Special Olympics

Athletes with intellectual and developmental disabilities train and compete through Special Olympics when school leagues, recreation departments, and mainstream sports bodies leave them out.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Switch to an Alternative
• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences
• Builder-side Interventions → Provision Resources for Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Provide Support Channels

What it is

Special Olympics International runs athletic programs in more than 200 countries and territories, serving roughly 4.6 million athletes and Unified Sports partners across more than 30 sports and nearly 60,000 competitions a year.¹ Eunice Kennedy Shriver started Camp Shriver in her Maryland backyard in 1962, and in July 1968 she staged the first Special Olympics Games at Soldier Field in Chicago, where about 1,000 athletes from the United States and Canada competed publicly for the first time.² Shriver's work grew out of her family's private experience with her sister Rosemary Kennedy, whom their father Joseph Kennedy subjected to a lobotomy in 1941 at age 23, a procedure that left Rosemary with the mental capacity of a small child and produced decades of institutionalization that the family hid from the public until the 1960s and later.³

Special Olympics operates as a builder-side design intervention in a sports world that had already decided who counted as an athlete, and it functions as a switch to an alternative when school leagues and recreation departments push athletes with intellectual disabilities out of the ordinary path into teams and competitions. Its Unified Sports program pairs athletes with and without intellectual disabilities on the same teams, and its Unified Champion Schools program uses sports, youth leadership, and whole-school engagement to shape school climates where students with disabilities feel welcome.⁴ In the United States, the school program draws support from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Special Education, and Special Olympics reports that three million young people now participate in roughly 6,500 Unified Champion Schools.⁴⁵ Healthy Athletes extends the same logic into primary care. Organizers piloted the program at the 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games in New Haven, after finding that about 15 percent of athletes at that event needed emergency referral for untreated dental pain and other conditions, and the program has since provisioned trained volunteer clinicians, equipment, and screening venues to operate a pop-up support channel that has delivered more than 2 million free screenings in vision, hearing, dental, podiatry, and general health.⁶⁷ Special Olympics youth leaders also launched the Spread the Word campaign in 2009 during the World Winter Games, pushing schools, broadcasters, and peers to drop the word "retard" and its variants from everyday speech.⁸

Special Olympics bundles training, competition, school inclusion, health screening, and language campaigning into a public alternative that mainstream sports and health systems still do not supply for this population.

Why it matters

Public school systems, recreation leagues, and state institutions spent most of the twentieth century treating children and adults with intellectual disabilities as outside the ordinary civic body. Joseph Kennedy's decision in 1941 to authorize Walter Freeman's lobotomy on his daughter Rosemary reflected a medical and institutional consensus that parents of wealth and ordinary families alike handed their intellectually disabled children to asylums, training schools, and state hospitals, and that doctors treated those children as experimental material.³⁹ Philosopher Licia Carlson traces how nineteenth and twentieth-century institutions and the scientific category of "the feeble-minded" built each other, and how philosophy itself kept intellectual disability at the edge of moral consideration by invoking it mainly in thought experiments about personhood.⁹ Eunice Kennedy Shriver built Camp Shriver in 1962 and the 1968 Games as a public counter to that arrangement, and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975 only began to force public schools to admit the children those institutions had excluded.¹⁰ Special Olympics entered public life as a substitute for school and sports systems that had already decided who belonged on the field and who stayed outside it, and later for health systems that had made the same decision about clinics.

