What A Ride!
By Jill Cousins
Years before his son Nate was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, Andy Reiff was passionate about riding his bicycle for a good cause. Nearly 30 years ago, the Orlando attorney – at the urging of a friend – began raising funds as a participant in the National Multiple Sclerosis Society’s MS 150 Bike Tour and quickly became one of the annual event’s top fundraisers.
“Somebody asked me why I rode, and I said, ‘Why wait for something bad to happen to help other people?’” says Andy, now 64, who would ride between 50 and 100 miles in each event. “That was my philosophy.”
Then, in 2016, something bad did happen in the Reiff family. Andy’s son, then a 21-year-old student at the University of Florida, was hospitalized and then diagnosed with type-1 diabetes, a chronic condition that usually first appears in young children.
Andy and wife Karen got the news while driving to Gainesville with Nate’s younger sister Gabby to visit Nate and attend a UF gymnastics meet. They were on the road when Nate called and told them he was in the infirmary and the doctor wanted to send him to the hospital’s emergency room because his blood sugar level was dangerously high.
“So we never got to the gymnastics meet,” Karen says. “We went to the hospital, and that’s where he got diagnosed.”
Fortunately, Nate, now 28 and a public defender in Asheville, North Carolina, is successfully managing his diabetes, but when he was first diagnosed, his parents were eager to do all they could to help their son and learn more about his condition.
The Reiff family: Nate, Karen, Gabby, and Andy.
“I figured, ‘What can I do to help?’ I’m not a doctor, so I can’t help scientifically, but what I could do is raise money to help find a cure,” Andy says. “Then I found out about this ride.”
The ride was the Tour de Cure, an annual fundraising event to benefit the American Diabetes Association – with cyclists riding between 10 and 100 miles – that begins and ends at Lake Nona Town Center. When Andy first found out about the ride, in 2017, he had less than three weeks to fundraise before race day. Still, he managed to raise $11,970 – the event’s second-highest total that year – and also raised a lot of eyebrows.
“Everyone was wondering, ‘Who is this guy?’ because most of these people had been riding in the event for years,” Andy says with a grin. “And they were asking me how I did it. I told them I just asked. I find that people are very generous. You just have to ask.”
And that’s how it started. Since then, Andy has completed seven Tour de Cure events, including one in Colorado and a virtual race during the COVID-19 pandemic, and has raised tens of thousands of dollars each year. This past March, Andy set a Florida record for Tour de Cure fundraising with a total of $70,263 – almost double the amount raised by his nearest competitor. Andy has also won numerous prizes including twice winning a couple of Super Bowl tickets for raising the most money during a specific two-week period. Both times Andy generously gave away the tickets to his top contributors.
Karen has been Andy’s biggest supporter, forming Team Reiff and designing T-shirts for family members and helping to raise additional funds through her own email campaign. Several of Andy’s friends also show up for Andy’s rides either joining him on the road or cheering him on.
For Andy, the Tour de Cure has been the perfect merger of his two passions – riding his bicycle and raising money “to help society and help people less fortunate than I am,” he says. “My goal is to always ride and raise money for causes, as long as my legs keep going. But my biggest wish is that they find a cure for diabetes... and then I have to go find another cause to ride for!”
Over the past three decades, Andy Reiff has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for important causes by participating in fundraising bike rides.
Story was originally published in print in Summer 2023.