Jo Gardiner, From BBC's Race Across the World, Has Died at 61
Jo Gardiner, the Manchester physiotherapist who competed alongside her son Sam in the BBC's Race Across the World, has died at 61. Her family said she had been through "a long and courageous battle with cancer" (The Guardian). Her death comes about a year after Sam was killed in a car crash on the A34 road near Manchester. He was 24.
Gardiner and Sam raced together in the second series of Race Across the World, which aired in 2020. The show followed five pairs of people travelling overland from Mexico City to Ushuaia, Argentina, on a tight budget and without smartphones or flights. Jo had type 1 diabetes, a condition where the body cannot produce insulin and a person must carefully manage their blood sugar every day. She was also an ambassador for Diabetes UK. She entered the competition because she wanted a travel adventure with Sam, who had ADHD — a condition that affects attention and impulse control (The Guardian). Their partnership on the show drew attention for its warmth and for the particular dynamic between a mother managing a demanding health condition and a young adult managing life with ADHD across thousands of miles of unfamiliar places.
Sam Gardiner died in hospital on 26 May 2025 after his white Volkswagen left the A34 near Manchester, rolled, and landed on its side (BBC News). An inquest — a formal investigation to establish the facts of someone's death — was held into his death. Reported in November 2025, it found that insufficient tyre tread (the grooves on a tyre that help it grip the road) was a contributing factor in the crash (BBC News). The National Organisation for FASD published an in-memory tribute to Sam on 5 June 2025, noting his death at 24 in a car accident (National FASD).
In May 2026, the first anniversary of Sam's death, pairs from Race Across the World came together for a tribute run in his memory (BBC News). The gesture reflected the close-knit community the programme has built among its contestants across its various series.
Gardiner's family, in a statement reported by the Manchester Evening News, described her as "an intrepid" figure (Manchester Evening News). The word carries particular weight for those who followed her on screen: a woman managing both type 1 diabetes and the demands of overland travel through Latin America, paired with a son whose ADHD shaped their journey in ways viewers could see week to week. She is survived by her other son, Charlie (The Guardian).
Gardiner's family has set up a JustGiving page in her name, with all donations going to Diabetes UK (The Guardian). The cause reflects Gardiner's longstanding advocacy: she lived with type 1 diabetes throughout her life and competed on a physically demanding television show while managing the condition, which requires continuous blood-sugar monitoring and insulin regulation.
The broader context here is that the Gardiner family's story moved from a televised adventure that captured a particular mother-son bond to two deaths within a year, giving it a resonance beyond the usual celebrity obituary. The inquest finding on Sam's death — specifically the role of tyre tread in a fatal single-vehicle crash — is the kind of detail that can get lost in the emotional sweep of a story like this but carries real practical weight. Tyre condition is among the most routinely neglected vehicle safety checks, and the link between insufficient tread depth and loss of control in bad driving conditions is well documented in road safety research. For Race Across the World's audience, Jo and Sam Gardiner's series remains one of the programme's most discussed pairings, not because of drama or conflict but because of the quiet interplay between two people whose health conditions shaped every decision they made on the road. Jo's death closes a chapter that the programme's community had already been mourning.