School and sports organizations keep reproducing that exclusion when they calibrate tryouts, coaching, transportation, and team culture to non-disabled bodies and communication styles. Unified Sports and Unified Champion Schools interrupt that pattern by putting athletes with and without intellectual disabilities on the same teams and in the same school climates, but the work still depends on local adults who choose to redesign the requirement-setting stage instead of asking disabled students to endure inaccessibility or travel to a separate program. Self-advocacy organizations built in the same decades that Special Olympics was scaling kept the sociological pressure on the separation itself. People First began in Salem, Oregon, in 1974, when residents of Fairview Hospital and Training Center and their allies returned from a 1973 convention in British Columbia and organized a meeting where, according to the movement's founding account, a participant said, "I'm tired of being called retarded. We are people first."¹¹ Self Advocates Becoming Empowered grew out of that network and now organizes self-advocates in every U.S. state around closing institutions, voting, and community inclusion.¹² Families still carry the cost of rides, equipment, scheduling, and caregiving when mainstream leagues refuse, which means the labor of inclusion still falls on the people who already carry the diagnosis rather than on the institutions that set the rules.⁵¹³

Trump administration officials kept the political economy visible in 2019, when Education Secretary Betsy DeVos defended a proposal to eliminate roughly $17.6 million in federal funding for Special Olympics education programs, and President Trump reversed the proposal after three days of bipartisan public pressure.¹⁴ Special Olympics said the money supported the school-based Unified Champion Schools work that mainstream school systems had not built into their own budgets.⁵¹⁴ The reversal preserved the program, but it also showed that inclusion in public education can still depend on discretionary appropriations, philanthropic donations, and political attention. School districts do not have to create Unified Champion Schools. Special Olympics has to keep proving that the work deserves funding. The economic arrangement concentrates the adaptation tax on disabled children and their families. Parents pay for transport to separate facilities. Coaches volunteer their time. Donors underwrite clinic days that a public health system should fund. Mainstream leagues capture the reputational benefit of an inclusive banner without carrying the staffing cost of inclusive practice.

People with intellectual disabilities and the movements they have built read Special Olympics in more than one way at once. Keith Storey, writing in the Journal of Disability Policy Studies in 2004, argued that the segregated structure of Special Olympics reinforces stigma, that the universal medal system functions as overprotection, and that communities should replace the program with inclusive recreation where athletes with and without intellectual disabilities share ordinary leagues.¹⁵ Molly Oswaks, reporting for Vice in 2016, quoted Carrie Wade writing in AutoStraddle that the Special Olympics works as a disability community builder "as long as able-bodied people don't use them as a feel-good-fest," and Ryan O'Connell telling her he "loathes the word special" because it "further marginalizes us from mainstream culture."¹⁶ Stella Young's 2014 framing of "inspiration porn" gave self-advocates and allies a shared name for the able-bodied gaze that frames disabled athletes as moral tonic for non-disabled viewers.¹⁷ Licia Carlson's philosophical work asks what kinds of institutional attention actually recognize people with intellectual disabilities as speakers and agents rather than as examples.⁹ Within that literature, Unified Sports and Spread the Word read as partial corrections pushed by disabled youth and their allies from inside the program, while the segregated competition structure still sits closer to the institutional history that People First and Self Advocates Becoming Empowered have organized against.^8111215

People with intellectual disabilities in the United States and internationally die on average 12 to 23 years sooner than the general population, and researchers in a 2016 England study and a 2024 Danish population study found that much of the gap comes from preventable and treatable conditions that routine clinical care should have caught.¹⁸¹⁹ The mechanism runs through embodied medical neglect. Clinicians report that they cannot communicate with patients who have intellectual disabilities. Medical schools do not teach the diagnostic pathways. Waiting rooms and examination protocols depend on literacy and verbal history that many patients cannot provide on standard clinical timelines. Dental pain, vision loss, untreated infection, cardiac conditions, and medication side effects accumulate in bodies that never reached a clinic that could read them. Healthy Athletes organizers discovered that pattern at the 1995 Yale Games when 15 percent of athletes needed emergency referral from a screening that took place next to the competition field, and STAT News reporter O. Rose Broderick noted in 2024 that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities faced COVID-19 mortality 2.6 times that of the general population, a gap that weak disability data in public health surveillance helped hide.⁶⁷ Healthy Athletes intercepts some of that differential risk at the pop-up clinic, but the broader abandonment of this population by primary care, dental care, and hospital systems produces the premature deaths the program tries to prevent.

