Terry Fox: One Leg and a Dream

Victoria, British Columbia

Terry Fox was an athletic young man whose right leg had to be amputated because of cancer. Convinced that it was his mission to call attention to the plight of other cancer sufferers, and defying then-conventional assumptions about people with missing legs, Terry announced that he would run clear across Canada -- over 4,500 miles -- in the Spring and Summer of 1980. He made it two-thirds of the way on his "Marathon of Hope," but the cancer spread and he died. Terry's effort was nevertheless seen as a victory by Canada; his statue stands at the spot that he never reached, and his sneakers are enshrined in a shoe museum in Toronto.

In 2012 a second, different Terry Fox statue was erected, in St. John's, Newfoundland, at the place where he dipped his artificial leg into the harbor, and then a third Terry Fox statue, just east of Thunder Bay, Ontario, near the spot on the Trans-Canada Highway where he could run no further.