Why won’t you let me play?
Is the Special Olympics discriminating against the kids it's supposed to help?
Lauren McKeon
Photography by Steve Payne
When my sister Carol first started soccer at age eight she more closely resembled a pylon than a player. When she did move, it was to sidestep away from the ball. Picture that scene in Braveheart where a blue-faced Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace leads the onslaught of sword-wielding, battle-crying Scots against the English. I imagine my sister saw something similar whenever the other team came toward her. It wasn’t that the kids wearing differentcoloured pinnies were particularly scary—most were anything but—that’s just the way Carol is: different. So were all the kids in her league.
I spent four years as assistant coach of Carol’s soccer team for Challenge League Sports—an organization for athletes with special needs in the Durham region of Ontario—and it was there I truly learned that different is not a dirty word. So did Carol. Among those other athletes, Carol found not only acceptance but friendship and a chance to simply be herself. None of her teammates cared that for that first year she was afraid to “get in the game.” They also didn’t care that some players used walkers or wheelchairs, that two or three always ran the wrong way, or that inevitably one player tried to spend the game picking dandelions or doing gymnastics. They were a team and they were having fun.
Not that things were idyllic. There were bullies and more skilled athletes who, at times, could dominate the game. And the other coaches and I did spend a lot of time encouraging players to run the right way, kick the ball and stop picking flowers: next to fun, learning the fundamentals of the game and developing those skills were key. But we didn’t keep score and what seemed to matter most was that those kids who spent so much time on the outside were finally on the inside.
Challenge League—which, like other grassroots sports groups, is affiliated with, but not fully integrated into, Special Olympics Canada (SOC)—has teams with different skill levels for each of its sports. So too does the better-known Special Olympics. But unlike Special Olympics, affiliates such as Challenge League give as much attention to the worst as to the best players. Carol, who is developmentally handicapped, will likely never be high-skill. (The “developmentally handicapped” label applies to a person whose developmental level is considerably out of synch with his or her age—but the extent and areas of the delay can vary from person to person.) For Carol it means that although she is 15, she learns and develops—emotionally, intellectually, socially—at a significantly slower rate. She is not dumb, but would have, years ago, been called “mentally retarded.” Since that first summer in 2000 she has become a good soccer player and has added basketball, baseball, bowling and hockey to her list of sports. But with the exception of bowling, she has never officially worn the Special Olympics crest. And there is a reason for that.
When most people think of the Special Olympics they picture cheery children with Down syndrome or autism, perhaps somewhat befuddled by the life around them. With marketing material full of inspiring images of young athletes waving victory Vs, hugging in camaraderie and “Winning at Life,” SOC promotes a specific image of its mission and its athletes. But like so many marketing campaigns, the pictures used to make the sell don’t tell the whole story. It is true that SOC is inspiring, enabling and, well, special, but it is not the organization so many visualize: one that is there for everybody. Contrary to popular perception, the reality is that SOC’s highest-ranked athletes—those who go on to provincials, nationals and worlds—are often adults. Perhaps more troubling, however, is that the hierarchy of competition tends to favour the more able athletes. These are the athletes who, while they may not appear as frequently in promotional materials, receive a disproportionate amount of the revenue the pitches generate.
The Special Olympics movement began gaining momentum in the early 1960s, when some people were beginning to wonder if society had wrongly sidelined those with intellectual disabilities. The most acclaimed of these early disability activists is Eunice Kennedy Shriver, whose siblings included John F., Robert and Rosemary Kennedy. In June 1962, she opened Camp Shriver in the park-sized backyard of her Rockville, Maryland, estate. Thirtyfive boys and girls attended, there to prove that sports wasn’t beyond them. Shriver’s sister, Rosemary, who had intellectual disabilities exacerbated by a lobotomy in her twenties, is believed to have been Shriver’s inspiration. By 1969, through her parents’ Kennedy Foundation, Shriver had established 32 camps across the country, attended that year by more than 10,000 children with intellectual disabilities.
At the same time, Toronto researcher and professor Frank Hayden was questioning the assumption that lower fitness levels among those with intellectual disabilities—half that of their non-disabled peers—were a direct result of their handicap. His work demonstrated that, given the opportunity, people with special needs could become physically fit and acquire the necessary skills to compete in sports. The low fitness levels, he concluded, were actually a result of study participants’ sedentary lifestyles—in turn a result of exclusion from the recreation readily available to other children.