Special Olympics can scale Unified Sports, Healthy Athletes, and youth language campaigns, but it cannot force state school systems, municipal recreation departments, professional sports leagues, medical schools, and public health agencies to absorb the inclusion work into the baseline. The frontier it changes shows up in the schoolyard, the dental chair, and the broadcast booth, where millions of athletes now appear as teammates, patients, and public speakers rather than as wards. The frontier it cannot change on its own sits in the institutions that still treat those athletes as a separate population to be served by a separate program. Self-advocacy organizations continue to push toward community inclusion, scholars continue to document the costs of segregation, and the movement's own youth leaders continue to push the program itself toward integration, all under a political structure in which federal support for even the current arrangement depends on the annual willingness of an education secretary to defend a line in the budget.^511121415

Real-world examples

In the news

Special Olympics kickstarted the push for better disability data (September 2024)
-- O. Rose Broderick, STAT News

• Broderick reports that the Healthy Athletes program started after organizers saw that about 15 percent of athletes at the 1995 Yale World Games needed emergency referral for untreated dental and vision conditions, and that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities died at 2.6 times the general COVID-19 rate while public health surveillance still lacked the disability data to track the gap.⁶ Healthy Athletes gives athletes a population-scale user workaround because it supplies screening, referral, and data capture where routine care still falls short.

In the news

Trump reverses course on Special Olympics funding cut after Betsy DeVos comes under fire (March 2019)
-- Adam Edelman, NBC News

• Edelman reports that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos defended eliminating federal Special Olympics funding across two congressional hearings before President Trump reversed the proposal on March 28, 2019.¹⁴ Special Olympics told reporters the money supported Unified Champion Schools, work that relies on education-system funding that local districts do not routinely budget, which shows how requirement-setting for school inclusion still depends on discretionary federal line items rather than baseline state obligations.

In the news

The Special Olympics Is Not Here to Be Your 'Inspiration Porn' (August 2016)
-- Molly Oswaks, Vice

• Oswaks reports on disability rights writers and athletes who describe Special Olympics as a community space they value and an able-bodied spectacle they resist.¹⁶ Carrie Wade calls the games valuable "as long as able-bodied people don't use them as a feel-good-fest," and Ryan O'Connell tells Oswaks he "loathes the word special" because it "further marginalizes us from mainstream culture," which tracks the broader protest that self-advocates have aimed at the separation itself.

In the news

The Kennedy Family Secret That Helped Inspire the Special Olympics (July 2018)
-- Erin Blakemore, History.com

• Blakemore reports that Joseph Kennedy arranged Rosemary Kennedy's lobotomy in 1941 with neurologist Walter Freeman, that the procedure left Rosemary unable to walk or speak in sentences, and that the family kept the lobotomy secret for decades.³ Eunice Kennedy Shriver's Camp Shriver and the 1968 Chicago Games emerged from the same family experience of institutional abandonment that the public medical system had normalized for intellectually disabled children of every class.

• Storey's 2004 Journal of Disability Policy Studies article, "The Case Against the Special Olympics," argues that the segregated classification of athletes, the universal medal structure, and the distance from ordinary recreation reproduce the stigma the program says it fights, and he outlines three paths: no change, reform, or replacement by inclusive community recreation.¹⁵

• People First began in Salem, Oregon, in 1974 after residents of Fairview Hospital and Training Center and their allies organized the first convention of self-advocates with developmental disabilities in the United States, and Self Advocates Becoming Empowered grew out of that network into a national organization working on institutional closure, voting, and community inclusion.¹¹¹²

• Researchers who studied Unified Sports found gains in social competence among non-disabled partners, while a 2022 transnational study found no statistically significant difference in community inclusion outcomes between Unified Sports athletes and athletes in traditional Special Olympics programs.¹³

