Eunice Shriver and the Special Olympics Revolution

By Colman McCarthy

Of the dozens of times--perhaps hundreds going back 40 years--that I’ve been in the company of Eunice Kennedy Shriver I’ve always came away thinking, “I must become a better person.”

Most likely that same thought has been in the minds of all those tens of thousands who gathered from October 2 through 11 in Shanghai, China for the Special Olympic World Summer Games. Some 7,500 athletes with intellectual disabilities from 160 nations competed in 23 sports. The event could really have been called the Eunice Shriver World Games. For 40 years she has traveled the planet—every continent except Antarctica though maybe that’s next—doing the hard labor of rousing governments, schools, corporations, volunteers and families to include “the special people” in all parts of life.

She did that in her Massachusetts childhood, as the sister of the mentally disabled Rosemary Kennedy, and in the 1960s when she persuaded—browbeat, some say--her president brother John F. Kennedy to get on the legislative ball regarding the intellectually handicapped.

What began in 1968 as Eunice Shriver inviting a few children with Down Syndrome to play on her front lawn is now the world’s largest sports program, one involving several million athletes, coaches, volunteers, families and funders. A 1994 poll taken by the Chronicle of Philanthropy said that Special Olympics ranked first as the nation’s most credible nonprofit, well ahead of the Girl Scouts, the Salvation Army and the American Red Cross.

Eunice Shriver left for Shanghai in late September. I have to think that all kinds of observers told her not to go: you’re 87, you had a stroke in July when doctors said you would never speak again, you’ve been hospitalized twice in critical condition in recent years, you’ve grown old and now it’s time to grow up and rest.

Such cautions have been thrown at Eunice for decades: you can’t do much about retardation, it’s a genetic or pre-natal defect for which early intervention or education--much less winning medals in the 100-yrd. Dash--won’t help.

Baloney, she said. Or