Special Olympics: Athletes off to the races

You’ve gotta build a bigger galaxy.

Yvette Degagne says this to the owner of Galaxy Lanes, where she and other Special Olympic athletes have been playing five and ten pin for over two decades. “More people are coming in every year,” she notes.
Expanding “the galaxy”—in more ways than one—is true to the original intentions of the Special Olympics. More than just a sports organization, it has also become a catalyst for social change. As the head of one international Special Olympics chapter said, “a primary goal was to change the public’s attitude toward people with disabilities” by emphasizing their potential and abilities.

In the early 1960s, at a time when children with disabilities were often barred from activities with other children, Eunice Kennedy Shriver of the famed Kennedy family started a day camp for her sister and others with disabilities.

Around the same time in Canada, York University’s Dr. Frank Hayden was conducting research that found children with disabilities to be only half as physically fit as other children. Hayden challenged the prevailing assumption that lack of physical fitness was a result of a child’s intellectual disability; he found, on the contrary, because of their disabilities, these children were being excluded from the physical fitness programs that would improve their social and emotional skills.

Unable to find funding in Canada for his initiatives, he approached The Kennedy Foundation in the United States. As a result of his collaboration with Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the first ever Special Olympics were held on July 20, 1968 in Soldier’s Field, Chicago. Canada sent a floor hockey team to compete in these inaugural games. One year later, Canada held its first Special Olympics in Toronto. Over 1400 athletes from almost 50 Canadian cities participated.

In the past 40 years, the Special Olympics has grown to include 180 countries and over 2 million athletes. In Thunder Bay, recreational support workers at the Lakehead Psychiatric Hospital started the first Special Olympics program—floor hockey—in December 1976.

Although the number of athletes involved in Thunder Bay’s Special Olympics has grown in number over the years, as Yvette has witnessed, reports estimate that still fewer than 25% of the people with an intellectual disability in Thunder Bay take part. Athletes who joined when the organization first formed are still competing, but fewer younger ones are getting involved. As a result, the average age of athletes in Thunder Bay is 34, whereas in the rest of the province, it is 25.

Yvette, however, who is now 46 years old, is proof that age does not detract from the experience. At the last summer games in Niagara Falls, she brought home a silver medal in running long jump and a bronze each in shot put and the 50-metre dash. Medals aside, Yvette embodies the true spirit of the Special Olympics. “Age doesn’t matter,” she says, “as long as we’re having fun. I’ll probably still be doing this when I’m 90 years old.” Given Yvette’s infectious enthusiasm and vitality, I can well imagine her on the podium in her “golden years” receiving a lifetime achievement award.

Athletes are categorized by gender, age and ability for the purposes of competition, so the more an already small number of athletes is subdivided, the fewer athletes there are in each division or sport, reducing competitive opportunities. The Northwestern Ontario region stretches east to Marathon, west to Kenora, and north to Red Lake. If there are only enough athletes to form one basketball team in a region, there is no standard competition at the regional level. Thunder Bay and Northern Ontario regions would benefit by having new recruits to offset the challenges that dispersed populations pose, particularly to team sports.

If the number of athletes is to grow, then the number of volunteers willing to assist in recruitment, coaching and travel must also increase. In the province as a whole, the Special Olympics is almost completely volunteer driven, and Northern Ontario faces unique challenges that its Southern Ontario counterparts do not, namely, funding for travel and volunteer attrition.

One group that has been particularly generous with time and money to the Special Olympics is the Thunder Bay Police Force which holds an annual Law Enforcement Torch Run. Funds raised at this event help pay for athletes’ travel costs to provincial or national games.

The three regions that comprise Northern Ontario have developed a strategic plan to address some of these challenges. Sean Bryan, a Lakehead University Masters student is the Special Olympics Coordinator for Region 8, of which Thunder Bay is a member. As part of NOPAT, the Northern Ontario Planning Task Force, he is investigating the tri-regional model that would see the three Northern Ontario regions (comprised of 31 communities) work together more closely on fundraising and organizing tri-regional competitions. “We’ve been working on a made-in-the-north solution to our challenges,” says Sean.

