Cancer charity bike ride Tour de Cure heads to North Queensland
Riders will peddle 1000km of the North Queensland coast to help ease the anxiety, isolation regional cancer patients can face.
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A group of passionate bike riders are getting ready to hit the road to raise money and raise awareness, but for one rider, the challenge just got a whole lot more personal.
Riders will cycle all the way from Airlie Beach to Port Douglas stopping at all of the bucket list locations along the way as part of Tour de Cure’s signature tour — a whopping 1050km.
Tour de Cure grants committee chair, Paul Mirabelle, said every dollar fundraised would go toward supporting vital cancer research, prevention programs, and support initiatives in Australia.
Eight community grants of $10,000 are going to local cancer services in the regions they were touring, working closely with leading researchers, medical institutions, and community organisations to improve outcomes for those impacted by cancer.
Bowen farmer, Robert Lee, is participating in this year’s ride and said the community grant would be hugely beneficial for Bowen Hospital’s oncology department, a place he knows all too well.
“There’s three nurses up there and they are amazing,” he said.
He said they have a small room with three chairs that patients rotated through throughout the day and anyone accompanying them had to sit in the corridors as there simply wasn’t enough space.
“With this $10,000 the hospital has been able to find a room we can turn into a waiting room where we’ll be able to put a TV and some chairs so it makes it a bit more comfortable for the carers,” he said.
It was hoped the funding could also go towards purchasing tablets so people receiving treatment for hours each day could keep themselves occupied, he added.
The 55-year-old signed up for the ride in June 2024, not knowing that just four months later it would become a lot more personal to him when his wife Cheryl was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer.
“Everybody thinks they understand what happens with cancer and what people go through but until you actually physically have to be there with somebody that’s going through it you really don’t understand,” he said.
“It’s so hard on them individually, it’s hard on the family.”
He said the fight was even more challenging for his wife who had Lyme disease and was wheelchair bound.
Mr Lee said they were very lucky she was able to get fortnightly chemotherapy in Bowen Hospital’s small oncology facility with the help of Telehealth appointments so she didn’t have to travel as frequently but he knew others weren’t so lucky.
“I can only imagine how much stress and anxiety this must be for them,” he said.
Mr Lee said nearly two decades ago he saw a documentary on Tour de Cure while on a plane and it immediately became a bucket list ride for him.
He went on to raise $17,000 for Tour de Cure and the RACQ careflight helicopter in 2019 after he was challenged by a friend to do the Bowen to Collinsville rollercoaster bike ride which took him 190 kilometres over the rolling hills up to Collinsville across two days.
His coach, Naomi Ballard, convinced him to keep riding and signed him up for the Tour de Cure in 2020, but unfortunately that ride didn’t go ahead.
“That was quite devastating after all the hard work I’d put in to get fit and be able to ride and do the tour,” he said.
“Covid kind of put a dent in things with bike riding, I didn’t give up, I kept riding socially for the next couple of years and then last year in July Tour de Cure said they’d be back up here in the tropics.
“Naomi said come on you’ve got to do the tour this year so I got back to training and signed up.”
Mr Lee said his aim is to raise $20,000 this year and he was already well on the way to achieving that goal.
“It’s amazing to find the support that we are getting from everybody locally,” he said.
Tour de Cure will kick off in Airlie Beach on 30 May, stopping in Bowen, Townsville, Magnetic Island, Ingham, Mission Beach, Cairns, and Atherton before finishing up in Port Douglas on 6 June.
The team, including Mr Lee, will also spread their ‘Be Fit, Be Healthy, Be Happy’ cancer prevention message with stops at a number of schools along the route.
Originally published as Cancer charity bike ride Tour de Cure heads to North Queensland
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