This is a glorious occasion for Special Olympics. We have experienced many unforgettable moments, but tonight ranks as one of the most remarkable, enjoyable and significant occasions in the history of our world-wide movement.
It’s “remarkable” because never before has a Governmental Entity such as your Strathclyde Regional Council taken the initiative, and with energy, imagination, and competence, negotiated a contract to sponsor Special Olympics for an entire Region of the World!
Our negotiations with your officials have also been truly enjoyable, a pleasure to participate in. Your officials have been diligent, sensitive, and experienced. Very few regions of the world are served by public officials equal to yours. And this occasion is significant because your Special Olympics Games will reveal to the entire European Continent, from the Atlantic to the Urals, via television, a truly unique, unprecedented sports movement, the phenomenon we call “Special Olympics”.
It is no exaggeration for me to say what I have just said. “Special Olympics” are truly a phenomenon. They are truly “special” just as our name implies. In ways which inspire and reveal the very best in human nature, they have become one of the most encouraging and profound developments in the modern history of sports!
How is it possible for me to make such extravagant statements before an audience so knowledgeable as this one here tonight?
Please let me explain why...
Special Olympics are truly amateur. No money changes hands with the athletes above or beneath the table. No training or coaching fees are charged to the athletes. Not even an entrance fee is charged to the thousands of spectators who attend Games, -- 50,000 last year just for the Opening Ceremonies at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, U.S.A..
The coaches, the referees, the medical doctors, the policemen and policewomen, the starters and timers, the lawyers and accountants, the computer operators and the publicists all work for nothing. No sports organization has so many Volunteers --500,000-- including most of the coaches and trainers.
They give themselves just as the athletes do ... for the love of the Game and for one another. True amateurs in their hearts and actions. “The sun never sets” on Special Olympics. Just like the British Empire at its zenith, Special Olympics goes on night and day...every day... somewhere in the world! As we meet here in Glasgow, Special Olympics training and coaching are in progress. Rome was not built in a day. Neither is a Special Olympics athlete!
Special Olympics is drug-free!
Special Olympics is not nationalistic. We play no national anthems. We wave no flags. We permit no computation of medals won by specific countries.
Special Olympics is open to competitors of all ages. So we have Medal winners who are 60, 70, even 80 years of age. And we have winners who are able to compute only at the lowest level of human ability in what we describe as “Developmental Sports”.
Our competitors in International Games can participate only once in such events. They must make way so that other athletes can enjoy the experience of such competition.
And our athletes always compete in groups arranged so that persons of comparable ability play against others of the same, or approximately, the same ability.
We demand the best from everyone. We emphasize that competition brings out the best. But we’re not interested in Victory at any cost. Why? because we’re interested in enhancing the ability of everyone, increasing their self-esteem and self-confidence, improving them physically, psychologically, and spiritually.
We do not believe that sports are an end in themselves. We do not permit sports to dominate us or our Olympians. We use sports to help people develop, not to break their spirits. We use sports to help us all, not as an end in themselves.
Special Olympics involves the parents and siblings of all our athletes. They help to coach and train the athletes. They provide transportation. They sit on Boards of Directors. They raise money. 10,000 parents and siblings attended our last International Games. They were housed, fed, and transported, free-of-charge, by volunteer hosts and families. They wore T-shirts proudly announcing that they were the parents of a Special Olympian. They sat in specially reserved seats.
No wonder that this very year, 1988, “Special Olympics” was formally recognized, even adopted, so to speak, by The International Olympic Committee. We are the only sports organization authorized by the I.O.C. to use the word “Olympics” in our title!
No wonder that industrialists, businessmen, and labor leaders support Special Olympics. Proctor & Gamble dramatizes their support for Special Olympics in their direct mail and shopping-center, sales programs. They have paid $1,500,000 per annum, for eight years in succession, to use our logo and name in their advertising. IBM, AT&T, Minneapolis Honeywell, Pan-Am Airways, VISA credit cards, and many more corporations like Nike Shoe Company, pay us to use our name to sell their products and services, because Special Olympics is good business for them. United Technologies, the huge industrial corporation, embraced Special Olympics in part because 3,000 of their employees were working for Special Olympics as volunteers in the State of Connecticut alone. They know Special Olympics was good for their own employee relations, their community, and for their reputation with the public.
Why do I bother this audience with all this information about the nature of “Special Olympics”.
I do so first so that you will know us for what we truly are... an organization for persons of all abilities, aiming to improve life in all its aspects for all persons with mental retardation. That’s why we send coaches and other experts to improve Special Olympics in all countries...to Communist China, to Castro’s Cuba, to Israel and to Muslim countries, to Poland and Korea, to Japan and the Seychelles Island, to Northern as well as Southern Ireland. We rejoice in victories by persons with mental retardation, no matter what their age, sex, tribal, political, or national background. 250,000,000 persons with Mental Retardation are alive tonight all over the world. They need us. They need you! European Special Olympics Games here in Glasgow will light a candle of hope for all those 250,000,000 persons. For they know that what you do here, they will be able to do some day in their own towns and cities. They know that we and you recognize the God-given beauty inside every human being. They know that you and we will not allow the physical or mental disabilities of a person’s body deter us from helping and acclaiming the beauty within that body, the glory they possess, because they, just as much as we, were crated in God’s Image and Likeness, and are called to live with Him forever.
