O’Connor’s final Instagram post announced her marriage to Adriano Cardinal
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NEED TO KNOW
- Georgia O’Connor died at 25, months after revealing she was diagnosed with cancer
- Just weeks before her death, she married her longtime boyfriend Adriano Cardinali
- The professional boxer blamed doctors for ignoring her, and failing to run tests that could have detected her cancer sooner
Georgia O’Connor made one last wish come true before her death.
The death of the 25-year-old British professional boxer was announced on Thursday, May 22, by her promoter, Boxxer, in a statement obtained by The Guardian. O’Connor revealed in January that she had been diagnosed with cancer. In February, she said she suffered a miscarriage.
Just two weeks before her death, O’Connor tied the knot with her longtime boyfriend Adriano Cardinali.
“09.05.2025. The day I married the love of my life. 🤍,” O’Connor wrote alongside an image of her husband’s hand over her own.
Her photo showed the couple both wearing their wedding rings as she held a bouquet of white roses and baby’s breath. It was the last post she shared, uploaded on May 12.
Before her wedding announcement, O’Connor last shared an Instagram photo of herself with Cardinali for his birthday in February, where she referred to him as “my Italian prince.”
“I never in my life thought I would find someone like you. Someone with such a pure heart and soul, someone who makes me feel loved every day, someone who would do absolutely anything for me… someone as weird as me,” she wrote.
Her words captioned a single photo of the couple sitting in a restaurant booth together, both smiling at the camera as they posed with drinks in front of them.
“You are not just my boyfriend but my truest and closest friend,” O’Connor continued.
She also mentioned that the longtime loves “have been through so much together, things that no couple should go through but we always get through because nothing can ever break us.”
“I couldn’t imagine life without you and I adore you from the deepest parts of my heart,” she wrote, later concluding, “you are the best thing that ever happened to me and being your girlfriend is the greatest title I could ever wish to have.”
When O’Connor revealed her cancer diagnosis in January, she made a post calling out “the absolute incompetent RATS that have allowed this to happen.”
“For 17 weeks since the start of October, I’ve been in constant pain,” she wrote on Jan. 31.
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Her post was a single image of her sitting in a hospital bed, hooked to multiple machines as she smiled and gave a “thumbs up” sign.
The pro athlete said she knew “something was seriously wrong” and felt that she had cancer because “I have colitis and PSC [primary sclerosing cholangitis — a chronic liver disease], two diseases that dramatically increase the chances of getting it.”
“I KNOW how high my risk is and they do too. They always did. But not one doctor f—— listened to me. Not one doctor took me seriously,” O’Connor wrote.
She said she “begged” doctors to run tests, but they refused. “One even told me that it’s ‘all in my head.’ And now? Now the cancer has spread,” O’Connor wrote.
O’Connor was undefeated in her boxing matches since turning pro in 2021, and won several high-ranking titles, including a bronze medal at the 2018 Youth World Championships as an amateur fighter.