Bjorn Borg reveals battle with ‘extremely aggressive’ cancer

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By Simon Briggs

September 19, 2025 — 7.16am

Bjorn Borg has revealed that he has been battling “extremely aggressive” prostate cancer.

The disease is in remission after an operation in 2024 but the tennis legend, 69, said it could return devastatingly at almost any time.

Borg makes the revelation in his new autobiography, Heartbeats, which he wrote with his wife Patricia and is being published on Thursday.

The final chapter of the book addresses the condition. He writes that, because of the threat of the cancer returning, he is approaching his life “day by day, year by year”.

Borg also says that the disease was “at its most advanced stage” when it was picked up, and adds that he plans to “fight every day like it’s a Wimbledon final”.

As part of his promotional duties, Borg appeared on BBC Breakfast on Thursday morning and gave further insight into the nature of the cancer, which he described as “difficult psychologically”.

“I spoke to the doctor and he said this is really, really bad,” Borg explained. “He said you have these sleeping cancer cells [and] it’s going to be a fight in the future. Every six months I go and test myself. I did my last test two weeks ago. It’s a thing I have to live with.”

Despite his illness, Borg still has a youthful appearance that recalls his heyday as one of tennis’s greatest leading men. Emerging suddenly as a long-haired teenager in the early 1970s, he won the French Open at his second attempt, having just celebrated his 18th birthday only 10 days earlier.

He then set off on one of the great winning streaks in the sport’s history, claiming five straight Wimbledon titles between 1976 and 1980, and five more French Opens to boot.

Borg had a metronomic style, with an unusual hybrid backhand which switched from two hands to one halfway through the swing. He was also legendarily fit and athletic, and the title of his book is a reference to the fact that his resting heart rate usually sat somewhere in the low 30s.

Apart from being a great champion, Borg became one of the most potent sex symbols in the history of sport: tennis’s answer to Beatlemania.

As his great friend and rival John McEnroe once put it: “If all four Beatles in their prime, Elvis Presley, Brad Pitt and Jesus Christ himself were interested in a girl at the same time as Bjorn, that girl is leaving with Bjorn Borg.”

As early as 1974 – Borg’s second visit to Wimbledon – the All England Club had to hire security guards to protect him from his own groupies. But the attention was difficult for Borg to handle, for he was no great extrovert.

He was guided around the tour by his mentor and svengali, Lennart Bergelin, who always seemed to make the majority of the decisions. And then, after losing to McEnroe at the 1981 US Open final, Borg suddenly rebelled. He walked out of the stadium and out of the sport, only returning for an ill-fated comeback – during which he used an anachronistic wooden racquet – in 1991.

Bjorn Borg celebrates after winning Wimbledon in 1980.

“I had enough. I lost the interest and the motivation,” Borg said on BBC. “If I knew what was going to happen in the years after, I would continue to play tennis.”

In his book, he explains that “I had no plan. People today, they have guidance. I was lost in the world. There was more drugs, there was pills, alcohol, to escape myself from reality. I didn’t have to think about it. Of course it’s not good, it destroys you as a person.”

Borg’s brief comeback to the tennis tour was actually prompted by a 1989 overdose in which he would have died if not for his second wife Loredana, who discovered his unconscious body and had him taken to hospital, where his stomach was pumped. “The fact that I’m still alive is thanks to her,” he explains in Heartbeats.

There was also another near-death experience, a few years later, when he suffered a heart attack on a bridge in the Netherlands but was saved by passers-by. As he writes, “Before it goes black, I have time to think: how did things end up like this?”

His father happened to be with him at that moment, and flew home with him after the crisis had been averted. Yet Borg says that his parents were unable to address his struggles with addiction.

“We didn’t even know how to begin discussing it,” Borg wrote. “They didn’t offer me help with any kind of treatment with the drugs. That was something I had to handle on my own.”

He also writes that he needed to have a girlfriend at all times, which led to some complicated romantic entanglements. “I just couldn’t handle being alone. This means there was invariably an overlap between one relationship and the next. I never dared end one unless someone new was already lined up.”

With the benefit of hindsight, he says, he should not have retired so early. It was in the absence of any real purpose in his life that he first took cocaine, at a party in Manhattan in 1982, and began the downward slide that only started to abate when he married Patricia – whom he describes as his saviour – 20 years later.

Borg has been clean from drugs since they became an item, 25 years ago, and says that the publication of his book feels like a weight off his shoulders. “I was close to dying many times,” he said on BBC. “I fixed my life. I’m very happy with myself.”

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