> Emotional and Mental Health > Goal Setting and Motivation

The man’s got charisma. Rick Hansen, who turns 50 in August this year, rolls forward to speak into the microphone, sending the crowd into cheers. The crowd is as loud as any this Man in Motion heard at the peak of his round-the-world wheelchair tour 20 years ago.

Since then, Hansen has done much to overcome incredible shyness and personal frustration in order to challenge society’s perception of what is possible for someone with spinal cord injury. He is an incredibly positive role model.

“Rick Hansen is not only an icon, he is a true hero,” says Jordan, a grade 10 student in Delta, BC, who heard Hansen speak recently. “He showed me that anything is possible.”

Hansen has led a lifetime campaign to inspire us to believe in the possibility of a fully accessible, inclusive society and a cure for spinal cord injury. As head of the Rick Hansen Foundation, he has helped raise awareness of the potential of people with disabilities, advanced spinal cord research, and established International Collaboration on Repair Discoveries (ICORD), the largest spinal cord injury research facility in the world. He has also established an annual Wheels In Motion event, which has funded more than 500 quality-of-life projects to date.

Life-Changing Moment

He’s come a long way from Williams Lake and the injury in 1973 that left him paralyzed from the waist down–at age 15. Tossed from the box of an out-of-control pickup truck while hitchhiking, Hansen spent months in the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster. This was followed by even more months in rehab at the GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre in Vancouver, where he began to accept the physical and emotional realities of his injury. It took a long time for Hansen to accept the wheelchair, though.

Road to Acceptance

Hansen used crutches and leg braces throughout most of his first year at university and while living in Haida House at the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) Totem Park residence. As a student living in the same residence, I’d see Hansen swinging his braced legs through the cafeteria, maneuvering his tray ahead of him in line, and then walking in that herky-jerky way of a man on prostheses towards a cafeteria table to join a group of friends–mostly girls, I noted.

It was only later that I realized the determination it took for Hansen to appear upright in braces and out of the wheelchair. “The person wearing [leg braces] must be prepared to put in the work to lift and swing that essentially useless lower body forward,” Hansen said. “[Braces are] inconvenient in that you always have to have the crutches with you, and as a method of transportation they’re nowhere near as fast or as efficient as a wheelchair.

“But if I could learn to use them, I could stand up. I could tackle stairs. I could look out at the world instead of up at it,” Hansen said. “For the first six months I hardly ever used my chair outside the gym. I’d try to get between classes on my crutches and braces with a packsack on my back–10 minutes to go a mile, and me huffing and puffing down the road. The sensible thing would have been to wheel between buildings or classes with my crutches in my lap and leave the chair at the door. But in my mind, that would have heightened the perception of my being disabled.”

Road to Success

Hansen’s resistance to using a wheelchair relaxed the next year when he was accepted into the faculty of physical education at UBC, becoming the first student with a physical disability to graduate with a bachelor’s of physical education from that university.

While in university Hansen began to compete internationally in wheelchair sports and went on to win 19 international wheelchair marathons, including three world championships. He competed for Canada at the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

The Long Road

Ann-Marie Metten, like many Canadians, vividly remembers Rick Hansen’s Man In Motion World Tour and is pleased to have been able to meet and write about her long-respected hero.

Source: alive #295, May 2007