Making A Difference From Where He Sits

If Canadian Rick Hansen could turn back the clock to that day in 1972 when, hitchhiking on a pickup truck that swerved off a country road and crashed into the trees, his spinal cord snapped at waist level – he wouldn’t even try.

“It was a long, hard journey. It took time to forgive myself for getting into the truck with my friend, and I was very angry at the driver. My parents went through a lot. But I regard that accident at age 15 as the best thing that could have happened to me. I would never trade my life that followed for something else.”

Almost without being aware of it, he gradually became a catalyst for change in society’s attitudes, and a man dedicated to making a difference.

Born in Port Alberni, British Columbia, Hansen grew up in Williams Lake, BC. By his teens he had won all-star awards in five sports. After the devastating injury, he turned his paralysis into a lifelong mission, promoting research into spinal cord injuries and accessibility and integration for the disabled around the world.

He remembers the accident vividly – even though 38 years have passed. “I was returning home from a fishing trip,” Hansen tells The Jerusalem Post in an interview in Jerusalem. “A friend of mine who was also 15 sat on the right side of the truck, with me on the left, but he asked to switch seats, which I did. The truck went carelessly to the right around a corner.

There were no seat belts. I was thrown against a steel tool box and my spinal cord was severed at the waist.”

Hansen worked to rehabilitate himself, finished high school and then became the first student with a physical disability to graduate in physical education from the University of British Columbia. He won national championships on wheelchair volleyball and wheelchair basketball teams and went on to become a world-class Paralympic athlete.

“My friend in the truck was only lightly hurt, but if he had been sitting on the right and been paralyzed, it would have been devastating, as he had never believed in himself. But after seeing what I could do with my life as a paraplegic, he devoted himself to playing acoustic guitar – and won a top prize.” Today, that friend – also 53 – works at the Rick Hansen Foundation, which its namesake established in 1997.

“Life is about passion and giving, surrounding yourself with love, having purpose and making a change in the world. I could do this without being able to walk,” says Hansen, looking healthy, fit, with the strong biceps he needed to push himself over 40,000 kilometers in 34 countries around the world – including Israel – a project he embarked upon in March 1985. He finished his Man in Motion World Tour “two years, two months and two days later” and was received as a hero in his hometown. Canadian songwriter David Foster wrote the original version of a song called Saint Elmo’s Fire (Man In Motion) in his honor. 

Hansen used that amazing trip to increase awareness of the needs of the disabled, and raised $26 million for spinal injury research. Since then, his foundation has collected over $220 million more. He married Amanda Reid, the physiotherapist who accompanied him on that first tour; they have three daughters Emma, Alana, and Rebecca (aged 20, 18 and 15).

Another famous person with disabilities that Hansen knew was Christopher Reeve, the late Superman movie hero who became a quadraplegic after a fall from his horse. “He was a great man,” comments Hansen, who admired him for setting up a foundation to advance research in the field. Another hero of his is a former mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan, who lost control of all four limbs in a skiing accident at 19, overcame depression and suicidal thoughts and went on to his election to city council in 1993 and in 2005 as mayor. “I remember that he went to Torino as mayor to attend the Paralympic Games. In his electric wheelchair, he circled the field with the country’s flag. He didn’t have to say a thing. He could have spent his life in a hospital, but he thrived.”

These successes conflict with the image of disability in the minds of some people. “Occasionally, when we go to a restaurant, the waiter will bring the bill to my wife or an attendant at the airport will talk to her rather than to me – as if being unable to walk means I have no brain. I don’t know if it’s a sign of women’s liberation or my own situation,” Hansen says.                                      

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