Pedal for Hope campaign lives up to its name

Each spring for the past 14 years the Pedal for Hope fundraising tour has set out on what is now a 1,000kilometre journey and staged a triumphant return three weeks later.

The police officers who make up the core group of this transcendently successful fundraising and motivational tour, accompanied by a bevy of young cancer survivors and supporters, ride back into Peterborough knowing they have made a difference.

It’s an uplifting fulfillment of the old saying, “What goes around, comes around.”

The tour, as its name suggests, spreads hope that cancer can be beaten. That’s what goes around. What comes back is support for children with cancer, and large amounts of cash to help beat the disease.

Last week the Pedal for Hope team announced this year’s campaign raised $356,358.

The team’s combined haul since 2005 is approaching $5 million.

This year’s announcement included a new and welcome wrinkle: Pedal for Hope’s newest funding recipient is a Vancouver-based doctor and researcher.

Dr. Torsten Nielsen will get $1 million over four years to help develop better diagnostic testing for synovial sarcomas, a particularly nasty form of cancer that most commonly strikes teenagers and young adults.

Over the past seven years Pedal for Hope money has gone to two different researchers based out of Toronto’s Sick Kids Hospital.

Some might have expected the Ontario-based focus to continue. As a fundraising strategy is makes sense to direct people’s donations as locally as possible.

Kudos to Pedal for Hope for reminding us that cancer is not a local disease. The work Dr. Nielsen does will help young cancer patients in Vancouver, in Ontario, across Canada and around the world.

Choosing Dr. Nielsen’s project might have been simply the result of looking for a successful, highquality research program that targets youth cancers.

But there is also a “what-goes-around” aspect to his work.

When Terry Fox, who grew up just outside Vancouver, set off on his Marathon of Hope back in 1980 Dr. Nielsen was in elementary school in Vancouver.

Fox’s courageous attempt at a cross-country run on one leg is one of the most inspirational stories in Canadian history, and as a young boy following that story Dr. Nielsen was inspired to think about a career in cancer research.

Like Terry Fox her persevered, graduating from a joint MD/PhD program at McGill University, doing post-graduate work internationally and then joining the University of British Columbia and Vancouver General Hospital as a professor and staff physician.

Dr. Nielsen has also done important work to develop better testing methods for breast cancer, but the research Pedal for Hope will help pay for focuses on cancers that primarily develop in the soft tissue of knees and elbows.

That’s the type of sarcoma that cost Terry Fox his leg, and eventually his life when he was part-way through his Marathon of Hope.

It is fitting that Fox’s Marathon of Hope set Dr. Nielsen off on his journey to become and internationally recognized cancer researcher and was also the inspiration for a national Cops for Cancer campaign that was the origin of the Pedal for Hope ride.

Congratulations to the local and area police officers and their supporters and sponsors who drive Pedal for Hope for once again bringing hope to young cancer patients everywhere.