“You are the stars and the world is watching you. By your presence you send a message to every village, every city, every nation. A message of hope. A message of victory. The right to play on any playing field? You have earned it. The right to study in any school? You have earned it. The right to hold a job? You have earned it. The right to be anyone's neighbor? You have earned it.” -- Eunice Kennedy Shriver speech at the 1987 Special Olympics World Games, South Bend, Indiana.
Let Me Win. But If I Cannot Win, Let Me Be Brave in the Attempt. -- Special Olympics motto
July 20th, 1968: little did Eunice Kennedy Shriver realize the impact of the first Special Olympic Games at Solider Field in Chicago. She predicted that one million athletes would one day participate in these events. She could not foresee the number of athletes participating in these unprecedented events would be triple that amount.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver was the middle child of nine children born to Joseph and Rose Kennedy. Educated at Stanford University in California, Shriver earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology. May 23, 1953 she married Sargent Shriver.
Shriver’s Disabled Sister
Shriver's interest in helping those with disabilities came from personal experience. Her older sister, Rosemary, was classified as mildly mentally retarded, as it was called during the 40s. She was lobotomized and spent most of her life in an institution. She died in 2005.
Shriver herself was very athletic, engaging in swimming, sailing and touch football. She knew firsthand the limitations on women in sports as well as the lack of education and involvement society offered for people with limited abilities.
"When I've talked to her about it, the word she comes to is 'anger,'" says Shriver's son, Tim, now chairman of the Special Olympics organization. "She is really tough and ambitious and strong-willed, but she also has this vulnerable and empathic side. After watching the struggles of her sister and visiting institutions and seeing this enormous amount of human suffering, and at the same time coming from a place where women didn't have equal opportunity in sports, she just couldn't take it anymore."
Changing Perceptions of the Disabled
Shriver began her path to the Special Olympics at The Foundation, established in memory of Joseph P. Kennedy, Jr. killed in action in World War II. The Foundation's two objectives - 1) to seek prevention of intellectual disabilities by identifying its causes and 2) to improve the means by which society deals with citizens who have intellectual disabilities - also laid a firm foundation for Shriver's own vision to create a world where people with intellectual disabilities would be accepted.
Through the Kennedy Foundation, started by her parents, Shriver created programs for the intellectually disabled. Camp Shriver soon followed with a dozen or so camps throughout the country.
The Kennedy magic transformed a track meet for the intellectually disabled organized through the Chicago parks and recreation department. The brainchild of then-teacher Anne Burke (now an Illinois Supreme Court judge) appealed to Shriver. With $25,000 in funding, the movement to create the Special Olympics became reality.
The fundamental goal of Special Olympics is the improvement of people's lives. Any person with below-average intellectual functioning and significant limitations in adaptive skill areas needed to live, work and play in the community is allowed to participate, regardless of age. The Special Olympics transforms people with physical, intellectual or mental challenges into something completely different: athletes.
Special Olympics Impact Health Care
Over time, that essential goal has expanded to have a global effect. The athletes of Special Olympics now bring preventive medicine to the intellectually challenged throughout the world.
Shorter life spans meant the intellectually challenged didn't live long enough for adult or specialized care. The medical community wasn't trained to deal with issues specific to people with special care needs. Obesity and periodontal disease, both with possible fatal consequences, are predominant concerns for people with intellectual disabilities. Medical issues went unchecked for various reasons, communication barriers, lack of medical training and indifference being only a few.
Thanks to Special Olympics, the medical community has begun to take notice of those and other medical issues indigent to those with special needs. Those with Down Syndrome have possible life spans of 55 and 60 years as compared to an average of 19 years, thanks to medical advances and surgeries which treat a cardiac defect that up to 50% of those born with Down Syndrome have.
Eunice Kennedy Shriver’s Legacy
Today, over three million athletes from around the world participate in the Special Olympic games. These athletes compete in a variety of sports; everything from basketball, cycling, running, cross country skiing, figure skating and other sports.
China, which once hid its intellectually challenged away, hosted the 2007 World Games in Shanghai to a crowd of 80,000. Russia once claimed it had no intellectually challenged: it sent a team of 190 to Shanghai.
After the Special Olympics World Games where held in Dublin in 2003, Ireland rewrote its antidiscrimination statutes.
The Special Olympic games were the catalyst for the passage of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act in 1975 and the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
Shriver has a list of honors and awards too numerous to print. But all those honors and awards combined do not measure up to the impact she had on the improvement of millions of lives, attitudes, mindsets and laws.
Tim Shriver sums up his mother's legacy: "If you look at her brothers and sisters and all that they accomplished, no one will stand any higher than my mother."
Sources:
Eunice Kennedy Shriver website
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