Small Steps, Great Strides

Ireland rewrote its antidiscrimination statutes after the Special Olympics World Games were held in Dublin in 2003. China once routinely warehoused its intellectually challenged, but at the '07 World Games in Shanghai a crowd of 80,000 cheered as a video on the stadium scoreboard showed the country's president, Hu Jintao, cavorting with a group of Special Olympic athletes. Three decades ago Russia claimed that it had no citizens with intellectual disabilities--it sent a team of 190 to Shanghai.

In Egypt, Special Olympians practice snowshoeing (a Winter Games event) on sand in front of the Pyramids, and in embattled Iraq and Afghanistan, people who were once locked in dark rooms now kick soccer balls in the light of day. The Special Olympics movement is built upon hundreds of big moments and thousands of small ones. In St. Kitts, a young boy with intellectual challenges picks up a grapefruit, tosses it toward a stone, and now he's a bocce player. In Turkey a father watches his daughter run a race and, through tears, tells a Special Olympics official: "I never even thought of my daughter as my daughter before."

It was a daughter who started all this. Born into wealth and power, the middle child of nine in this country's version of a royal family, Eunice Kennedy Shriver chose to lobby for the powerless. Yes, she used her connections from time to time. When Iowa's Tom Harkin was a freshman Senator in 1984, he got a political favor from Massachusetts senator Ted Kennedy and, sure enough, was visited shortly thereafter by Eunice, who asked for his support for Special Olympics funding. But she never twisted arms or peddled her influence to build her own power base. She used it to help those who were invisible or perceived to be an embarrassment by the population at large.

The results of her efforts speak for themselves, but her son Tim, now the organization's chairman, puts it all in some perspective. "If you look at her brothers and sisters and all that they accomplished," he says, "no one will stand any higher than my mother."

The grand dame of Special Olympics is 88 now, too frail and weak from a stroke to sit for interviews or photos. Her husband, Sargent Shriver, himself once a tireless advocate for Special Olympics--"My father had the zeal of a convert once he got over the fact that his wife was a little wacky," says Tim--suffers from Alzheimer's Disease. But Eunice's spirit remains an essential part of the organization. It will forever be a Kennedy-Shriver movement, even when a Kennedy or a Shriver is not in a leadership position.