Terry Fox

Terry Fox was a determined, average-sized teenager from British Columbia who made his school basketball team through sheer persistence. In 1977, at 18, a pain in his knee turned out to be osteosarcoma, a bone cancer, and his right leg was amputated above the knee. The night before the operation he read about an amputee who had run the New York Marathon.

In the cancer ward he saw children dying and decided to do something about it. He trained in secret for 14 months on an artificial leg, running more than 5,000 kilometres, until he could manage a marathon distance. His plan was to run from one coast of Canada to the other and ask every Canadian for a dollar.

He dipped his leg in the Atlantic at St John's, Newfoundland, on 12 April 1980 and started running west: roughly 42 kilometres a day, every day, with a hop-skip gait that made his stump bleed. At first almost nobody noticed. By the time he reached Ontario, crowds lined the roads and he was meeting the prime minister.

On 1 September, outside Thunder Bay, after 143 days and 5,373 kilometres, coughing and in pain, he was told the cancer had spread to his lungs. He never ran again and died in June 1981, a month before his 23rd birthday. The annual Terry Fox Run, held in dozens of countries, has since raised more than 850 million Canadian dollars for cancer research, far past his original goal of one dollar per Canadian.