March 31st, 2011
Rick Hansen – Man in Motion World Tour
Recently I had the pleasure of spending a day with Canadian icon Rick Hansen and his wonderful support team. Rick is a Canadian Paralympian and an activist for people with spinal cord injuries. Following a car crash at the age of 15, Hansen sustained a spinal cord injury that paralyzed him from the waist down. Hansen is most famous for his Man In Motion World Tour 25 years ago. You might remember the celebration Melbourne turned on for him at the MCG as it was the half way point on his epic tour! Our day started with a Western Bulldogs training session, follwed by an afternoon at the Royal Talbot Rehabilitation Centre & then on to the hallowed turf of the MCG to relive the epic achievement of wheeling half way around the globe. Here is an excerpt from The Rick Hansen Foundation website on their recent Aussie flashback;
” It’s been 25 years since the Man In Motion World Tour made its way across Australia. The original team and I flew down under last week to celebrate the great strides Australia has made in accessibility awareness and spinal cord injury research. We’ve visited Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and it brought back a lot of great memories. Back in 1986, Melbourne was our halfway point – 12,450 miles. The city was fantastic and ended up holding a ceremony for us with the Lord Mayor dressed up in his ceremonial garb. Australia’s biggest television show, “Good Morning Australia”, interviewed me which gave me the perfect opportunity to explain why we were there and what the Tour was trying to achieve. The Melbourne halfway ceremony was of tremendous significance. I have always mentally split every wheeling challenge down the middle, telling myself that once I’d done half, I can always do it again. This was the biggest wheeling challenge of my life and now I had actually done half; I had wheeled halfway around the world! Melbourne and Australia will always be significant to me.
We took stock halfway through the Tour, of how we lived and what we’d done. One year on the road and we’d written 1,086 postcards, done 365 loads of laundry, had 63 flat tires, gone through 47 pairs of gloves, used 100 rolls of tape and had been robbed four times. Number of robberies solved? Zero. I’d also worn out one wheelchair and attended 59 official receptions. Oh, and the wheelchair strokes? 7,180,800. At least I’d earned the exhaustion I constantly felt! I could hardly fathom it, but we now had to do it all over again. We had completed 13,943 miles and still had 11,000 miles to go.”