Hayden’s work took him across the border to meet with Shriver, and when U.S. educator Anne Burke submitted a proposal to the Kennedy Foundation for a track-and-field-style Olympics competition for those with intellectual disabilities, Hayden was there to make sure Canada was represented. Shriver, not surprisingly, accepted the proposal and Hayden brought in an old pal, Harry “Red” Foster.
The broadcaster had, from early in life, spent much of his time and money working with those with intellectual disabilities. He accompanied a floor hockey team from Toronto to those first games in 1968, and was likely there when Shriver addressed the opening ceremony: “The Chicago Special Olympics prove a very fundamental fact, the fact that exceptional children— children with mental retardation—can be exceptional athletes, the fact that through sports they can realize their potential for growth.”
Foster returned to Canada inspired to lay the foundation for a movement in this country, and the first Special Olympics Canada event was held in Toronto the following summer. SOC would continue to grow throughout Foster’s life and long past his death in 1985. It was incorporated in 1974 as a national, charitable volunteer organization, to which by 1995 all provinces and territories belonged.
Today, Special Olympics is a worldwide organization, with approximately 2.5 million athletes in more than 180 countries. There are over 31,000 Special Olympics athletes in Canada alone—and many more with special needs who play for other leagues not part of Special Olympics. (The Special Olympics is often confused with the Paralympics, which is geared toward those with physical disabilities, and held in tandem with the Olympic Games.) The last Summer Games were held in 2007 in Shanghai; the next will be the Winter Games in Boise, Idaho, in 2009.
But the push for growth has come at a cost; it is a grassroots movement that has become so large it has adopted a necessary-for-growth system of cash-generation and bureaucracy. And while Special Olympics Canada may be expanding, it’s not taking all of its members along with it.
In February, having made the switch from coach to spectator (and now journalist), I travel with Challenge League’s basketball group for a tournament. The site for the 2008 Kingston Special Olympics Basketball Classic, the gym at Holy Cross Secondary School, is sliced into two half-courts. A lonely and resigned row of spectator chairs, one for each side, makes up the dividing line—nobody is here to watch except the most dedicated volunteers, the most proud parents. There are no encouraging signs, no giant foam fingers, no flashing cameras. Though there are higher-skilled athletes in attendance, most here, even those in the higher divisions, have never been to the provincial, national or world games.
Here, the competition is split into four divisions: adapt, D, low-C and high-C. In the adapt and D divisions there are players who may walk up the court or dribble the wrong direction or miss every time; in low- and high-C, players have the basic skills down, and, in the higher class, are perfecting those skills. Officially, there are technical requirements for each class but this event isn’t a qualifier and there are no representatives from Special Olympics here to make the call.
That may be why some teams are so mismatched. The 11:40 a.m. game in the low-C division pits Oshawa Challenge League against the Oakville Skywalkers. The Challenge League team is made up of mostly younger teenagers. Some have Down syndrome, some are otherwise developmentally delayed, some have behavioural issues. They are short, at least, comparatively. The Oakville team is made up of men, mostly in their mid- to late-twenties, who have muscles that ripple, men who have long hair tied back with bandanas, men with tattoos and baggy NBA-style shorts. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say most of them top six feet. As they enter the court there is an incredulous chorus from the Challenge League of: “We have to play them?”
The Special Olympics’ slogan may be “Winning at Life,” but today the Challenge League teens lose at basketball 11–62. There’s an oath, evoked at the world level, for Special Olympics: “Let me win, but if I cannot win let me be brave in the attempt.” For some, especially the Special Olympics movement at its grassroots, it truly is the brave attempt that matters most—not winning. But for others—like a team of frustrated young basketball players— even the chance at attempt proves cheap and elusive.
While there is an obvious contradiction inherent in introducing a competitive element to something many join for fun and good health—it’s hard to know who should advance when you don’t keep score—Special Olympics’ emphasis on winning means that only an elite few get the most out of the program. An institution that was founded on principles of inclusion has, ironically, come itself to exclude.
The competitive culture has become a strong part of SOC’s mandate. As Special Olympics Ontario CEO Glenn MacDonell says, “If you don’t have competition, you don’t have sport.”
The Special Olympics are organized as follows: world, national, provincial, regional, then individual communities within those regions, and clubs within each of those. To make it to the provincial level, an athlete first has to place high enough at a regional qualifier to advance. Triumphing at a regional earns an athlete an invitation to provincials, but victory at provincials does not necessarily mean an invitation to go to nationals. When it comes to teams especially, like floor hockey or baseball, the provincial chapter often has to choose which team will advance, because there are only so many available slots and, with more than one division, more than one team that will have placed first. “The selection of athletes to national games is a carefully controlled process with established parameters,” reads the SOC manual. “Chapters should remember that, as in other sport bodies, higher-level competitions are meant for athletes who have, through their performance, proven themselves capable.”
