Small Steps, Great Strides

The grand dame of Special Olympics is 87 now, too frail and weak from a series of strokes 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 at 93. 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.

Tim, 49, doesn't specifically remember that weekend in Chicago when the Games began, but he vividly recalls summer mornings at Timberlawn, the family's home in Rockville, Md., when he'd look out of his bedroom window and see ponies and balloons and clowns and kids running and laughing on the huge expanse of lawn. That was Camp Shriver, which Eunice started in 1962 to give intellectually challenged boys and girls a place to have a good time. "My parents were more example people than adage people," says Tim. "We were told to do a lot of things—get off your rear end, don't watch television, don't be arrogant, don't waste your time—but the whole issue of being engaged in some kind of socially meaningful work came from seeing it and having fun with it. They were great at making important things fun."

By that time Eunice was already firmly committed to improving the lives of the intellectually challenged, in no small part because her older sister, Rosemary, had "a mild form of mental retardation," in the parlance of the day. She was lobotomized in 1941 and afterward spent most of her life in an institution in Wisconsin. (She died in 2005.)

Eunice was a good athlete (her favorite sports were swimming, sailing and, of course, touch football), and she was frustrated by the dearth of athletic opportunities afforded women in the 1930s and '40s. At the same time, she saw how much worse it was for the intellectually challenged in a society that rarely educated citizens with such conditions, much less thought about organizing them into athletic competitions. So Eunice did what Kennedys do: She made some noise and moved around the furniture.

"When I've talked to her about it, the word she comes to is anger," says Tim of the wellspring of his mother's activism. "She is really tough and ambitious and strong-willed, but she also has this vulnerable and empathic side. After watching the struggles of her sister and visiting institutions and seeing this enormous amount of human suffering, and at the same time coming from a place where women didn't have equal opportunity in sports, she just couldn't take it anymore."

Eunice began by using funds from the Kennedy Foundation (started by her father, Joseph, and mother, Rose) to create programs for the intellectually disabled. Then she instituted Camp Shriver and helped finance a dozen or so other such camps around the country. One day in 1967 she listened to a plan from the Chicago parks and recreation department to hold a track meet for the city's kids with intellectual disabilities—Anne Burke, then a teacher in the parks system, now an Illinois Supreme Court judge, was the moving force behind the idea—and turned on the Kennedy magic, providing $25,000 in funding and insisting that people from all over the country be involved. And with the Games in Chicago in '68, the movement was on.

Since then, its emphasis has changed but always with the goal of improving people's lives. In the beginning the Games were based on the model of the modern Olympiad. Allowed to compete was any person, regardless of age, who had a below-average intellectual functioning level (two years or more behind their peers) and significant limitations in the adaptive skill areas needed to live, work and play in the community.

Now the organization has become far more ambitious, using athletics to bring preventive medicine to the intellectually challenged throughout the world. "Up until 40 years ago most people with intellectual and developmental disabilities didn't live long enough to have adult specialized care," says Matt Holder, a Louisville-based dentist whose practice is devoted exclusively to treating such patients. "So many of them died young because we didn't take care of them." Obesity and periodontal disease, both of which can lead to fatal health problems, are rampant among people with intellectual disabilities, for example. They used to go relatively unchecked for any number of reasons: indifference, communication barriers, a lack of training in the medical community. "Studies show that 81 percent of medical students will graduate without having any training in caring for a person with an intellectual disability," says Holder, who is the executive director of the nonprofit American Academy of Developmental Medicine and Dentistry and the global medical adviser for Special Olympics. "And the 19 percent who did had an average of one hour."

Another medical reality: About 40% to 50% of those born with Down syndrome have a cardiac defect that, if not corrected, could lead to early death. Surgeries and other medical advances have increased the average life span of someone with Down syndrome from 19 to between 55 and 60 years old, Holder estimates.

"What Special Olympics is about now," says Tim Shriver, "is using an event to drive the development of sport, fitness and health programs nationwide. It's a basic change in the movement."