Address at the Special Olympics Law Enforcement Torch Run Seminar

"300,000,000 human beings are waiting for what we have to give. Let’s go forth from this gathering determined and inspired to extend Special Olympics to every human being who needs our help. They are waiting for us. Let us hurry to reach them with mercy, with compassion, and with the competence we have gained from experience, training, and hard work."
San Francisco, CA • September 19, 1987

Dave Atkins was great last night. He came all the way to the airport at ten-thirty p.m. to pick up Ted Beitchman and me. We were more than an 1 hour late, but he still had a smile on his face!

He’s been doing generous, kind things like that, free-of-charge, for Special Olympics for years and years.

Yesterday at the Sportswriters and Sports broadcasters lunch in Madison Square Garden in New York City, Bob Costas, the TV sports broadcaster performed as MC. Larry Brown, the famous Kansas basketball coach; Walt Frazier the New York Knicks Hall of Fame star; Ronald Perelman, the owner of Revlon, Juan Alberto Duarte, the Special Olympian from Paraguay; coaches and parents and families from Idaho, Wyoming, Washington, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and New Jersey; from Germany, from Zimbabwe, Monaco, Trinidad, our U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, General Vernon Walters; all were present giving hours from their busy schedules to celebrate the Special Olympics movement! Yet, they were and are only the tip of the iceberg.

You know we have a million participants in “Special Olympics”.


You know we have a half-million volunteers, families, and friends serving “Special Olympics”, free-of-charge, from China to Korea to Singapore from India and the Seychelles Islands, to Turkey, Yugoslavia, Jordan, Israel, Nigeria, to Europe; all of South and North America, New Zealand, Australia, Guam, and the tiny islands of the Pacific.

What a marvelous volunteer movement to participate in, to share in the joy of! To help create goodness, and peacefulness, and happiness for so many human beings is a rare privilege.

We are a lucky, fortunate few!

We’re lucky -- even financially! The stock market has lost half a trillion dollars in calendar ’87 while our Special Olympics Law Enforcement Torch Run alone has netted $684,000! In three years our Run has earned $1,300,000...a 61% net return on investment. Stockholders in IBM, GM, GE, or Exxon wish they had done as well, -- But, they have never had 30,000 law enforcement officers helping them!

Just as a footnote, I should add that these figures do not include the sponsorships of the Torch Run raised at the state level by all of our state organizations. These sponsorships totaled more than $300,000 -- all of which, as you know, remains 100% within each state where it is raised.

Overseas, the 1987 Torch Run raised $300,000 in just six countries. So, if this sum and the state sponsorship were added to our overall Torch Run figure, the final figure raised for Special Olympics world-wide would be $2,100,000!


That’s an amazing achievement! Kirk Miles, Chief LaMunyon, Chris Casey, and Frank Dean deserve wholesale thanks and applause for their work.

Historically, Special Olympics, in its entirety raised only $11,600,000 in calendar year 1983. In calendar year 1984 we raised $16.3 million; but in fiscal year ’86 we raised $27.2 million and in fiscal 1987 we will raise $38 million!! In other words we will have progressed from cash income of $11.6 million in calendar 1983 to $38 million in Fiscal Year 1987!!!

That’s a 330% cash increase in four years. More than 90% of that increase has remained right in the states where it has been raised! But none of these results would have been possible without national and international leadership! The public reputation of Special Olympics and our prestige are essential to the favorable response we obtain everywhere. Without endorsements from Presidents and Prime Ministers, and without guidance and help from leaders in medicine, law, business, and politics we could not he accomplishing these results.

The very name and title “Special Olympics” today enjoys a world-wide value given to it, created for it, by the unselfish, devoted efforts of numberless persons. We are all deeply in debt to those who have made “Special Olympics” what it is today. Without their intelligence, creativity, foresight, we wouldn’t have any name of any value to anyone. We stand erect and tall only on the shoulders of those who have gone before us!

In the early 1970’s the International Headquarters of Special Olympics supplied more than 90% of all the cash required for our movement. We were investing then in the idea and people and future of Special Olympics. Today the International Headquarters provides only 7% of the total income used within the Special Olympics movement. The financial foundation, the financial base, for our movement has grown at the local level where it should grow. Administrative costs as a percentage of income have declined with spectacular speed and success. We have a magnificent record of concentrating our money where persons with mental retardation are located, not in building a bureaucracy. About sixty persons, including everyone from bottom to top, are running Special Olympics world-wide! Just as one comparison...150 people are employed in the marketing and merchandising sections alone of the NBA, twice as many as in our entire headquarters!!!

Should we grow to capitalize on our great earning potential? Undoubtedly, yes. The Commissioner of the NBA, David Stern, told me just yesterday that he thinks we in Special Olympics have one of the greatest names and reputations in the world. To paraphrase his comments, he said, “You have created a gold mine”. You have concentrated your attention on people, not things; you have rallied volunteers to serve unselfishly because from top to bottom, yours is overwhelmingly a volunteer movement. Yet you transform the lives of millions. You replace hopelessness with optimism. You replace fear with courage. You make everyone feel better about themselves and the world. Everyone wants to be associated with an enterprise like yours...

What does all of this mean to us here today?

I think it means at least these few things : -

First it means we are lucky to be here, lucky to be working in and for a movement which brings such unalloyed joy to so many millions of people.

Second, it means that Special Olympics has only begun its work... 300,000,000 persons with mental retardation are waiting for us to reach them. Not even in the United States have we achieved our potential. Not one state has reached even one half of its citizens with mental retardation! We have an obligation, one might almost say, to bring Special Olympics to the millions as yet unserved. To do this we need to double our Volunteers and Family participants. “Special Olympics” has never relied primarily on paid employees. Essential though it is to have full-time, paid professionals, we have always realized that inspired and trained volunteers are necessary to keep our spirit alive and productive!

So, we must attract, and train, more and more teachers, coaches, parents, and friends so that as our Volunteers they can increase their abilities, their outreach, their effectiveness.

Third, in 1989 we shall have the largest Winter Games for handicapped persons in human history!

1,500 participants from thirty countries will come to Reno/Lake Tahoe...That’s 50% more participants than last time and 33% more countries! These Special Olympians will all be highly trained, but they will still represent all of Special Olympics...not just the cream of our participants. Old and young, poor and rich, all races, all creeds, all nationalities...There is truly nothing like these Games, or these athletes, in the world today.

Next year, of course, we shall have the 1988 Law Enforcement Torch Run...in all states...and in many more countries. Runners, sponsors, volunteers, public officials -- world-wide -will be enlisted, freely and generously, to help our “Special Olympians”. It’s our job to make every dollar they raise produce the maximum benefit to persons with mental retardation.

That’s what we’ve been doing for 19 years...at a cost-benefit ratio unequalled in philanthropic history. No athletic program has ever produced more bang for the buck than Special Olympics. No movement has captured world-wide support more quickly or with less argument, dissension, or distrust.

We have a precious heritage to maintain. We have an immense challenge still to meet.

300,000,000 human beings are waiting for what we have to give. Let’s go forth from this gathering determined and inspired to extend Special Olympics to every human being who needs our help. They are waiting for us. Let us hurry to reach them with mercy, with compassion, and with the competence we have gained from experience, training, and hard work. We’ve got lots to give...and the customers are waiting.

Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.
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Sargent Shriver
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