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He never finished the run; it still raises money 45 years on

Terry Fox was a Canadian runner who, after losing a leg to bone cancer at eighteen, set out in 1980 to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. Growing up in British Columbia, he'd been a scrappy, competitive athlete who pushed into cross-country running and basketball, and after his amputation he kept moving, learning wheelchair basketball well enough to win national titles. Inspired by a magazine article about an amputee marathoner, he trained for over a year, developing a distinctive hopping gait to cope with his artificial leg, and quietly planned something far bigger than a single race: a cross-country run he called the Marathon of Hope, hoping to collect a dollar from every Canadian.

He began in St. John's in April 1980, dipping his leg in the Atlantic, and ran the equivalent of a marathon daily through brutal weather, indifferent crowds, and constant pain from blisters and bone bruises. Momentum built as he moved west: towns turned out with donations, corporate sponsors like the Four Seasons chain rallied support, and by Ontario he was a national sensation, meeting the prime minister and sports stars and drawing huge crowds. He clashed with the press over privacy and with his support team over the strain, and pushed through worsening symptoms until, outside Thunder Bay after 143 days and over 5,000 kilometres, chest pain and a coughing fit forced him to stop—the cancer had spread to his lungs. He died the following June at twenty-two, prompting an outpouring of national mourning, flags at half-mast, and a huge telethon that raised millions more than his run itself had collected.

Fox's death did not end the project: an annual Terry Fox Run began months later and grew into the world's largest single-day cancer fundraiser, eventually drawing millions of participants across dozens of countries and funding a dedicated research institute. He became a fixture of Canadian identity, voted among the country's greatest figures, commemorated with stamps, a coin, statues, schools, highways, and a mountain, and dramatized in multiple films. His legacy is not uncomplicated, though: disability scholars and activists have debated whether his

Between his amputation and the Marathon of Hope, Fox played wheelchair basketball in Vancouver and won three national championships.

Read the whole of Terry Fox on Wikipedia

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