“For example, we’re trying to think creatively about team sports,” says Sean, “by introducing three-on-three basketball, allowing smaller groups the chance to field teams”. An idea like this may have originated in the one-on-one he used to play with his brother, Ian, back when Sean enjoyed the size advantage—that is, until Ian sprouted up to his current height of 6’5”.

Ian, too, has some novel ideas for the Special Olympics. As a fishing aficionado, he dreams aloud of organizing ice fishing derbies to raise funds for other sports like basketball. Ian has been competing in the Special Olympics for the past eight years and, in that time, has enjoyed some exciting competitions, such as a floor hockey game at the last provincials. Ian was a forward on the Thunder Bay B-division team that played the Ottawa Lightning. He recounts the final moments of the gold medal game, play-by-play, evoking enough excitement to rival any Stanley Cup game. “We had to beat lots of other teams to play in the finals. We were leading 2-0, and they tied it up in the third period. The game ended up going to—not just one—but six overtimes!” Although the Thunder Bay team did not score the winning goal, they made sure the Ottawa Lightening victory did not come easily.

Ian has been serving as the Athlete Ambassador from Region 8, and has worked with his counterparts across the province to plan the athlete program content for the first ever Healthy Athletes Expo, which is to be held in concert with this May’s spring provincial games in Durham. Leadership and public speaking are some of the skills these ambassadors will have the opportunity to develop, and to teach to their peers.

The raison d’etre for the Special Olympics extends far beyond mere competition. The travelling, in and of itself, to regional, provincial and national games allows athletes the opportunity to overcome personal obstacles, develop independence, and relish their accomplishments.

Depending upon the community and the individual athlete, motivation varies. Sean suggests that, on the whole, the Southern Ontario chapters are more competition-oriented. Southern Ontario communities have the benefit of drawing on a larger population and funding base, allowing them to accommodate both the highly competitive athletes and the more recreational ones. “It’s important, though,” says Sean, “to be sensitive to what drives participants in our own community.”

For many Thunder Bay athletes, the social component is almost as important as the sports. The banquets and dances that are part of regional games are truly a highlight for athletes who have developed friendships over many years with others from the region.

Rob Neff, who is a track and field coach and the organizer of the regional spring games being held here in Thunder Bay on April 26, says, “We want to promote the aspect of competition, but not too much. Athletes don’t tend to get too intense.”

The differing priorities for Special Olympic participants extends as far back as the first games in Chicago in 1968 when even the organizers were divided in their aims. Dr. Frank Hayden, the general director, described the pro-competitive sport model that he advocated: “I don’t want a track meet. I want a Games. A Games is multi-sport…and certainly not a field day which implies casual recreation.”

Other organizers, like Anne Burke, said, “We wanted parents, volunteers, educators and people from Chicago to understand, to touch, feel and be part of things with persons…whom they had never seen participate before.”

When planning the upcoming regional games, Rob Neff says that “the challenge is making it fun for everyone.” In his early years as a coordinator, he admits he tended to over-organize. He now laughs when he remembers one occasion in which he learned this first-hand: He had one heat of runners ready at the starting line for the 100-metre dash and had asked a volunteer to line up another group behind them for the second heat. When the starting pistol sounded, however, both groups darted down the track. The volunteer chased after the second group in vain to bring them back to the starting line. It wasn’t until they reached the finish line that he caught up, at which point he was assigned the slowest time and asked if he had lost his numbered bib along the way.

There’s nothing stopping Thunder Bay’s Special Olympics athletes now that they’ve left the starting block; we just have to try to keep up. As Timothy Shriver, Chairman of Special Olympics USA and son of founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver, writes, “Athletes are the force driving change for all of us, promoting their vision of a world without—a world of victory without conquest…and pride without prejudice.”

Cheer on the athletes at the regional spring games hosted in Thunder Bay on April 26: Bowling begins at 9:00 am at Galaxy Lanes, and swimming begins at 1:00 pm at Lakehead University Pool.