Whale attack victim equips gym
Former athlete helps raise $200,000 in cash, equipment for cancer patients’ gym
While healing from more than 70 broken bones sustained in a whaleon-boat accident, Mike Hamill helped secure cash and exercise machines worth $200,000 to equip a gym for cancer patients.
Longtime friend Man in Motion Rick Hansen urged Hamill — a former bodybuilding, powerlifting and wrestling champion — to use his months-long recovery to take on the project.
Hamill’s 61-year-old body took a terrible beating last June when a humpback whale breached and smashed into a guided fishing boat he was on near Haida Gwaii. The accident broke his back in three places and left him a paraplegic.
“Nearly all my ribs were broken and my pelvis was smashed,” he said.
Sports medicine icon Jack Taunton — B.C. Sports Hall of Fame inductee and co-founder of SportMedBC — asked Hamill to help furnish the gym at UBC’s Allan McGavin Sport and Exercise Medicine Centre and kept him focused on the project during his recovery.
“Before he died, I promised my former mentor (Fitness World founder) Henry Polessky I would do something in his memory,” said Hamill, founder of Olympic Gyms and now a fitness equipment dealer. Polessky died of cancer in 2014.
Hamill got to work on his phone and raised the money he needed from Polessky’s friends and family while other donations were secured by Taunton and Andy Nemeth, of Robbins Sports Flooring.
“Every second day Jack would be at my bed asking how Henry’s gym was coming along,” he said. “I’d tell him I was nearly dead, but he just said ‘You can do it, I’ll be back Wednesday for an update.’ ”
Taunton — chief medical officer for the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games — had already hit up the Jack and Darlene Poole Foundation for $1 million to build the cancer gym which is just now open to patients in the newly opened Chan Gunn Pavilion at UBC.
Jack Poole led the successful bid for the 2010 Games, but died of pancreatic cancer a day after the Olympic torch was lit in Greece on its way to Vancouver.
“I looked after Jack during the four-and-a half years of preparation for the 2010 Winter Olympics and I’ve know him and Darlene for a long time,” said Taunton.
Taunton had worked with Hamill to install gyms for the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies and for Olympic and Paralympic athletes.
“Mike was a pioneering strength and conditioning coach who had worked with Clint Eastwood and lots of others,” he said.
Hamill himself donated equipment for the gym — including two $20,000 treadmills — contributed several new machines financed by donations and secured equipment donated by local gyms.
“My guys (at Lifestyle Equipment) spent the summer rebuilding the treadmills to help me fulfil this dream,” he said.
Hamill has spent nearly six months in hospitals from Vancouver General Hospital to GF Strong Rehabilitation Centre and, finally, extended care at UBC Hospital where he resides today while his condo is renovated by friends to accommodate his wheelchair.
Mike’s friends launched a GoFundMe page — promoted by Hansen — to raise money for his wheelchair, lifts and medications not covered by B.C.’s medical insurance and took in more than $17,000.
Hamill’s friendship with Rick Hansen dates back 30 years to the Man in Motion Tour. He joined Hansen and ran with him as the tour entered the home stretch between Princeton and Hope.
“Mike has been on this journey with me through all these years, working on projects supporting the (Vancouver 2010 Winter) Olympic and Paralympic Games, facilitating and donating accessible sports equipment for the athletes, our foundation and many people with disabilities who need this specialized fitness equipment,” said Hansen in a post on the Rick Hansen Foundation Facebook page.