A similar process of selection occurs when those at the national level are chosen to proceed to the world games. Chapter offices are reminded that “It is important that athletes have demonstrated the ability to cope with the pressures involved in travelling, competing and being removed from their usual environment for up to a two-week period.” Arguably, this provision attempts to guarantee a smooth, safe and rewarding trip for all those involved—but it also tends to favour those placed in the higher-skilled divisions.
As in the big Olympics, many of the athletes who participate at higher levels attend more than one world games and participate in more than one sport, or more than one variation of it—say the 100- metre sprint and the 200-metre sprint. I know one athlete, who is in his late twenties, who returned from the recent Summer Games in Shanghai with three medals. He has been to the 1998, 2002 and 2006 National Summer Games, the 2003 and 2007 World Summer Games, as well as the 2008 National Winter Games. While he is clearly an exceptional and dedicated performer, he is not unique. Many talented athletes participating in SOC are recruited and nurtured once they show potential and a desire to compete at the grassroots level. They may not all have such impressive records, but most do have an ongoing presence at the higher competitive levels.
The Special Olympics doesn’t consistently reward lower-functioning athletes, but it does use them to promote the games to volunteers, would-be athletes and funders. A few years ago, one Special Olympics club member gave the Ontario office a picture of two young girls with Down syndrome gleefully smiling. It’s now plastered on banners, awards and other promotional material. She wonders how much reward those two girls, and others like them, are receiving from all that promotion. “People donate thinking it’s going to stay in the community, but once they write that cheque, it’s gone,” says Theresa Grabowski, co-founder of Challenge League Sports. “I think the intent of it all is good—and nothing runs perfect—but it’s not as evenly distributed as they’d like you to believe it is.” She adds, “But, I’ve got to say, on the other hand, if I were fundraising and marketing for these people, that’s the way to do it.”
It is true that a more equitable distribution of donations would go a long way toward mitigating the ill effects of the emphasis on competition and winning. Special Olympics Canada has its own operating budget, mainly devoted to the higher levels of competition and the athletes competing in those games. In 2006—the most recent return filed to the Canada Revenue Agency—its revenue was $4.8 million. About $1.3 million of that came from fundraising, both corporate and event based, just under $30,000 from tax-receipted gifts—donations—and about $950,000 from the Canadian government. There is about $2.1 million worth of revenue slotted under the “other” category.
Grabowski does wonder sometimes why those selling Special Olympics cannot receive a greater chunk of the benefits. She founded Challenge League Sports in 1994 with her husband because at the time her local region had no Special Olympics programs for her eight-year-old son. “When we took him to [Special Olympics] swimming they wouldn’t take him because he couldn’t swim two lengths of the pool. If you can’t swim two lengths you’re not ready for training, for competition. It was, ‘Go learn to swim, because we’re not teaching you how to swim,’” she recalls. But, she is careful to add, programs and policies can vary from club to club. “If you go to another town they might have the volunteers and the space and the time. They might teach you how to swim, or develop your swimming so that you can become competitive and swim in a race.”
At the time, though, her only choices were to enroll him in a generic club, which she tried to do with baseball—“The parents were not too understanding of why he thought he could go to bat twice, or why he didn’t want to stop at first base, or why he was sliding at home—all kinds of whys”—or start her own club, which she also did. In the beginning, it was just a group of people she knew getting together to play baseball, but after an ad in the local paper, Challenge League was officially formed. For the first five years, the organization wasn’t even affiliated with Special Olympics and made a go of it on its own, aligning itself with the community-level Oshawa Minor Baseball Association for support.
Grabowski knows as well as anyone how much cash is needed to make the Special Olympics world go round. For SOC, each athlete is expected to set a goal at the beginning of her training, which could range from just learning how to kick a soccer ball, to beating a personal-best time, to making it to the provincials. The greater the goal, the more the resources required to support it. Money is needed for everything from the van ride to a regional qualifier potentially hours away, to renting the space to host that qualifier, to paying for the winners’ medals. Plus, there are many other things that go into making an athlete’s experience complete, like yearend banquets and galas. Organizers, says Chris Ivey, a volunteer ski coach at the community level, always make sure there’s that social aspect after any meet or tournament. For some, he says, “it’s a bigger deal than actually skiing. That aspect of it is huge.” So’s the cost.
