Brave son Rick Hoyt and his loving dad ‘ran’ for their lives

Rick Hoyt and his father Dick worked together - running the world - to change how we saw the lives of those with disabilities.

Dick Hoyt runs with his son Rick at their 25th Boston Marathon in 2006. Picture: AP Chitose Suzuki/AP.)

Rick Hoyt knew adversity. He was born to it. While emerging into this world his umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck. Deprived of vital oxygen for a few minutes, he was born with cerebral palsy and quadriplegia. Speech was beyond the boy, who also controlled no muscles below his neck.

Dick Hoyt knew adversity. He took it on with fatherly enthusiasm as he and Rick proved a lot of well-educated people very wrong along the way.

Dick and wife Judith were urged by medical staff not to try to cope with the burden of living with Rick but to place him in an institution where he would be cared for alongside other children whom the fates had betrayed. That was never going to happen. Dick and Judith wanted Rick to be home with his brothers and for them all to share their lives together no matter how hard it might be. And it was a challenge.

But from the start they were convinced that Rick was aware of his surroundings and of his love for them. They would tell doctors that Rick’s eyes would follow them around the room. At least a few of the doctors they spent time with each week in one of Boston’s major hospitals had faith in the parents’ observations – after all they were with their son 24 hours a day.

Early on, one of them, witnessing Rick’s unexpected intellectual progress, told the parents to “treat him as any other child”. They’d long been doing that, with a few refinements. Rick was taken to public swimming pools and his dad would take him sledding down gentle slopes of snow in the city’s colder months. Committed to making sure Rick was literate – and with the wild ambition that he might be employable one day – Judith taped cut-out letters to every object in the house: a T on the TV, a C on the couch, an R on the refrigerator, a W on the wall. These would be his first steps in putting letters together to make up words that he would use to describe what he saw and thought.

Then, in 1972, they spent the equivalent today of $94,000 on an early computer developed by researchers at Boston’s famous Tufts University. It was crude by today’s standards but was unique then: with a headpiece Rick could tap the keys and, letter by letter, spell out words. His first weren’t “I love you mum” but “Go Bruins” (the city’s ice hockey champions).

Soon he was in a regular classes in the Massachusetts public school system. When he heard another student at his school had been rendered paraplegic after an accident, he suggested to his dad that they run – Dick running and pushing his son in a pod of sorts – in a fundraiser for the boy.

From that a phenomenon was born. Dick was 36 in 1977 and had never run anywhere. But certainly never away. They completed the course. Soon they were running fundraisers elsewhere. They set their eyes on the famed Boston Marathon. They ran it first in 1980. And did so for the next 37 years.

They were there in 1986 when Robert de Castella won the race in 2hr 7min. That was de Castella’s personal best, but while the city celebrated the Australian’s record, every Bostonian stuck around until the Hoyts had run under the finish flag. By then Rick was completing a degree at Boston University.

They had planned the 2013 Boston marathon to be their last but they were directed to stop after Muslim terrorists bombed the finish line, killing three and injuring hundreds, 17 of whom lost limbs. The Hoyts bravely loaded up again for the 2014 race, which they completed. By then they had competed in more than 1000 races, including triathlons in which Dick would pull his son in a boat by a cord tied to his waist, take off on a two-seat bicycle and finish as usual pushing Rick in an ever-improving cart.

Rick once told a reporter: “When my dad and I are out there on a run, a special bond forms between us.” Dick would say he was the body but Rick was the heart.

These days a bronze statue of the pair sits at the starting point of the Boston race commemorating a brave, adventurous boy turned man and his loving dad who reinvented fatherhood.

Dick died aged 80 in April 2021. Mum Judith had died in 2010.

Rick’s brothers said they believed that it was now Rick in heaven pushing his dad Dick about.

Rick Hoyt. Marathon racer.
Born Holland, Massachusetts, January 10, 1962; died Leicester, Massachusetts, May 22, aged 61