|
Statement of Timothy P. Shriver, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Special Olympics, regarding the restrictions being placed on some World Games athletes:
It’s certainly a sad day for the Special Olympics Movement around the world, and I believe it is a sad day for the proud and beautiful country of Ireland.
In planning our first-ever Summer World Games outside of the United States, we were confident in choosing Ireland, a nation unmatched in its much-deserved reputation for hospitality and in its uniquely welcoming posture towards all people of goodwill coming to enjoy Ireland’s scenic beauty and to meet her wonderful, friendly people. It is therefore shocking to us now to be forced to acknowledge that we face the imminent prospect of the banning of some of our athletes from participation in the Games. Moreover, this ban — incredibly to us — appears to be directed not at the general populations coming from SARS-affected areas, but only toward our Special Olympics delegations coming from those areas.
What a tragic irony it would be if Special Olympics athletes — all people with mental disabilities — would suffer such an indignity as this, when it perennially has been, and is now, their common plight, wherever they may live, to deal daily with attitudes and policies of exclusion and rejection or, perhaps at best, an environment of only grudging acceptance. And how odd that such rejection and exclusion would now come at the hands of the Irish health authorities, all citizens of perhaps the most accepting people in the world.
SARS is a serious and perplexing malady, and we join all right-thinking people in advocating the most prudent measures to hinder its spread to new areas. It is for that reason that we have been watching with keen interest the statements and policies of the World Health Organization and of other internationally known authorities in the field of epidemiology and public health. We were happy when the World Health Organization published policies, procedures and standards for international travel that would make possible, with adequate safeguards and appropriate medical oversight, the travel to Ireland of all our athletes, who naturally have been both training to compete, and dreaming of a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Ireland to participate in the world’s largest sporting event this year.
When Irish authorities first began to advocate restrictions on travel from SARS-affected areas that went far beyond the recommendations of the WHO, we expressed puzzlement — especially when no logical justification for these restrictions was then, or is now, forthcoming. Later, when these surprisingly severe measures were re-affirmed, we became genuinely concerned, and we began to reach out to health authorities in Ireland and elsewhere to try to understand the logic of these measures and perhaps to broker a timely and fair resolution of this matter, one which would satisfy both Irish health concerns and the obvious need for Special Olympics athletes to travel. It seems that our efforts — and the efforts of countless others, in Ireland and elsewhere — to convince Irish health authorities that their proposed policies (practiced, so far as we know, by no other country) are excessively restrictive, may have failed.
It comes down to this simple proposition: when even one Special Olympics athlete can compete, when even one can know the unbounded joy of a great personal effort, we rejoice both in the specific event and in the life-changing example it sets for others; and when even one Special Olympics athlete is unfairly denied that experience, we grieve that the priceless opportunity to change that life was lost, as was the potential chance, through that one magical experience, to change the attitudes and lives of all those watching.
This July marks the 35th anniversary of Special Olympics, and in that time we have grown into a global movement of more than a million athletes, and almost as many coaches and volunteers who, together with family members of those with mental disabilities, comprise a small and rapidly growing army of people dedicated to the proposition that the more than 170 million people around the world with mental disabilities deserve a fair and equal chance to live and grow into their full potential.
This low point in our wonder-filled movement only makes us more determined than ever to pursue relentlessly our single-minded mission: changing one attitude and one life at a time to make the world a kinder, more accepting place for those whom we tend to overlook.
|