Fundraising can work on national, provincial and regional levels. Corporate sponsorship is largely national and provincial, with the majority of the money raised going to sponsor the official games and the athletes who attend them. Hellaina VanErp- Rothenburg, district developer for the Georgian Bay area, admits it is difficult to balance the needs of the few with the needs of the many: “A community may fundraise to send one athlete to a national games, where that amount of money may otherwise cover the budget for two sports addressing the participation needs of up to 30 athletes.”
For money to stay in the community, it has to be raised locally, usually through small-scale events like bake sales or golf tournaments, which means teams at the grassroots level can struggle to evenly distribute their funds. Having enough money to spread across all programs to put athletes on an even financial playing field would definitely be beneficial, VanErp-Rothenburg adds. Those at the Ontario provincial office, like MacDonell and Lynn Miller, Special Olympics Ontario’s head of marketing, acknowledge that much of the funding is gobbled up by competitive costs—a large focus of Special Olympics energies. They point to new grassroots initiatives, like school programs and community games, as areas where they’re seeking to improve fund distribution and opportunity. Even VanErp- Rothenburg doesn’t see the competition-based fundraising as a real point of criticism. “Everyone has the equal chance to go on to the games,” she says. “By encouraging one athlete, you’re still bringing a bit of a dream, or a bit of a goal, to the other athletes by being an ambassador for that town. It’s always been a good thing—but it is true it’s a lot of money.”
She also points out that putting a face on fundraising works both ways. Although it is often the whole club that will fundraise to send one or two athletes on to national games, it is hard sometimes to get individuals or small businesses in the community to donate, say, $500 for field or track time as opposed to something concrete like sending an athlete to the games.
While grassroots fundraising is hard work, on a national level SOC is a relatively easy sell. It’s a “feelgood charity,” says MacDonell, and as a result, it’s a natural place for corporations looking to be community- minded to invest. Special Olympics has partnerships with RBC, TSX and Air Miles—to name a few. Each sponsor brings its own level of support to SOC, which can include one-time large donations, an ongoing commitment or unique product-based benefits. For instance, RBC, a sponsor since 1968, has donated money, but also sponsors large fundraising galas and encourages its employees to volunteer and donate; TSX donated $100,000 for the recent National Winter Games in Quebec; and Air Miles allows corporate clients and cardholders to donate their miles to SOC to cover travel to games.
One of Special Olympics’ best-known partnerships is with Staples, with its decade-old Give a Dollar, Share a Dream campaign. The campaign is negotiated with Special Olympics Canada, but the fundraising falls to individual clubs and chapters, of which there are hundreds across Canada. Members are “invited” to spend an afternoon at Staples promoting Special Olympics and helping out at the store. They must take pictures to send to the national office to prove they’ve been there.
The campaign raised about $600,000 in 2007, says Miller. But each of the local clubs that participated received only $250. The rest of the funds were kept at the provincial and national levels to help send athletes to games.
Special Olympics does state that money raised through the Staples campaign will go to both national athletes and community groups, but donors have no idea just how much of their contributions will go toward things like paying the costs of sending an elite-level swimmer to Shanghai.
As SOC’s own strategic plan for the years 2006– 2010 notes, “Public support for people with intellectual disabilities is often based on charity rather than empowerment and inclusion.” So while SOC receives sizable chunks of money from companies like the TSX Group and Coca-Cola, the challenge is to get corporate support for less money-oriented drives. For instance, Glenn MacDonell is encouraging the trend of corporate volunteerism, which asks company employees to donate time to one-day events like Hometown Games.
Canada’s immense geography poses another significant obstacle to the success of local Special Olympics affiliates. Northern Ontario—or any area, really, that’s distant from its provincial office—faces a new set of challenges. For one, it lacks sponsorships and, as a result, funding for travel to compete in tournaments, says regional coordinator Sean Bryan. “We’re just so far apart that competition becomes a big problem. A lot of folks in the south may not realize and recognize that—they’re not used to distance and travel cost being a barrier,” he says. Also, he adds, it’s harder to solicit donations in an area that’s in an economic downturn. Plus, the dearth of teams means that even when money is scraped together for a trip, clubs are so spread out that getting to a meet could take a day, leaving few eager or able to make it.
Special Olympics Ontario is currently working on the Northern Ontario planning and action strategy with members from the provincial office and representatives from the north, to address the region’s unique challenges. Bryan believes it has merit, but the plan has been greeted with distrust by many in his area, who feel the provincial office has not done much for the north in the past and is unlikely to start now. However, he is optimistic, and believes in the power of Special Olympics to do good: “Northern Ontario is definitely on the cusp of a great new season. Tomorrow we will look back on the challenges of today as the catalyst that brought us into our own, revitalizing and strengthening our SO programming and family.”
