I can hear the sound of tiny voices screaming with excitement as my Tour de Rock team pulls up to an elementary school just south of Comox.
We stop outside in our two parallel lines and dismount in unison, one line of riders flipping their bikes as if doing “the wave” so the bikes can lean against each other.
I’m told later by a child that our synchronized actions make us look like Minions from the Despicable Me movies.
We walk into Miracle Beach Elementary to a room full of children absolutely losing their minds, like we’re Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy all rolled into one.
They sing us a song they’ve prepared, along with a choreographed dance, and their excitement is as contagious as the cold my teammates are passing around.
“Is this how the Beatles felt?” my teammate Nicholas Arnold, a radio host for Sun FM in Duncan, asks as we ride away.
We’re off to another stop where we’ll run around giving high fives to cheering teens holding signs with our names written on them, or hugs to seniors who thank us with tears in their eyes for riding our bikes to raise money for pediatric cancer research.
Now in its 27th year, Cops for Cancer Tour de Rock has raised more than $29 million for the cause.
This rock-star treatment — mixed with an overdose of endorphins from cycling more than 400 kilometres over our first four days of a more than 1,000-kilometre ride of the Island — leaves us on a high as we finish our day in Courtenay on Wednesday.
A couple of hours later, many of us are in tears.
A former Tour de Rock rider meets us in our Courtenay hotel to fulfill a deathbed promise she made to an 11-year-old.
Alli Roberts tells us about her pal, Kaiden Finley, who she met while she was training to ride Tour de Rock in 2018. While Roberts was on the tour, Kaiden went for a routine check-up and found out his brain tumour had returned.
Roberts got the news in a text message from Kaiden’s family. In that moment, she finally understood what people meant when they described wanting to crawl out of their skin, she says.
“I was just a mess, because how do you digest that news? We went from he’s just going for his regular check-up to they found six tumors. He’s palliative,” she says.
Roberts rallied the network of former Tour de Rock riders to help Kaiden knock off everything on his bucket list, from driving a race car and flying a plane to becoming chief of the Victoria Police Department and getting a tattoo.
She promised Kaiden she would share his story with every group of Tour de Rock riders going forward.
“An 11-year-old child doesn’t want to be forgotten,” she says. Her words hang in the air and catch in our throats.
When Kaiden died a few months after that routine check-up on March 21, 2019, he was buried with a photo of his Tour de Rock team and his casket was carried by the riders.
That was what he wanted, because the Tour de Rock became like family to him, Roberts says. He called her his best friend.
We all toast Kaiden with a glass of cider, or “apple beer,” as Kaiden referred to it when he added drinking cider to his bucket list.
This is the intensity of being on the tour. We’re riding the highest high one minute, buoyed by the cheers of small children, and the next minute we’re crying.
Friday brings more highs and lows as we ride from Parksville to Port Alberni. At the bottom of a steep stretch of Highway 4 known as the Hump, we gather as a group to remember former Saanich police officer Mike Lawless, who was the face of Tour de Rock for many years.
Lawless, who rode in 2004 and worked on the support crew every year until he was diagnosed with cancer, gave countless riders a pep talk before tackling the Hump. Now, the team gathers each year in the same spot to honour Lawless, who died in 2015.
It’s a sombre moment and more tears are shed.
We pull ourselves together and conquer the hill together as a team, racing down at 60-something kilometres per hour with smiles on our faces.
At the bottom, we’re exhilarated. No more crying, we say. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Where the Tour de Rock team is
The team is heading to the west coast on Saturday, riding from Port Alberni to Ucluelet, with stops in Sproat Lake and Tofino.
On Sunday, the team will drive back to Parksville to continue the journey south, heading to Lantzville and Nanaimo, and Monday will see the team head to Ladysmith and Chemainus. The tour will end at the B.C. legislature on Oct. 4 at 4:45 p.m.
To donate to Tour de Rock, visit tourderock.ca
