The 2024 Tour de Rock team has been announced, and for the second year it will feature a face familiar to CHEK viewers.
Mary Griffin is joining the 2024 Tour de Rock team as one of the four media riders, alongside 10 RCMP and municipal police officers, two paramedics and a guest rider.
Griffin has been riding a bike since she was five years old and says she is excited to be doing something she loves for a good cause.
“Sharing my experience with people and getting to do something so extraordinary over the next six months, it’s incredible,” she said. “It’s taking something that I love and helping people.”
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The team has already kicked off their training and has been starting from the basics to ensure everyone is on the same page.
“There’s a bible and we go by everything in there, we learn from the beginning how to put our bikes together,” Griffin said.
“All the training sessions have been tested through the decades…they’re going to get us to the finish line.”
“I can ride a bike, but so many of the people here haven’t ridden bikes since they were kids and then to go from barely being able to get on a bike a few weeks ago to last Sunday riding for five hours.”
Simon Douthwaite is a member of the steering committee and 2019 alumni rider and says the Tour de Rock always hits close to home for him.
“I’m a father of a childhood cancer survivor, who’s also a junior rider on the program,” Douthwaite said.
“Chelsea, she’s thriving today, but she spent three years fighting leukemia pretty hard and it was a rough time.”
“Like most families, you go to Tour, they don’t approach you, and we heard about it when we were in hospital through an oncology nurse who said ‘have you heard about there’s this ride, Tour de Rock,’ and we heard about it and Camp Goodtimes.”
Douthwaite says his daughter has been paired with a few riders who have become lifelong mentors to her.
“The world seems like it’s so divided at the moment and people are at loggerheads a lot and I love what the Tour de Rock represents,” Douthwaite said.
“It’s good people from their communities coming together and looking after children who really need it. It’s just such a positive force for good, and we really need more of that these days and look no further than the Tour de Rock.”
The Tour de Rock is an annual bike ride where police and emergency responders bike for 14 days over 1,200 kilometres across Vancouver Island.
The ride, which has happened since 1997, raises money for childhood cancer research and for programs like Camp Goodtimes.
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