The Special Olympics: ‘Revealing the champion in everyone’

The olympic experience happens every day for participants and organisers of Special Olympics events around the world. And it is happening increasingly in the context of higher education – in terms of offering sporting venues and opportunities, and supporting research and programming that can improve the lives of people with intellectual disabilities.

The Special Olympics (SO) College network – which transitions from Project UNIFY, an elementary-secondary to higher education initiative – has been especially successful over the past several years in enhancing the lives of students and others with intellectual disabilities, explains Project UNIFY director Andrea Cahn:

“It uses sport not only to build friendships but to help lead the social justice movement of SO.”

In particular, it has found success in a model that showcases three core components of activation: inclusive sports, youth leadership and opportunities for engagement across the entire educational infrastructure.

Developing life skills

Many of the participants in the network see their involvement as allowing them to develop unique skills for future life.

Matthew Zielinski of the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, characterises his experience this way: “I aspire to become a surgeon one day, and in order to do that I must be able to adapt to different situations. Different environments. Different people.”

Zielinski’s experience is not unique, explains Cahn. Indeed, the initiative has grown to include 33 campuses in the US alone and is estimated to involve 10,000 students.

But this is just the tip of the iceberg: there are 800,000 volunteers worldwide, of whom an estimated 20% are youth, including college students. As of January 2012, there were four million SO athletes worldwide.

Co-founder of the SO College programme Soeren Palumbo adds: “The college population has a huge potential for advocacy, for being a driving force to make our world a more accepting place and a better place for all people.”

Advocacy comes in a wide variety of forms, from adaptive to unified sporting opportunities, but also at a fundamental, curriculum level. Indeed, integration of the SO movement across the general higher education spectrum has meant that more courses are being offered in applied health sciences and education programmes than ever before.

Indeed, some universities like the University of Hawai’i at Manoa’s College of Education offer programmes from recreation to bachelor and doctoral degrees in special education-exceptionalities.

SO headquarters in Washington DC also provides grants to health professions students and programmes as well as working collaboratively with researchers and institutions worldwide.

SO research

This support has made possible case-study work like that of Patrick Devlieger of the University of Leuven who, in conjunction with the University of Illinois in Chicago, conducted local community development-oriented analyses of the SO movement in Namibia, Paraguay, Thailand and Uzbekistan.

Their research reaffirmed several key aspects of the SO movement, in particular that it “creates opportunities for people with intellectual disabilities and families to surpass the boundaries of their own expectations.

“Through this boundary-spanning phenomenon, SO extends the horizons for individual athletes, families, communities and nations.”

In the same way, a group of researchers from the University of Massachusetts in Boston recently conducted an impact study of SO initiatives in China.

Their groundbreaking findings confirmed the extent to which SO participation has enhanced all aspects of Chinese athletes’ lives off-field, from education to employment to community life.

Notably, and consistent with findings worldwide, it was found that the greatest benefit of athlete participation was seen in adaptive behaviour or social skills – even more than the impact on sport skill development.

Key to the SO experience, therefore, are the social aspects of sport.

Sporting events worldwide

“Most people are unaware that the organisation hosts more than 50,000 sporting events worldwide each year,” notes Mandy Murphy, SO senior manager of media and public awareness in Washington DC.

Many are aware, however, of the flagship SO World Games that take place every other year. In 2011, more than 7,000 athletes participated in 21 sports at the Athens World Games. Thirty-two events – including seven new winter sports – are scheduled for the 2013 games in Pyeyongchang, South Korea.

“The world games may be the pinnacle, but the local community events are almost more important because they happen every day,” explains Murphy.

The experience is empowering all round: “Our athletes feel that their SO experience is like that of any Olympic athlete and the college and university students also feel empowered by the experience,” describes Jennie Newbury, SO curriculum and education resource manager.

“In the end, we’re all about trying to overcome misconceptions,” she adds. And, they are succeeding.