Sports
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NEWARK, N.J. — In case you haven’t heard, there’s a major sporting event going on right now. But it is not the World Cup.
Olivia Marincov is a Unified Sports soccer partner representing Florida at the Special Olympics 2014 USA Games, and for her, there’s no doubt which event is more important. “There will never be another life experience that compares with being a part of Special Olympics,” she said. “I get to watch and be part of lives being changed.”
The games had their opening ceremony at the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, on Sunday. While the global sporting juggernaut of the World Cup seems to gather ever more attention and TV dollars in the U.S., the Special Olympics is still an event that requires an army of volunteers and goodwill to carry out a mission of competition and advocacy against a backdrop of limited media and public attention.
Not that goodwill is in short supply. Some 18,000 people were in attendance at the opening ceremony, as 3,500 participants and 1,000 coaches from every state paraded into the arena. Athletes with intellectual disabilities — many of them accompanied by Unified Sports partners without disabilities — were introduced as champions and paraded proudly into the arena, high-fiving each other, as facts about their home states were announced. The WWE’s Big Show and David Otunga delivered inspirational messages.
Though large in scale, it was a far cry from the fevered spectacle and heated controversies unfolding in Brazil. Yet the opening ceremony was ambitious in its own right. One of the logistical challenges: More than 100 planes — part of a Cessna sponsorship — delivered about 1,000 athletes at 10-minute intervals on Saturday to Trenton-Mercer Airport, where each small arriving group experienced a red carpet welcome. From there, the athletes and coaches were dispersed to university dormitories before the opening ceremony and five days of events.
Ten venues in New Jersey are hosting 16 sports this week. Many of them have two types of competition — one exclusively for athletes with intellectual disabilities and the other for Unified teams. The latter allows for a greater range of participation and encourages awareness by emphasizing what connects rather than differentiates.
The competition mirrors the broader struggle of the Special Olympics movement, whose origins go back to 1947. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of future President John F. Kennedy, was appointed as a trustee of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, which issues grants and advocates for research into intellectual disabilities. In 1958 she took over as director of the foundation, and by 1962 she was running a summer camp for young people at her home in a suburb of Washington, D.C.
A version of the Unified team principle was already in place, as local high school and college students helped run the camps, with the aim of a one-to-one counselor-to-camper ratio. The success of the camp encouraged Shriver to speak publicly about her sister Rose’s struggles with intellectual and developmental disabilities — the first time the Kennedy clan publicly confirmed her condition, which went a long way to address stigmas about the subject.
By 1965, Shriver was developing a nationwide fitness program for people with intellectual disabilities, and in 1968 the first Special Olympics Summer Games were held at Soldier Field in Chicago. The International Olympic Committee endorsed and recognized the Special Olympics in 1988. The last Special Olympics World Summer Games were held in Athens in 2011 and hosted 6,000 athletes from 170 countries. The Special Olympics World Games return to the U.S. for the first time in 16 years next year, when they will take place in Los Angeles.
Competitors, partners and administrators make clear that Special Olympic sports are treated differently from other athletic events. Even the comments on the live stream of the opening ceremony are relentlessly positive and encouraging, with people even networking on possible regional fundraising campaigns or recounting their relationship to the movement through family members.
It’s certainly hard to imagine a media-trained athlete replying as honestly as young Arizona competitor Jake Lipovitch did when asked what he enjoyed about the games. “Swimming, because I’m really good at it!” he exclaimed. “I like bowling and baseball, too, because it’s knocking pins down and smashing balls.”
For others, the games represent a chance to emulate or support family members. Omar Cruz, a softball player from Florida, said, “My two older brothers played college baseball and played catcher like me. Attending these games is the highlight of my life, being just like my brothers.”
The spirit of the games is focused on pride and validation, notions familiar to athletes around the world. On Monday morning as the soccer competition got underway in Hamilton Township, thousands of miles away in Brazil the U.S. soccer team was preparing for its opening World Cup game. It was doing so under an unprecedented amount of fan and media scrutiny. Yet many in New Jersey felt plenty satisfied playing in front of a relative handful of people.
Katie Bauer, competing for Washington state, said, “Special Olympics has opened the door to incredible relationships and opened my eyes to a community of incredible individuals. Unified soccer is a beautiful reminder of what athletics are truly about — friendship, joy and play.”
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