Close to Shipley's heart

KENT BLECHYNDEN/The Dominion Post

RIDING IN RED: Heart Foundation medical director Norman Sharpe with Dame Jenny Shipley.

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A sea of red swarming into Parliament Grounds may be the stuff of a former National Party's prime minister's nightmares but Dame Jenny Shipley welcomed it with an open heart.

For Dame Jenny, yesterday's invasion represented a cause close to her heart. The 30-odd sweaty, red-clad cyclists, including Heart Foundation medical director Norman Sharpe, had just finished the latest leg in a 2117-kilometre fundraising drive to establish a heart health research centre at Auckland University.

Dame Jenny suffered a heart attack in June 2000, shortly after she was defeated in the 1999 general election.

She now chairs the Cardiovascular Research Fund Project, which, through the Heart Foundation, aimed to raise a $5 million endowment fund for the research centre.

The ride had raised more than $1m. Total fundraising for the project was about $3m and Dame Jenny was confident the further $2m would be raised by the middle of this year.

Twenty-five cyclists, many of them cardiologists, began the ride from Cape Reinga to Bluff on Monday, averaging 113km a day.

Health Minister Tony Ryall rode the last hour of yesterday's stint, from Porirua to Wellington.

Though his personal experience of heart disease was not as immediate as Dame Jenny's, as health minister he knew it was crucial to address the statistic that showed heart disease was New Zealand's biggest killer.

Auckland cardiologist Malcolm Legget, who is doing the entire ride, says heart disease kills 40 per cent of New Zealanders – about 9000 each year. The establishment of a research centre will help establish why New Zealand has such a big problem, he says.

The cyclists were to continue to Nelson tomorrow and were expected to arrive in Bluff on February 13.

- © Fairfax NZ News