Emily Chan
With the 2024 Olympic Games currently taking place in Paris, now is as good a time as any to dive into the history of the Special Olympics, an international program for people with intellectual disabilities to participate in sports training and athletic competition.
Last year, the Special Olympics World Games were held in Berlin, Germany. Over 7,000 athletes from 170 different countries took part in the games.
The Special Olympics began soon after John F. Kennedy became the president of the United States in 1961. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the president’s sister, started a summer day camp in the backyard of her Maryland home. The goal of the camp was to help children with intellectual disabilities explore their skills in sports.
As the camp grew, more and more people saw that the children were just like the other kids who wanted to have fun.
With the support of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, dozens of similar camps were created across the U.S. and Canada. Eventually, Shriver’s efforts earned her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Shriver was inspired to take action after seeing the way the world treated and excluded people with intellectual disabilities. Throughout the 1960s, she was committed to transforming the world’s views about differently-abled people.
Her movement gained national attention when the Kennedy family announced that one of their own family members, Rosemary Kennedy, had an intellectual disability.
Rosemary was President Kennedy’s eldest sister. She was developmentally different from her siblings and took longer to learn things.
Due to the lack of research and knowledge of disabilities at the time, Rosemary wasn’t properly cared for. She lived in a psychiatric institution for over 20 years. Rosemary’s story encouraged the Kennedys to advocate for individuals with intellectual disabilities.
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