Good evening. Thank you, Ben, for that tremendous introduction. For those of you who don’t know him, Ben Collins works in our headquarters and is a popular and efficient member of our team. He’s a gold medal athlete who was recently the subject of a lengthy article in the sports section of the Washington Post! He is also an orator, as you have seen and heard for yourselves. he is a marvelous, living testimonial to Special Olympics.
I also want to thank Loretta Claiborne for her inspiring and thoughtful remarks. No one surpasses Loretta in her down-to-earth eloquence, and in her devotion to Special Olympics. She was the first to run the marathon. The Ebon Gospel Temple Choir also deserves our thanks too for their exciting performance. Finally, I’d like to thank Edgar, Hal Connolly, and the staff at S.O.I. they created this opening session where the main speaker was certain to be eclipsed by the introductory words and songs. What a trap they have laid for me! I’ll get back at them, however at a future time.
At this opening event formally inaugurating the celebration of 25 years of Special Olympics, the big questions for me tonight were:
Should I just confine my opening talk to those very first games in Chicago in 1968? They were unforgettable, historic, unprecedented. Special Olympics would probably not exist today were it not for the success of those very first games, which were made possible by my wife’s vision and courage. No one else would have dared, unilaterally, to gamble her reputation and a lot of money on such an event. The wright brothers at Kitty Hawk never risked more than Eunice Shriver in Chicago!.
Should I tell about the five years preceding those games, the years when my wife conducted her experiments on “our farm” in Maryland determining for herself whether persons with mental handicap could swim, play softball, ride on a pony, climb trees, run a 100 yard race, take care of themselves physically, participate every day in a picnic lunch, exercise all day long, remember the rules and regulations for a race on the land or in a swimming pool. Without Eunice’s summer day-camp and hundreds more financed exclusively by her and the Kennedy Foundation, there would be no “Special Olympics” today.
Or should I talk about the future exclusively? Many of us already know about the past; none of us can be sure about the future!
Well, faced with those questions I have compromised!!! Like a politician, I’m going to give this marvelous audience at least a little bit of everything, and hope to finish with everyone wanting more.
As my theme I am taking the slogan invented for the conference -- “Together We Win” a theme which Marty Malone thinks is the best we have ever had. Here’s why she thinks so.
“Together We Win” — you’ve heard the phrase often the past several months. It’s been bandied about so much that the real meaning is probably rarely considered. But tonight, as we begin a five-day conference where the whole point is to “get together”, it’s important to give the term “together we win” serious attention. That’s what Marty Malone says.
The word “together” has meanings on many levels. We must be together as an organization. There is no S.O.I. separate from chapters, and training and parents and volunteers and donors. We are all S.O.I.; and we draw our greatest strength from being a house united! We bring the nations of the world together!! This program is bigger than you and me, bigger than the United States, bigger even than the western world. Our global reach enhances everyone’s interest in our program. We are together in our commitment to the athletes ... from the grass-roots to the headquarter office. That is evident to everyone we work with. It brings us sponsors, volunteers, and most importantly, more athletes.
Our best work is done together as one organization. I wouldn’t be surprised if ideas come out of this conference which are new and innovative now but which will become commonplace activities in the next few years.
If Massachusetts hadn’t worked with Connecticut and Colorado and the headquarters office, Unified Sports would still be a small innovation in Massachusetts. If S.O.I. hadn’t learned about “Athletes for Outreach” from Colorado, and invested time and money in regional training workshops, Ben Collins and Loretta would probably not be here tonight on stage with me. When we are together as an organization, we truly win, for together we spur each other on. We have the minds, the spirits, and the hearts to create great new programs and opportunities for athletes. We would never have our torch runs for Special Olympics without Chief LaMunyon and Kansas. Togetherness in Special Olympics means “community”. Whether it is Unified Sports, or in traditional Special Olympics activities, we show the world what it means to bring people with differences together!!!
Communities which have, to use a popular phrase, “mainstreamed” individuals with mental retardation, often have not achieved anywhere close to the level of togetherness that we achieve each day in pools and gyms and fields across the world. They may talk a good game, but when you look at the lives of people with mental retardation, particularly adults, you’ll see little of what could be called real “community.”
No one is reaching out to these individuals like Special Olympics.
