Terry Fox

Terrance Stanley Fox was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. An avid distance runner and basketball player at Simon Fraser University, Fox was diagnosed in March 1977 with osteosarcoma, a bone cancer that required his right leg to be amputated six inches above the knee. Deeply moved by the suffering of young children in the cancer wards, Fox resolved to run across the entire expanse of Canada to raise $1 from every Canadian for cancer research.

On 12 April 1980, Fox dipped his prosthetic leg into the Atlantic Ocean in St. John's, Newfoundland, launching his 'Marathon of Hope'. Running through blinding rain, gale-force winds, and blistering heat on an awkward, unyielding mechanical prosthesis that caused severe bone cysts and bleeding, Fox ran an astonishing 42 kilometers (26 miles) every single day without a rest day.

As he crossed Ontario, crowds of tens of thousands lined the highways to cheer him on. On 1 September 1980, near Thunder Bay after 143 days and 5,373 kilometers (3,339 miles), severe coughing fits forced him to stop; hospital scans revealed the cancer had returned and spread to his lungs. Before his death in June 1981 at age twenty-two, his Marathon of Hope reached its goal of $24 million. Today, the annual Terry Fox Run is the world's largest one-day fundraiser for cancer research, having raised over $850 million.