We're Back: And We are Changing the World

We're back, baby. Back in a big way. Last year the world started turning again, away from the pandemic shadows and into the light and Special Olympics athletes were at the center of the action. We’re back!

With ESPN airing the celebration live around the planet, athletes from Special Olympics' seven global regions relayed the Flame of Hope into the arena.

At her turn, Sana Kapri, from Pakistan, a slender 21-year-old in a green track suit, did something unexpected. She seized the torch—and hit the gas, sprinting along the oval as if she were chasing something, maybe a dream, some quicksilver slippery thing that she was determined to catch before it disappeared.

With exuberance and a spirit of improvisation, and sheer joy, Sana ran. She ran as fast and as far as she could, surely giving some TV producers palpitations before finally yielding the flame. Soon it was delivered to the cauldron and our Games were ablaze.

Sana had traveled almost impossibly far to get to Berlin. She was one of three athletes featured in last year's award-winning documentary "As Far as They Can Run" by Tanaz Eshaghian—a film that made the short list for Best Documentary Short Film for the 2023 Academy Awards. The movie revealed the isolation and pain that people with intellectual disabilities endure when poor families are forced to make cruel choices between caring for a child and earning a living. It also showed the liberating power of loving attention and inclusion—the good that happens when young people who have been waiting for opportunity can finally seize it. Their determination ignites the spark that can change a life, a family, a village, a country and, in time, the world.

Let no one tell you the world can't change. It does. We saw it. Our athletes lived it. Those 7,000 who earned a place for themselves in Berlin gave that city an entirely new Olympic story. Their week of ferocious competition now stands in history beside the dark memory of 1936. For nearly nine decades, the words "Berlin Olympics" summoned an ideology of hatred, bigotry, exclusion and violence. Until June 2023. Now they also recall a joyous vision of what the world can and must become—when walls of division come tumbling down.

Berlin was almost too perfectly symbolic a city for our message of radical inclusion. We were there during the 60^th anniversary of U.S. President John F. Kennedy's 1963 speech deploring the Wall that once divided Berlin into zones of oppression and freedom.

That Wall fell long ago, along with the regime that built it. But our athletes knew there are walls that remain, walls we cannot see. Walls of hatred and contempt are standing all around us, in every city, village, country and continent, and in too many human hearts.

That is the wall-toppling work that Special Olympics has been strengthening and re-energizing around the world.

In Berlin we unveiled our Global Leadership Coalition for Inclusion, a world-leading partnership and policy platform that seeks to achieve Special Olympics' goals of inclusion in and through the schools.

The Coalition represents the next step in transforming years of exhortation and advocacy into practical and radical changes in the classroom, community and society. It unites distinguished leaders in sport, education and child welfare—officials from government and civil society who recognize the power of social inclusion in upholding the rights of marginalized youth and developing thriving societies. Many of them have partnered with Special Olympics to support our time-tested Unified Champion Schools.

The Coalition exists to tear down walls of indifference and neglect with positive attitudes and actions, including a challenge to governments worldwide to allocate at least 3 percent of their education budget to children with special needs, to match the percentage of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities ready and hungry to go to school.

The Coalition aims to create 150,000 “Unified Schools,” where students of all abilities play inclusive sports and reap the benefits of peer-to-peer mentoring. It seeks to bring 2 million young people with and without intellectual disabilities into Special Olympics programs at schools around the world. And it is working to scale Special Olympics inclusive education through sports programming to 180 nations.

These are admittedly ambitious goals, and you haven't heard the last of this from us. In our organization's 56^th year, we remain on a path that is steep and full of struggle. At the 2011 World Games in Athens, Greece, we explained it this way:

All of us who were lucky enough to have witnessed the 2023 World Games brought home a warm, glowing memory of that miracle in Berlin. But many of our athletes returned to lives of difficulty and loneliness. Daunting challenges are all around. We hesitate to declare COVID done and dusted, for the disease is still able to harm vulnerable populations, and ours is among the most vulnerable of all.

And our work against hatred and exclusion never ends and never gets easy. We have all been appalled by ongoing eruptions of violence and hatred, of resurgent anti-Semitism and anti-Muslim rage, of the toll of warfare, disease, hunger, and political and economic instability. Anguished humanity cries out for understanding and solace, whether in the Middle East, in Ukraine, in Africa and Latin America or within the United States.

To all these crises, our answer remains steadfast. We seek a revolution, but a peaceful, loving one. A revolution of human dignity.

Timothy Shriver, Chairman
Mary Davis, Chief Executive Officer