Hal Connolly told me a story the other day. He asked Ben Collins what he would be doing on the weekends for fun if he didn’t have Special Olympics. Ben’s answer was eloquent, concise, and simultaneously troubling and uplifting for me. His answer was, “Zilch”. Zilch! That is what’s out there for most persons with mental retardation, because they aren’t “together” with their neighbors and colleagues. They are separate, but Special Olympics “brings them in, brings them together, with family and friends and coaches and sponsors. Special Olympics helps athletes, families, and volunteers, feel “together”.
You’ve heard the phrase, “He’s got his head together,” (of course young people would phrase it slightly differently.) That use of “together,” to steal a phrase from the author John McPhee, means a sense of where and who you are. McPhee wrote a book called “A Sense of Where You Are” about Senator Bill Bradley. He drew an analogy between Bradley’s tremendous physical abilities as an athlete and his mental and moral abilities. Bradley had highly refined proprioception, a sense of where he was physically in space, which made him a great athlete!!! He also had a sense of where he was morally and intellectually, which made him a great senator.
We are here to give our athletes a “sense of where they are”. They need to feel how their bodies and their minds work - they need to exercise both of them - to begin to feel “together” as humans and as members of the community. For so many centuries, persons with mental retardation have not had any sense of where they were, because in fact they were not anywhere!!! Locked up, abandoned, mistreated, or even cared for but ignored mentally, spiritually and physically, individuals with mental retardation needed profoundly what my wife started in 1968.
Now our athletes have a sense of where they are, and who they are, because they have goals and they have achievements and successes. Our athletes have a chance to gain what all of us need — self-awareness and self-acceptance that brings both inner peace and a desire to improve oneself. Those athletes at the 1993 World Winter Games in Austria — they knew who they were and what they wanted!! They didn’t need anyone to tell them. Yes, our athletes have it together, in a very real sense — and for many, Special Olympics made it happen for them. To anyone who still harbors the notion that winning a gold medal doesn’t matter to our athletes, let me correct that impression right now. But, regardless of what winning means to an athlete or a volunteer or a family member, it is best accomplished together. Special Olympics couldn’t happen without thousands of volunteers, individuals who do everything from spotting our powerlifters to crunching our numbers. because of volunteers, we all win!!!
Special Olympics also couldn’t happen without the tireless work of staff members at the local, area, chapter, national and international levels. Because of them we all win! Families who drive their athletes to practice, who encourage others to get involved, who can be seen in every video and every photo we have, cheering on their athletes — especially because of families, we win!!! And of course, the athlete who doesn’t give up, the athlete who gives his all in practice who wants that gold or who settles happily for participating -- his or her victory is our victory, too.
This week, over 1,000 staff, volunteers, athletes, and family members have gathered together, here in Florida. We have lots of larger gatherings at International Games, and even at many national program and at chapter level events. We even have some area games in the U.S. with assemblies larger than 1,000!!! But we don’t have lots of more important gatherings.
This week, we are here, we are together, to learn, to laugh, to celebrate, to work on our new effort to extend Special Olympics into mega-cities worldwide, to reach poor athletes and families who have never heard of Special Olympics; to keep up our “top-quality” sports programs, our fund-raising, our public relations so that Special Olympics will become a household word everywhere on Earth!!
So we are here - we are together - to rejuvenate our spirits and our energies, to redouble our efforts to serve! Together this week we will explore much of our history, and how we have come to be “The Miracle of Special Olympics.”
Together we will analyze our successes, and how we can replicate them, everywhere!!! Think for a moment of these facts:
- 21,500,000 people live in Mexico City alone. 600,000 of them are probably human beings with mental retardation. Lots of them should be in Special Olympics.
- 25,000,000 people (it is estimated) live in Shanghai. 750,000 of them probably should be in Special Olympics!!!
- 7,000,000 live in Sao Paulo, Brazil
- 3,000,000 in Cleveland, Ohio
- 5,500,000 in Los Angeles
- 7,500,000 in Moscow
- 3,000,000 in Vienna
and in none of those huge cities do we have even 1,000 Special Olympians!!
Three years ago we had only 600 in Miami-Dade county. Today we are close to 2,000 and growing. Eight years ago we had only a handful in greater New York City. Now we are approaching 8,000, the same in Philadelphia. All of these are the results of our new mega-cities program. Yes, we have reached thousands of new Special Olympians. but, can you believe there are 55,000,000 people in the Ukraine alone. That’s bigger than France! There are 80,000,000 in one province of China, Guandong, and we have only 5,000 athletes there.
