Manitoba cyclist taking on 3,500-km Tour de France route this summer to raise money for cancer research
Amateur Brandon cyclist Grant Hamilton hopes to raise $55K for leukemia research as part of Tour 21
A Prairie cyclist is journeying across the French Alps and the Pyrenees mountains this summer to raise money for leukemia research.
Grant Hamilton is the only Canadian riding this summer in The Tour 21 — a team of 25 amateur cyclists who will ride the full 21 stages of the roughly 3,500-kilometre Tour de France route over 21 days.
He'll get there at the end of June and spend three weeks peddling from the ocean to the mountains, cycling around 200 kilometres a day.
"I feel like I have a lot of responsibility to carry the national pride," Hamilton said. "It's going to be fun. It's going to be a challenge, but it's ... a very important cause."
The Tour 21 team hopes to raise around $2 million for leukemia research. Hamilton personally aims to raise at least $55,000.
It's also part of his continued work to promote cycling, he said.
In the summer of 2022, he was hit by a car while he was out biking with his wife. He lost one of his pinky fingers in the crash.
"It was a pretty traumatic accident," he said. "If I can be hit by a car biking on one of Brandon's shared road bike paths, it could happen to anyone."
He took it as a sign that it was "time to make the city a little safer for cycling," he said, and he's now a vocal advocate for making Brandon a more cyclist-friendly city.
That passion has already taken him around the world. Last summer he travelled with Brandon's mayor and other city representatives to Copenhagen to learn about how the Danish capital helps keep cyclists safe.
That advocacy is part of what helped get him on the Tour 21 team, Hamilton said.
Training for the big leagues
A&L Cycle, a Brandon bike shop, is helping Hamilton prep and train for the ride, says owner Cam Wirch.
The hardest part of the race will be the elevation gain, but Hamilton also needs to be able to recover and get on the bike each day and ride, said Wirch.
"It's going to be a lot of mental toughness as well — it's not just physical. The hard part is going to be psyching yourself up for the next day for another big ride," he said.
Hamilton has a fat-tire bike, designed for speeding on the snow, which he can use to train through the winter, but it's hard to get a lot of kilometres in because it gets dark so early.
That means he gets up early every morning to hop on his stationary training bike, with a virtual trainer provided by A&L. He also goes to the gym after work for strength and flexibility training.
Right now, he's riding about 50 kilometres a day to build up his leg strength — but he'll also have to train for climbing mountains.
While there are some smaller hills in Brandon's river valley and the nearby Riding Mountain National Park — which has an average elevation of around 1,600 feet above sea level — there's nothing nearby like the elevation gain he'll see in France, which can be more than 7,500 feet above sea level at the highest points of the race.
"It's up and down the Pyrenees, it's up and down the Alps, and from what I understand, it's like climbing Everest five or six times," Hamilton said.
To help prep for the elevation gains he's planning training trips in California and Spain in the new year.
But he says with each peddle, he remains focused on raising money for leukemia research. While he isn't personally affected by leukemia, the Canadian Cancer Society estimates 6,600 Canadians will be diagnosed with the disease this year, and 3,200 Canadians will die from it.
Hamilton says he's had people across the country reach out to support his ride.
He's happy to be putting Brandon on the world stage — a feeling that hit home after seeing the route reveal for Tour de France 2025 in Paris this October.
"That was really spectacular … to be in the Palais des congrès [convention centre] in Paris with some of the world's greatest cyclists," Hamilton said.
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