RICK HANSEN – MAN IN MOTION
When I was a teenager I hitchhiked through Europe. It was one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. I discovered what it felt like to go to a strange country where I knew no one, in most cases did not speak the language, and relied on my wits to get by.
When Rick Hansen was a teenager, a truck in which he was riding crashed, he was thrown out, and was paralyzed from the belly button down.
Rick was very athletic, and he vowed that his disability would not stop his life. He continued playing sports, becoming a successful wheelchair basketball player and, later, wheelchair marathoner. He made physical education his life work, becoming the first disabled person to graduate from the University if British Columbia with a degree in Phys Ed. He won many world-class events and competed in the 1984 Olympics.
But it was not enough.
Wherever he traveled, he was faced with the reality that disabled people are treated differently in our society, and that it is very difficult for a person in a wheelchair to just get around in our world.
His government was doing next-to-nothing about it. In 1985 their total funding for spinal cord research was an embarrassing $50,000. So, inspired by his friend Terry Fox who had attempted to cross Canada to raise funds for cancer research, Rick dreamed up the Man in Motion Tour.
It is a shame that someone had to undertake a superhuman task to make a difference. But that was the case.
The idea of the Man in Motion Tour was to circumnavigate the globe to raise money for spinal cord research and global government awareness for the challenges of those with disabilities. At the time – the mid 1980s - wheelchair accessible buildings and streets were more rare than common.
Now I have tremendous respect for adventurers who fly, sail, bike, climb or soar huge distances. But it is another thing altogether to try to circumnavigate the globe using your arms to roll the wheels on a wheelchair.
Hitchhiking through Europe was not exactly a huge project for me. I was fully mobile. I worked for 6 months to raise some cash, bought a ticket, packed a pack and off I went. I got around on the train or, more commonly, by sticking out my thumb on the side of a road.
But think of this for a moment. You don’t just jump off a plane (literally) in Paris, grab your wheelchair and start rolling down the highway towards the Champs d’Elysee with a backpack. If you didn’t get run over first (high degree of probability in France), the gendarmes would have you off the road and packed on your way in minutes.
The logistics involved in staging a globe-circling wheelchair ride must be incredible. It requires cooperation from the police in every large community you visit, most of whom don’t speak English. And you don’t just go off alone. The chair is going to take a beating and break down. So is the body, turning the shoulders literally thousands of times a day in perpetual stress. Imagine wheeling a chair up the Alps.
And then there is the media. There is not a lot of point doing this if no one pays attention. How do you get the media in Rome, Beijing or Auckland to care?
All of these question and challenges were taken up by the young Mr. Hansen and his volunteer team. This was one determined young man. And to put this in perspective, there was no Internet when he did this. No email. Just snail mail and the phone. And there he was trying to connect with authorities and the press around the world from his home near Vancouver.
His detractors were many, including some people in the disabled community, countless of whom doubted he would ever get outside his native Canada. People said it was impossible, as they always to do people with big dreams.
But off he went. Over the next two years of his life he traveled 24,901.55 miles – the circumference of the earth. He went through any country that would let him – 34 in total - rolling along at over 50 miles a day. Try walking that.
What was the stress on his body? He averaged 30,000 wheel strokes a day. A day! I am guessing that would be like doing 30,000 reps of a chest press. In total he estimated he did 10 million wheel strokes on the tour.
He wore through 94 pairs of padded gloves.
He was in constant pain. His shoulders had to be packed in ice twice a day, and he required daily physiotherapy treatments and massages.
His chair took a beating too, wearing out 160 tires along the way and suffering 126 flat tires.
And, sadly, he was robbed 4 times. Indeed, nothing is sacred.
But the good side was the upside. He was greeted along the way by millions of supporters, many of whom spoke no English but understood what he was doing. Kids gave him their change, people gave him food and drink and support. The media gave him some attention - a bit here, a bit there. And it began to grow. At Tianjin China, hundreds of thousands of people came to greet him.
David Foster, the Canadian composer, wrote the song St. Elmo’s fire for him. When it became a hit it raised more awareness.
He had planned to be on the road for a year. It was tougher than he had thought.
He spent his 28th and 29th birthdays on the road. He wheeled for 792 days.
He arrived back in Canada in Newfoundland and then wheeled across the entire country (through a prairie winter!). By then he had become a genuine hero.
In the end, he returned to the same mall he had left two years earlier. He had raised $26 million dollars. And more important, perhaps, he had raised awareness. And he had made people think - about how we think of the disabled and how we do or do not integrate them into mainstream society.
But Rick’s work was not over. He became CEO of the Rick Hansen foundation and began what has been 20 years of hard work – raising more money, raising awareness, petitioning governments, and helping people with disabilities, particularly those with spinal cord injuries.
To date the Rick Hansen Foundation has raised over $200 million for spinal cord related research and initiatives. That’s a significant amount of money by any standard.
He was the driving force in the development of the $48 million International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (iCORD), a new spinal cord facility in Vancouver, and his foundation donated the final $8 million needed to complete the centre.
But more important, Rick has been an ambassador by example for the simple idea that all of us are capable of doing great things. Some of us have challenges to overcome just to do what others can take for granted – because of our bodies, our backgrounds, our financial status, our minds.
None of us knows what might happen to us today, tomorrow, the next day. Rick was a healthy athletic kid until a freak accident changed his life. But he was determined that, though it would change his life, the accident would not end his life.
He has shown us all that every one of us is capable of having a dream and going for it. And who knows, along the way our dream may just turn out to help a lot of other people’s dreams come true as well.
