUP HERO TO FIGHT FOR LIFE
Reality hit hard when the doctors explained the seriousness of his condition.
“He said to me: ‘Mate, I’ve been looking at your scans. The tumor is sitting between your heart and your lungs, right on the pipe. You’re either going to play cricket or you could have a heart attack. I think you’ve got three to six months if you don’t go on chemotherapy.’
That moment made him take a step back and reconsider.
“That’s when I realized I really had to think about what I had to do. It wasn’t easy because I run a cancer foundation that focuses on early detection, and here I was not coming to terms with what I was going through,” he said.
Yuvraj traveled abroad for treatment and underwent chemotherapy in the United States in 2011–12. It was a physically and mentally exhausting time, but it also gave him a new perspective.
“It took me almost a year to accept that I might not be able to play cricket again. But once the treatment was over I was determined to come back even though no one believed I could.”
His journey remains one of the strongest comeback stories in cricket.
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Issued by:
Amar Panicker
Published on:
09 Apr 2026 16:11 IST