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the design stage of inclusive athletic and health programming involves schools, recreation departments, sports governing bodies, and clinics that build participation and primary care structures around the full range of ability levels:

• "We redesigned the tryout process. Written assessments that screen out athletes with intellectual disabilities do not measure athletic ability. We changed to performance-based evaluation and opened spots on every team."
• "Our coaching staff completed disability-inclusive training before the season started. Not as a compliance exercise. As preparation for the athletes who are going to be in our program."
• "We scheduled Unified Sports in the same facilities, at the same times, with the same equipment as the mainstream program. Separate facilities signal that participation is conditional."
• "We built the health screening protocols into the pre-competition process. Athletes with intellectual disabilities have higher rates of undiagnosed conditions because primary care systems have not trained their clinicians to examine this population."
• "We revised the dental school curriculum so every graduate has supervised clinical hours with patients with intellectual disabilities. Screening tents close. A licensed dentist who knows how to treat this patient stays."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect at the design stage of athletic programs and clinical training produces infrastructure built around assumptions that exclude athletes with intellectual disabilities by default:

• "We have one team. You either make the cut or you do not. That is sports."
• "There is no capacity to modify our structure for every type of disability. We recommend they find a program designed for their population."
• "The Special Olympics program handles athletes like that. That is what it is for."
• "We cannot lower the bar for everyone just to include a few students. It would not be fair to the other athletes."
• "My dental school never covered patients with intellectual disabilities. If a parent wants a sedation visit, I refer them to the university hospital three hours away."
• "Our liability coverage does not extend to athletes with intellectual disabilities without a specialist supervisor on site. We cannot afford that."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor athletes with intellectual disabilities, their families, and their organized self-advocates undertake when mainstream athletic programming and primary care exclude them:

• "I drive him forty-five minutes each way every Saturday for Special Olympics practice because there is no program at his school that includes him. That is a three-hour round trip I make because no one built what he needs where we live."
• "She aged out of the school program at twenty-one and the adult Special Olympics chapter has a two-year waitlist. We have been managing on our own in the meantime."
• "I go to every game as his shadow. Without me there, the coach does not know how to communicate with him and the other kids do not know what to do. I do the inclusion work that the program does not do."
• "He qualified for the open recreation league on skill alone. They said they could not accommodate his support needs and pointed us to Special Olympics instead, so we switched."
• "My daughter's doctor has never seen a patient with Down syndrome before. I bring my own materials to every appointment and explain her history myself. The Healthy Athletes screening at the games last year found things her regular doctor missed."
• "We keep saying the same thing at every board meeting. People First. Nothing about us without us. Close the institutions. Put the money into community supports. We have been saying it since 1974."

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All observations occur within organized sports, school inclusion, and health programming for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the United States and at Special Olympics national and regional programs in more than 200 countries and territories.

Footnotes

1. Special Olympics, "Annual Report," https://www.specialolympics.org/about/reports/annual-report; "Unbeatable Together: Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023," https://www.specialolympics.org/about/reports/annual-reports/unbeatable-together-special-olympics-world-games-berlin-2023. ↩

2. Special Olympics, "History," https://www.specialolympics.org/about/history; Special Olympics, "1968 Games," https://www.specialolympics.org/about/history/1968-games. ↩

3. Erin Blakemore, "The Kennedy Family Secret That Helped Inspire the Special Olympics," History.com, July 20, 2018 (updated May 28, 2025), https://www.history.com/articles/kennedy-family-secret-inspired-special-olympics; John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, "Rosemary Kennedy," https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/rosemary-kennedy. ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Special Olympics, "Unified Champion Schools," https://www.specialolympics.org/unified-champion-schools; Special Olympics General Rules, article 3, https://resources.specialolympics.org/governance/special-olympics-general-rules/article-3. ↩ ↩²

