Remembering the great Terry Fox - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

Choosing a topic to write this column almost resulted in me writing about U.S. President Donald Trump and his unprecedented attack on the free press with his decision to bar reporters of CNN, MSNow and Politico from entering the White House.

 

But then an item on the news reminded me that Sunday was the annual Terry Fox Run. What a difference the two men made. Trump has closed the John F. Kennedy Centre and threatened to have it torn down because a judge said he can’t rename it in his own honour. Meanwhile, though he never cared for such things, Terry Fox’s name is on various funds supporting cancer research as well as on schools and libraries.

 

Terry Fox lost a leg to cancer when he was only 18. He’d been an active athlete and even after losing his leg above the knee he became a wheelchair basketball player, encouraged by Rick Hansen, who later went around the world as a wheelchair athlete. Fox won wheelchair basketball championships in 1978 and 1979.

 

But, before the operation to remove his leg, Fox had been given an article about Dick Traum, who was the first amputee to complete the New York City Marathon. That made Fox decide he could run a marathon and he started out running only a mile or so on his artificial leg, but with adaptations to the leg and determined practice, he got up to the marathon level.

 

That’s when he took the extraordinary step that made him decide to run across Canada from coast to coast. He had done 5,000 kilometres of training runs. With the backing of a small crew in a van, he set out from St. John’s, Newfoundland on April 12, 1980 by dipping his leg in the Atlantic Ocean, planning a 5,373-kilometre run from coast to coast in 143 days; 42 kilometres or 26 miles a day.

 

People in Newfoundland came out to support him but he was disappointed with the lack of interest in Nova Scotia, where there seemed to be less knowledge about what he was doing. Prince Edward Island showed more interest. A reporter with the Toronto Star printed a weekly column on his progress (and later wrote a book).

 

But fame came in Ontario. He met with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and hockey stars Bobbie Orr of the Boston Bruins and Darryl Sittler from the Toronto Maple Leafs. The more he ran, the greater the interest was. Crowds along his publicized route swelled.

 

It’s hard for us to remember then how different Canada was. We had gone from being dominated by England and the Royal Family, to so admiring of the U.S. to growing a new admiration for ourselves with Centennial Year in 1967 and the Expo in Montreal the same year. Suddenly we were interested in things Canadian by 1980.

 

Terry Fox was a Canadian hero. I don’t know if Americans or the British residents even knew about his incredible undertaking. Fox ran across Ontario and then headed north into Northern Ontario. But though he kept up his 26-mile daily pace, he wasn’t feeling well. Finally, near Thunder Bay he stopped, and medical diagnosis showed cancer had spread to his lungs. With his original goal, he dreamed of raising a total of $24 million - one dollar for every Canadian in the population at the time.
Canadians were shocked and saddened by the news of his having to stop the run. A movement began to continue the runs for him.

 

In 2026, 46 years after Fox had to halt his challenge (after completing the equivalent of 128 marathons) there were 600 community runs in Canada. On a broader scale, the Terry Fox Run has grown to involve millions of participants in over 60 countries and is the world’s largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research. Last year, the run topped the $1 billion total in Canada.

 

Imagine if Terry Fox could recognize that total? Unfortunately he died less than a year after he was forced to end his Marathon of Hope. We recently rewatched the 2008 Canadian movie One Week. In it, Joshua Jackson is himself diagnosed with cancer and he decides to motorcycle across Canada. On his trip he stops at the monument where Fox was forced to end his journey. Millions of others have also visited this memorial.

 

Who could have imagined what one 22-year-old could have accomplished - on one leg yet?

 

It’s a great challenge to all of us. There is so much needed in the world, but each of us has the opportunity to contribute.
Who knows if someone older could even have dreamed of such a thing as running across Canada on one leg? But we have the privilege, whether young or old, to know he tried and accomplished so much before he died.

 

Few in the world today ­- even the greatest leaders - could accomplish as much as that one-legged cancer victim from British Columbia. But we owe it to him to try.