Man in motion

He was fifteen when a truck rolled outside Bella Coola, and the doctors told him he would never walk again. He wheeled forty thousand kilometres anyway.

Most people know the postcard version of Rick Hansen: the athlete in the wheelchair, the world tour, the money raised. Few know how close it all came to falling apart before it ever really began - a launch-day disaster caught on camera, a funding plan that ran out weeks into a two-year journey, and a private doubt he carried through the worst of it that never made the official story.

Man in Motion follows Hansen from a small-town athlete who lost the use of his legs, through the humiliating, unglamorous work of rebuilding a life from a hospital bed, into the wheelchair basketball gym where he met a young amputee named Terry Fox. Their friendship - and Fox's death five years before Hansen's own tour began - is the engine underneath everything that follows.

What comes next is the Man in Motion World Tour: thirty-four countries, twenty-six months, a body pushed past what anyone believed it could survive, and a country that had to be convinced, more than once, that the whole thing wouldn't end in failure. This book doesn't skip past the parking-lot disaster, the telethon that saved the tour from collapsing in Texas, or the exhaustion that never let up. It also tells a part of the story that stayed private for nearly forty years - the woman who was there for almost all of it, and what her presence changes about the myth everyone thought they knew.

This is a book for readers of true survival stories, Canadian history, disability advocacy, and anyone who has ever wondered what it actually costs to finish something the whole world is watching you attempt.

Discover the full story behind the legend - get your copy of Man in Motion today.