Newfoundland artist Luben Boykov certainly understands what Terry Fox's celebrated Marathon of Hope was all about.
The Sofia-born sculptor once completed his own marathon of hope - making a daring political escape from Communist Bulgaria in 1989. After years of planning, he, his wife Elena Popova, and infant daughter, Anna, literally jumped off a Havana-bound airplane in Gander, Nfld. and claimed refugee status.
Days later, in St. John's, they began hearing the remarkable story of the young, one-legged, cancer-stricken Canadian and his valiant 1980 attempt to run across the country, from St. John's to Victoria.
"We went to city hall and saw the plaque and painting of Terry Fox," Mr. Boykov recalled in an interview. "It was one of the first facts of Canadian history that we learned. It was an image that captured my imagination."
Last week, Mr. Boykov, now 50 and a resident of Flatrock, Nfld., learned that he'd won a $230,000 competition to design a new commemorative sculpture of Mr. Fox. It will be erected next year on the St. John's Port Authority site at No. 1 Water Street, where Mr. Fox began his epic journey.
Mr. Fox, a competitive athlete who lost his right leg to osteosarcoma in 1977 at age 18, was forced to abort his cross-country run near Thunder Bay, Ont., after the cancer spread to his lungs. By then, he'd run 5,373 kilometres, the equivalent of a 42-kilometre marathon every day for nearly five months.
In the almost three decades since his death in June, 1981, Terry Fox has become the most honoured Canadian in the nation's history. The annual Terry Fox runs that he inspired have raised $500-million for cancer research.
Mr. Boykov's winning, cast silicon bronze design consists of two, fused sculptural elements: A roughly two-metre-high figure of the runner dipping his artificial right leg in the Atlantic Ocean, and a sculpted land and water mass, representing a wave.
In his submission to the competition's jury, which included Mr. Fox's brother Darryl and representatives of the Port Authority, the City of St. John's and Parks Canada, Mr. Boykov said the sculpture will evoke "beginning and genesis; the artificial leg acting as a static point of inception, while the rest of Terry's body, tense and taut, projecting focus, determination and purpose, is reminiscent of the road ahead of him. He is portrayed at the moment of a literal and metaphorical climb on an incline. The sculpted terrain, with its dramatic form and texture, endeavours to reflect Terry's turbulent and gripping life story."
The ripples of the wave will be clad with stone on which quotes from schoolchildren and adults about Terry Fox and his place in the hearts and minds of Canadians will be inscribed.
"The wave is a metaphor," Mr. Boykov explained, "evoking the wave of hope that Terry inspired."
He said he heard about the competition in early November and conceived his winning design in a day and a half, while travelling in Sicily. "I'm very proud and honoured to have been selected. I can't adequately express my satisfaction."
The Boykov sculpture, to be set in a new garden designed by New Brunswick landscape architect Fred Hann, is the latest in a series of seven monuments honouring the memory of Winnipeg-born, B.C.-raised Mr. Fox.
These include statues on Dallas Road in Victoria, near the Pacific Ocean where he had hoped to complete his marathon; another opposite Parliament Hill in Ottawa, and a third, 2.5-metre-high memorial standing on a cliff-top near Thunder Bay and the Trans-Canada Highway, a portion of which has been renamed the Terry Fox Courage Highway. It was designed by Manfred of Oakville.
Yet another tribute is being designed by Vancouver artist and writer Douglas Coupland, to be built outside B.C. Place stadium. It will replace a 27-year-old monument that features a triumphal arch and statue at Terry Fox Plaza - part of renovations that will give the stadium a new retractable roof.
In addition to the statues, some 32 roads and streets have been named for Mr. Fox, as well as 14 schools, including his own former high school in Port Coquitlam, B.C.; 14 other buildings, among them athletic centres and the Terry Fox Research Institute in Vancouver; nine fitness trails, a mountain and provincial park in the Canadian Rockies in the Selwyn range; and a Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker, CCGS Terry Fox, commissioned in 1983.