Sea-to-Sky ALS Rally a rousing success

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When Greg Smith of Vancouver was diagnosed with ALS in 2019, his son Aidan Bate-Smith wanted to help raise awareness of the often misunderstood disease and raise funds for support and research. That same year, as a self-confessed car nerd, Bate-Smith put the wheels in motion and organized the inaugural Sea-to-Sky ALS Rally. Every year since, with the exception of 2021 when COVID restrictions prevented the event from running, Bate-Smith’s planning has seen drivers of higher end vehicles enjoy a weekend of automobile-focused activity.

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On June 10 and 11, 2023 — during the fourth annual event — more than 50 automobiles took to select B.C. highways and helped Bate-Smith raise just over $40,000 for the ALS Society of B.C.’s Project Hope. To date, that brings total funds raised to just over $200,000.

“It was pretty perfect in my opinion,” Bate-Smith says of the 2023 Sea-to-Sky ALS Rally. “We broke the $200,000 barrier, and I think we’ve started something beautiful and there’s room to scale this up.”

Bate-Smith, a 25-year old marketing student and weekend bartender, says he came up with the concept of holding an automobile rally through his awareness of similar events, “such as the Gumball 3000 Rally and the Diamond Rally,” he explains. Both of those rallies see drivers of higher-end vehicles adding kilometres to the odometer to raise funds for various causes, including $350,000 from the Diamond Rally to Make-A-Wish Canada. “I looked at the exposure and the money those events were raising and thought I could do something similar with the focus on ALS,” Bate-Smith says.

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This year, on Day One of the rally, vehicles departed West Vancouver for the Castle Fun Park. From there, drivers headed to Hope, B.C., where three blocks were cordoned off for a mini car show. Then, the rally headed to Kamloops, B.C., and the Delta Hotel for an overnight stay. Day Two had drivers head to Lillooet Airport where there is a quarter-mile drag strip. Those interested in participating ran their vehicles against the clock before heading to Whistler and the conclusion of the rally.

“The quarter-mile event was a riot,” Bate-Smith says. “It was interesting to see how fast, or how slow, as the case may be, some of the cars are. My car (a BMW M3) is unbelievably slow, as it did 14.4 seconds and 104 km/h. Two of the fastest cars were a tuned Nissan R32GTR, and a tuned Volkswagen R32 Golf.”

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The quarter-mile strip was the highlight of the event and Bate-Smith says the majority of rally goers participated. He adds that some of local Lillooet racers brought out their drag race cars and ran “simply to see where they stacked up against some of our rally cars.” At each stop along the route, Bate-Smith says he witnessed crowds of more than 500 spectators.

“They’d stop to check out the cars and would often get involved in a conversation about what was going on and about ALS,” Bate-Smith explains. “How much awareness about ALS is actually being raised is a hard metric to measure, but our Instagram followers (@als_rally) almost doubled during the ’23 campaign.”

It’s going to just keep growing and I’m super excited for the future of the rally.”

Aidan Bate-Smith

While not contagious, ALS, or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) is, according to the ALS Society of BC’s website, “a disease that gradually paralyzes people because the brain is no longer able to communicate with the muscles of the body that we are typically able to move at will.” With no creditable treatments or a cure, unfortunately, someone diagnosed with ALS “will lose the ability to walk, talk, eat, swallow, and eventually breathe, and approximately 80 per cent of people with ALS die within two to five years of being diagnosed,” the site adds.

On a positive note, however, Bate-Smith concludes, “It’s a wonderful thing to see the cars and the participants involved in the Sea-to-Sky ALS Rally, and it’s going to just keep growing and I’m super excited for the future of the rally.”

For more information, or to simply donate to the cause, visit www.alsrally.com.

Greg Williams is a member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC). Have a column tip? Contact him at 403-287-1067 or [email protected]