5. Special Olympics, "Special Olympics responds to proposed funding cuts for education programs in the United States," https://www.specialolympics.org/stories/news/special-olympics-responds-to-proposed-funding-cuts-for-education-programs-in-the-united-states. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

6. O. Rose Broderick, "Special Olympics kickstarted the push for better disability data," STAT News, September 25, 2024, https://www.statnews.com/2024/09/25/special-olympics-healthy-athletes-disability-data/. ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. Special Olympics, "Inclusive Health," https://www.specialolympics.org/what-we-do/inclusive-health. ↩ ↩²

8. Special Olympics, "About Spread the Word," https://www.specialolympics.org/spread-the-word/about; Special Olympics, "Unified Talks: The History of Spread the Word," https://www.specialolympics.org/eunice-kennedy-shriver/eunice-kennedy-shrivers-lessons/unified-talks-the-history-of-spread-the-word. ↩ ↩²

9. Licia Carlson, The Faces of Intellectual Disability: Philosophical Reflections (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), https://iupress.org/9780253221575/the-faces-of-intellectual-disability/. ↩ ↩² ↩³

10. U.S. Department of Education, "A History of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act," https://sites.ed.gov/idea/IDEA-History. ↩

11. Washington State Developmental Disabilities Council, "1960s: The Roots of the People First Movement," https://www.ddc.wa.gov/ddc-history-and-visioning/1960s-the-roots-of-the-people-first-movement; Minnesota Governor's Council on Developmental Disabilities, "Parallels In Time: The Self-Advocacy Movement 1980," https://mn.gov/mnddc/parallels/7a.html. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

12. Self Advocates Becoming Empowered, "Nothing About Us Without Us," https://sabeusa.com/; The Arc, "Self Advocates Becoming Empowered (SABE)," https://thearc.org/resource/self-advocates-becoming-empowered-sabe/. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

13. National Association of Training Directors, "The community inclusion of athletes with intellectual disability: a transnational study of the impact of participating in Special Olympics" (2022), https://natad2.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Foundational_Health_The-community-inclusion-of-athletes-with-intellectual-disability-a-transnational-study-of-the-impact-of-participating-in-Special-Olympics_2022.pdf. ↩ ↩²

14. Adam Edelman, "Trump reverses course on Special Olympics funding cut after Betsy DeVos comes under fire," NBC News, March 28, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-reverses-course-special-olympics-funding-cut-after-betsy-devos-n988576; NPR, "Trump Reverses Education Secretary DeVos' Plans To Cut Funding For Special Olympics," March 29, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/03/29/708170932/trump-reverses-education-secretary-devos-plans-to-cut-funding-for-special-olympi. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

15. Keith Storey, "The Case Against the Special Olympics," Journal of Disability Policy Studies 15, no. 1 (2004): 35-42, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10442073040150010601. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

16. Molly Oswaks, "The Special Olympics Is Not Here to Be Your 'Inspiration Porn'," Vice, August 10, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/zmbbvx/the-special-olympics-is-not-here-to-be-your-inspiration-porn. ↩ ↩²

17. Stella Young, "I'm Not Your Inspiration, Thank You Very Much," TED, April 2014, https://www.ted.com/talks/stella_young_i_m_not_your_inspiration_thank_you_very_much. ↩

18. Fay J. Hosking, Iain M. Carey, Sunil M. Shah, Tess Harris, Stephen DeWilde, Carole Beighton, and Derek G. Cook, "Mortality Among Adults With Intellectual Disability in England: Comparisons With the General Population," American Journal of Public Health 106, no. 8 (2016), https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4940652/. ↩

19. Lau Caspar Thygesen, Marie Borring Klitgaard, Anne Sabers, Jakob Kjellberg, Jens Søndergaard, Jeppe Sørensen, Marie Sonne, Knud Juel, and Susan Ishøy Michelsen, "Potentially avoidable mortality among adults with intellectual disability," European Journal of Public Health 34, no. 6 (2024): 1225-1231, https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11631387/. ↩