Rick Hansen, turned his teenaged dream of circumnavigating the globe into a personal crusade for the disabled, brought his Man-in-Motion tour home to Vancouver to a huge crowd. Tens of thousands of cheering well-wishers lined the streets and as the wheelchair Paralympian, who lost the use of his legs in a car accident at age of 15, wrapped up the final 40-km stretch of his around-the-world odyssey where it began, at the Oakridge shopping centre, 26 months earlier.
Hansen, 29, had travelled more than 40,000 kilometres while taking his example of ability over disability to 34 countries and raising more than$26 million for spinal cord research and quality of life initiatives.
The day before, he travelled through Port Coquitlam, the home town of Terry Fox, who died of cancer halfway through his Marathon of Hope run across Canada. Hansen told the crowd that Fox, a former wheelchair basketball teammate, was the inspiration for his own trip.
“He stands as a man who was not afraid to reach for his dreams, a man who knew that failing was not reaching, not trying to be the best you can be with what you have,” he said in a ceremony broadcasted nationally by the CBC.
The tour took him through rainstorms, snowstorms and desert heatwaves. Along the way, he also met his future wife, Amanda Reid, a 27-year-old physiotherapist who joined the tour two weeks after it began. The couple married five months after the tour ended and now live in Steveston after raising three daughters.
