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Tim Hockey, who is part of a cycling team that expects to raise $2.5-million for the Princess Margaret Hospital in the upcoming Ride to Conquer Cancer, at his home in Toronto on May 27.Tijana Martin/The Globe and Mail

The organizer: Tim Hockey

The pitch: Helping raise $2.5-million

The cause: Toronto’s Princess Margaret Cancer Centre

Tim Hockey has participated in the Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer 10 times, but this year’s two-day excursion will have new meaning for him.

Last fall, Mr. Hockey’s wife, Lana, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. “She’s been going through six months of the hell that comes with that,” Mr. Hockey said in an interview from the couple’s home in Toronto. “Hopefully, she’s through it now and she’s in recovery.”

Mr. Hockey and his team, Les Domestiques, have already raised $2.5-million for this year’s ride, which starts on June 11 and supports research at Toronto’s Princess Margaret Cancer Centre.

The ride is just one of many fundraising events that Mr. Hockey, 59, and the team take part in. He formed Les Domestiques 13 years ago to combine his love of cycling with his passion for helping charitable causes. The team has more than 100 members and every year, groups of teammates participate in around 15 fundraising rides. They’ve raised hundreds of millions of dollars for dozens of health care causes and they helped fund construction of the velodrome for the 2015 Pan Am Games in Toronto.

“One of the challenges, of course, is when there are all these charitable rides, you sign up and then you say ‘who is going to ride with me?’ So having a ready-made club of like-minded people, it’s pretty easy to say that out of a club of 120 members, you can find anywhere between five and 100 people who will want to do the same charity event with you,” he said. “It was a very efficient way of doing fundraising and charity rides.”

The Enbridge Ride to Conquer Cancer remains particularly important for the team. Mr. Hockey, the former chief executive of TD Ameritrade, has lost his mother and father to cancer. “It’s unlike many fundraising events,” he said. “The sheer number of yellow flags which denotes a cancer survivor on the ride shows you that there’s a lot of people who have gone through their own struggles.”

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