Long Time Coming - Eunice Kennedy Shriver's Legacy

[Are_grits_groceries]

On the 40th anniversary of the first Special Olympics, SI presents its first Sportsman of the Year Legacy Award to the movement's founder, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who has used athletics to change the world for people with intellectual disabilities

Special Olympics oath:

Let me win,
but if I cannot win,
let me be brave
in the attempt.

While skeptics shook their heads and most of the press ignored the unprecedented competition, Shriver boldly predicted that one million of the world's intellectually challenged would someday compete athletically. She was wrong. Today, three million Special Olympics athletes are training year-round in all 50 states and 181 countries. They run races, toss softballs, lift weights, ski moguls, volley tennis balls and pirouette on skates. There are World Winter Games, the next ones coming up in Boise, Idaho, in February, and World Summer Games, which will be staged next in Athens in 2011. Documentaries, Wide World of Sports presentations, after-school TV specials, feature films, cross-aisle congressional teamwork and relentlessly positive global word of mouth have educated the planet about Special Olympics and the capabilities of the sort of individuals who were once locked away in institutions. Schooling, medical treatment and athletic training have all changed for people with intellectual disabilities as a result of Shriver's vision; more important, so have attitudes and laws.
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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."
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http://vault.sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1149366/1/index.htm

It is a great article. She is a hero who has changed many lives!

[Captain Hilts]

1. She could have been EleanorRooseveltjr. but for our sexist society and her sexist family. nt