Riding for all the right reasons: inside the 2021 Westpac Ride for a Cure

By Matt Formston

The Tour de Cure is one of the biggest cancer fundraisers in Australia. However, for those involved, it's so much more.

The quest to cure cancer is a personal issue for me – my dad had a prostate cancer removed last year. My mum lost her sister to cancer about two years ago. And while I’m a Paralympian, world record holder and not shy of physical pain, I find it difficult to think about the emotional pain of losing someone to cancer.

Raising funds for Tour de Cure – by sponsoring the Westpac Ride for a Cure – is one way Optus is working to support the vital research that is being done around Australia to end this scourge.

If we can work with strategic partners like Westpac and pull together as a community to find a cure, it will take away so much pain – not just for those with the disease, but also for their families and friends.

On the Westpac Ride a couple of years ago, a man spoke at a dinner about how he lost his mum to cancer when he was just six years old. The tour’s route that year had actually taken him through the same town where he grew up as a motherless child. I have three young children myself and it really brought it home to me how important finding a cure is.

Optus has been a Westpac Ride for a Cure sponsor since 2017, and over this time, more than 500 riders have each ridden more than 1,500 kilometres to raise funds for cancer research, support and prevention.

This year, six current and past Optus staff members took part in the ride, supported by two crew members.

I’m proud to say that this year’s event raised $906,000 thousand to fund research into pancreatic cancer and childhood neuroblastoma, as well as three children's wellbeing camps through Camp Quality.

This brings the total raised by the annual Westpac Ride for a Cure to almost $5 million – an incredible contribution to the $60+ million raised by Tour de Cure since 2007. 


“Optus Enterprise is committed to supporting Tour De Cure in their important mission to find a cure for cancer. We are proud of our longstanding partnership with Westpac Ride for a Cure to provide our people with an opportunity to focus on health and wellbeing and contribute to a community initiative which we are highly passionate about.” Chris Mitchell, Managing Director Optus Enterprise


The ride is always a tough gig and this year’s ride was no exception, with a gruelling route that took the riders from Forster via Hawks Nest and the Central Coast to the finale in Sydney. 

Torrential rain made it even more difficult for the riders with one dirt road becoming so corrugated that buses were brought in to take the riders across that area. One of the support trucks became bogged too, and had to be lifted out by crane.

By the time the riders came in that night, they were half broken. There were tears of pain because it was such a hard day and also tears of joy as people thought about the reason they were doing the ride.

It was the spirit of camaraderie that set this year’s ride apart – partly because of the adversity they went through. There was a real sense of purpose and a sense that as a community they were doing something good together.

It was great to see the awards being given out to the pelotons at night and seeing one peloton stand up and perform a song they had come up with while riding that day. They call it the Tour de Cure bubble, and this year was the tightest I’ve seen.

A colleague of mine at Optus is one person who’s personally benefited from the research that has been done into cancer treatments and, on the 2021 Ride for a Cure, Marko Nakomcic had the opportunity to meet the professor whose work in gene sequencing had saved his life, Dr Matt Dun.. 

Dr Dun spoke at the 2021 dinner, sharing the heartbreaking story of how he swiftly pivoted the focus of his original cancer research when his young daughter, Josie, was diagnosed with a brain stem cancer called Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma, or DIPG.

Every year in Australia, about 100 children die of cancer, 36 from brain cancer and, of these, 20 from DIPG. The life expectancy for children with DIPG is 10 months after diagnosis. 

Dr Dun’s cancer crusade had now become agonisingly personal, but despite finding one drug, Paxalisib, that slowed the progression of DIPG tumour cells, Josie passed away in December 2019 after a 22-month battle against the deadly brain stem cancer.

His work continues today into identifying drug combinations that will kill the cancer cells. As ever, funding is crucial. And as teams got on the bike the next day to ride, I’m sure many had his story in their minds: we’re doing it for people like Josie.

Learn more about the Optus Westpac partnership here and Dr Dun’s charity set up - RUN DIPG funding vital research into the disease.

The whole thing’s a very powerful movement and I encourage you and your organisation to get involved in any way you can. I think the below infographic sums our successful journey with Westpac nicely. Contact us to get involved next year!