Steve Fonyo, who lost his leg to cancer as a child and ran a marathon across Canada to raise millions for cancer research, has died.
He was 56.
Fonyo’s niece Melody Kruppa said he had what appeared to be a seizure in a hotel room in Burnaby on Friday and paramedics could not revive him.
The cause of death was not clear and the family will have to wait until Tuesday or Wednesday for the coroner to assess the body due to the long weekend, Kruppa said.
“We’re in shock,” she said.
“We’re all just waiting. We’re just doing the best that we can. It’s just very hard to wait for the coroner to look at him and find out what the cause was and whether we’re going to be able to view his body. We just don’t know anything right now.”
She said Fonyo and his partner came to the Vancouver area from their home in Powell River to get the foot on his artificial leg redone.
Fonyo lost a leg to cancer when he was 12 and became a national hero in 1985 after completing a Canada-wide marathon to raise money for cancer research, five years after Terry Fox attempted the same thing.
An estimated 40,000 people came out in Greater Victoria to watch Fonyo run the final stretch of his 7,924-kilometre run. HMCS Qu’appelle brought Fonyo to Ogden Point on May 28, 1985. A helicopter then flew him to Swartz Bay, where he began the last two days of his cross-Canada journey.
Thousands of people lined the route as he made his way to Beaver Lake, and about 8,000 were in Beacon Hill Park as he dipped his artificial leg in the Pacific Ocean of Dallas Road on May 29 — 425 days after starting his journey at St. John’s, N.L. “I remember it clear as day. It’s a memory that will be with me for the rest of my life,” Fonyo told the Times Colonist’s Jack Knox in 2005, on the 20th anniversary of his journey.
His Journey for Lives raised nearly $14 million for the Canadian Cancer Society. He was named the Canadian Press’s newsmaker of the year in 1985 and appointed an officer of the Order of Canada at the age of 19 — the youngest person to receive the honour at the time.
His Order of Canada membership was terminated in 2009 following multiple criminal convictions. His struggles with drug and alcohol use led to a series of assault, theft and impaired driving charges. The decision sparked public outcry, with critics saying at the time he should be remembered as a hero despite his struggles later in life.
In 2015, Fonyo told The Canadian Press that he was putting his life back together after decades of drug abuse, crime and near homelessness.
At the time the runner was back in the spotlight with a documentary about his troubled life at the Toronto International Film Festival called “Hurt.”
He said the film director Alan Zweig had helped him see things he needed to work on and that his life was much more stable after his troubles.
“I need to better myself. And I’m doing that,” Fonyo said at the time.
“I don’t think they should have taken away my Order of Canada. I think they should have been more supportive, but it’s a two-way street. I wasn’t really doing anything for myself either.”
On the final day of filming for the documentary in February 2015, Fonyo was beaten and stabbed in a devastating home invasion that landed him in hospital for several months.
More than a month after the attack, Fonyo was lifted from an induced coma but he was still suffering from memory loss and slurred speech. His sister, Suzanne Main, told The Canadian Press at the time that doctors had diagnosed Fonyo with a head injury. Main said Fonyo had recovered from a collapsed lung he suffered in the stabbing.
Kruppa, his niece, said Fonyo was her hero.
“He was 11 years older than me. I looked up to him,” she said on Monday. “What I respected about him was that he had a lot of difficulties, but he kept going. He just persevered.”
Kruppa called on the federal government to reinstate Fonyo’s Order of Canada.
“If this isn’t possible then I will cut out the photo that I have of his medal and place it on his chest at the burial,” she said.
“If the latter is necessary then that would be a real shame.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 21, 2022.
— With a file from the Times Colonist
