"What a great moment for me, my son, the world. What you have made possible for so many people defies all reason." LOWELL WEICKER, JR.
Former United States Senator

World Games

Early on, Eunice recognized the need for a platform to reach the larger public and mobilize people of influence around the movement. Although Special Olympics was growing incrementally and steadily in local communities changing real lives through year-round training and competitions, she wanted to get the word out faster, change public opinion faster. Thus, was born World Games.

Two years after Chicago, Eunice convened the second International Special Olympics Games, again in Chicago but with twice as many participants and athletes from all 50 states, as well as France (besides Canada, the earliest international supporter of the movement) and Puerto Rico. Then it was Los Angeles in 1972, and then it was Central Michigan University in 1975 ... with a very important milestone: CBS broadcast the competition between 3,200 athletes from 10 countries on its weekend "Sports Spectacular."

By this time there was a growing lobby to include winter-style competition, an aspect that added layers of complexity to the Special Olympics operation. But in 1977, not even 10 years after Chicago, the first International Special Olympics Winter Games were held in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, with more than 500 athletes competing under the watchful eye of all three networks.

And so it went, the numbers of athletes and number of countries always increasing. New York, Louisiana, Vermont and Utah all hosted competitions that were becoming increasingly international. By the time that the University of Notre Dame hosted the seventh International Special Olympics Games in 1987 in South Bend, Indiana, there were about 4,700 athletes from 70 countries involved. Notre Dame represented rather a watershed moment in Special Olympics history, not least because such an iconic university served as host. But the number of competitors had expanded exponentially, too, and ABC featured competition on its prime-time schedule.

Nevada, California, Minnesota-on it went. And in 1993 came another inevitable result of Eunice's far-reaching ambition: The first competition held outside the United States. That was the fifth Special Olympics World Winter Games in Salzburg and Schladming, Austria which was attended by Dr. Thomas Klestil, the first Head of State to ever open a Special Olympics World Games.

Two years later, U.S. President Clinton continued this tradition at the ninth World Summer Games in Connecticut. It was at those Games, too, that an official marathon (26 miles, 385 yards) was contested-Troy Rutter of Pennsylvania won it in the entirely respectable mainstream time of 2:59.18. It wasn't until 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, remember, that women competed in an Olympic marathon because it had been widely believed that the distance was too grueling for the feminine physique. Similarly, the running of the marathon represented another barrier broken for Special Olympics.