At first, Rick Hansen saw his wheelchair as a symbol of limitations, eschewing what would eventually help propel him around the globe and shatter the true barriers: stigma and a world designed for the able-bodied.
Instead, he often used crutches and leg braces to get around after he was paralyzed from the waist down at 15 when he was thrown from the back of a pickup truck in rural B.C.
“I had this stigma about it and I tried to avoid it with everything I possibly could,” he said of his wheelchair in a recent interview with The Current. “It was one of my greatest handicaps at that time.”
Eventually, he realized the issue was not his legs. Nor was it the wheelchair.
“It’s coming from, usually, your mind and your heart and the precepts that you have,” he said. “You try to remove them and redefine them so that you’re liberated and free … and you now see the wheelchair as your vehicle for mobility and freedom.”
When he set out on the Man in Motion Tour on March 21, 1985, what he was most determined to do, he says, was to showcase the athleticism and power that still lived within his body and inside others with disabilities.
On May 22, 2027, 40 years will have passed since Hansen finished that tour, wheeling across 34 countries and 40,000 kilometres to raise $26 million. A film documenting that 26-month journey premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this week, Man in Motion: The Rick Hansen Story, with the final screening on Saturday.
Not only did his wheelchair take him around the world, Hansen has said his epiphany about it shifted his advocacy primarily to making spaces accessible, rather than on walking again, though the Rick Hansen Foundation has contributed heavily to spinal cord research.
That acceptance distinguishes Hansen from other high-profile people with spinal cord injuries, like Christopher Reeve; in a Globe and Mail interview in 2010, Hansen told the publication that the hope of walking unassisted one day is not the thing that drives him.
“My life is full,” he said at the time.
While many Canadians are familiar with Hansen’s legend, the film unearths the private moments from that time and how the physical and psychological toll caused the B.C.-born athlete to doubt himself.
The first moment of reckoning came as Hansen faced the brutal foothills of California’s Siskiyou Mountains. He already had tendonitis in wrists, and it was only Day 2.
“I was like, literally, completely filled with fear, uncertainty, and I needed some big time support,” he said. “That summit was, like, the first massive challenge. And I knew that if we could get up that one, maybe, maybe, maybe there was some hope.”
That support arrived in the form of his physiotherapist, Amanda Reid. She had already helped him recover from a dislocated shoulder in April 1984 after he crashed going 80 km/h test-driving a new wheelchair he wanted to use on the tour.
Hansen said she quickly became the person he turned to for encouragement.
“With each passing mile, I grew more and more fond of her and eventually was in love with her,” he recalls.
They both acknowledge the tour tested their relationship.
But by the time the team returned to Canada in 1986, public support had picked up. This was before social media, Hansen reminds Current host Matt Galloway, so they were relying on “snail mail and carrier pigeons.”
That buoyed the couple and the team itself.
As they moved through New Brunswick, Hansen proposed and the pair would be married the next year. They now have three daughters and five grandsons and have continued their advocacy work through the Rick Hansen Foundation, which funds spinal cord research and has also developed a accessibility certification for public and private buildings.
And it was Amanda who talked him through one of the most challenging and remarkable moments on the journey: the Great Wall of China.
Rick Hansen scales the Great Wall of China
In his mind, Hansen says he had pictured wheeling up the Great Wall as a symbol of his journey — but they arrived to find 103 stairs he would have to navigate. He recalls not wanting to get out of the van and have his supporters see him being carried up.
But Amanda said she “was quite blunt” and told him there were people with disabilities waiting for him, that his team had been “carrying [him] since the beginning” and that this was another example of their support.
Hansen says he agrees that while he was the one in the wheelchair and the face of the campaign, his journey was that of a team.
For every moment where Hansen was able power through 13 hours of wheeling each day, in rain, up mountains and alongside angry drivers, there were others — like the Great Wall — that reminded him exactly why he was doing this.
He would be invited to give a speech, and there would be steps to get onto the stage. In hotel rooms, he would have to crawl across the floor to get through spaces his wheelchair could not. And the ensuite washrooms were almost never accessible, he said.
“The world was built not for people with disabilities, it was built for an average person,” he said. “So this was the beginning of what I think is a global movement, you know, where hundreds of millions of people say, ‘That’s not good enough. We’re building a society for all of us.’”
‘He inspired all of us,’ says Rick Hansen about his basketball teammate Terry Fox.
During his journey, Hansen had a touchstone that kept him going on the hardest days. Inside the support van, was a small statue of Terry Fox, with whom Hansen became close friends after playing wheelchair basketball together.
“When you think about quitting, you think about, well, ‘Terry wouldn’t have quit,’” Hansen said, his voice quavering. “Get out of the motor home. Get into the cold steel chair. Put on the wet slimy gloves. Push out again.”
He paused.
“See how far you can go [but] don’t make the decision here,” he said. “Terry’s inspiration was, was there with me through the entire journey — and is today.”