Yet the north isn’t the only region facing challenges. I spoke to one representative from southwestern Ontario who was considering shutting down clubs in one community for lack of volunteers, and she was not alone. “It gets to the point,” she says, “where we have the 1:4, 1:5 ratio for safety purposes for the athletes and if we don’t have the volunteers to provide that ratio, we can’t really provide that program for them.” Things are so stretched, she adds, “I have some of my smaller communities where my community coordinator is actually the head coach for four sports, and they’re the treasurer and the secretary and they take all the athletes to ambassador programs.”
This is unfortunate, given what grassroots clubs do for their participants. “I don’t think we can underestimate the impact Special O has on athletes’ lives,” says Bryan. “It’s easy to forget that when you look at problems.” SOC has made a huge impact on the life and health of his brother, who was 200 pounds overweight before he started. For many athletes, Special Olympics, and sport, is like a lifestyle. Athletes don’t realize the challenges of what is going on behind the scenes, Bryan says—or at least they shouldn’t.
Chris Ivey, whose brother is also an athlete in Special Olympics, adds, “You can tell if athletes didn’t have this opportunity available to them, they’d get very little activity in their lives.” The rest of us, he says, take it for granted. “We find ways to get involved with sports and activities—it’s fairly easy to do—but when you’re a person with disabilities, you need help to participate in an activity. It’s great that an organization like Special Olympics exists and provides that opportunity.”
Indeed, many I spoke to were hesitant to criticize SOC because not only is it the biggest, most influential—and sometimes only—kid on the block, it’s the kid who does a lot of good. After all, Special Olympics is not just about sports, points out Jenn Klaus, an Ontario regional coordinator. Among many benefits, “Athletes can enhance their social skills in an environment where they’re not being judged. They can excel at things here that in the outside world they really can’t.”
At least, that’s the idea. Special Olympics positions itself on the principle that any person is good enough to compete. But for some, that chance may never come, whether for reasons of skill or, as in many far-flung areas of Canada, lack of opponents. Special Olympics is trying to fix this, but with varying degrees of both effort and results. That’s why it started Hometown Games and why it holds events like the Kingston Invitational, which, in theory, give the experience of competition to lower-skilled athletes.
“We need more competition, not less competition, for all of our athletes and we need it at a local level,” says MacDonell. “Hometown Games is a miniature one-day competition that is just like the big games.” It may not really be just like the “big games”—the salmon-and-industrial-green interior of Kingston’s Holy Cross can attest to that—but for some who may never even make it to regionals, it holds the best approximation.
It’s hard to judge whether a trip to Shanghai compares to the “whoop” feeling of scoring one’s first goal or winning one’s first round robin. And there is no reason why an elite athlete with special needs should want anything less than any other elite athlete: to make it to the very top and win. They deserve our respect and support, but so, too, do the athletes who may not win, or compete, or even have the desire to; those athletes who simply revel in play; and all those who wear the Special Olympics logo and present themselves as the face of the organization. They need the same level of opportunity to do better and to do more—regardless of their chance of winning a medal. As Bryan says, for many who are part of the grassroots movement—athletes, volunteers and relatives, “It’s not about the half of a fraction of athletes that are going to the World Games in Japan. It’s about the 99.9 percent of athletes who just need to build this kind of activity into their life.” And the uneven levels of opportunity for Special Olympics athletes seem to run counter to their own message: “Losing the game is not defeat. Never competing is.”
In 1999, my family took Carol to a figure-skating learn-to-skate session run by Special Olympics. Contrary to what the program description suggested, there were no coaches to assist during hour-long ice times—and it was either sit despondently watching Carol struggle or do the assisting. Luckily, we knew how to skate, but not every parent or sibling did. A fee was charged for the winter, presumably to cover ice costs. After one of those dismal sessions we met the Durham Dragons, who were practicing on an adjacent ice pad. The Dragons is a hockey club for players with special needs and is not associated with the Special Olympics. Carol has been playing with the team since 2000.
At first it was both agonizing and thrilling to watch her fulfill her dream of becoming a goalie. But her team and her coaches continued to encourage her no matter how many—and in the beginning it was definitely many—goals she let in. Last year, at the big tournament, in Arlington, Virginia, Carol had her shining moment. She stoned the opposing team’s star player, who’d already scored five goals, when he was sure he would make it six with a penalty shot. Two weeks later, at the year-end banquet, the head coach told the story of “the best save of the tournament.” Carol received a standing ovation from the entire league.
