Competing in Olympics, Paralympics with ten percent of his vision

From the Seattle Times, MacLean’s magazine and elsewhere:

Canadian skier Brian McKeever is the first winter-sport athlete ever named to compete in both the Olympic and Paralympic teams. Like his father, McKeever has Stargardt’s disease, the most common form of inherited juvenile macular degeneration. An excerpt:

“There’s not a day goes by that I don’t wish that I saw better,” McKeever, 30, said, talking to a small group of reporters earlier this week. “And yet, it’s made me who I am. It’s a part of who I am and I like the person I am. If that’s the case, then this can’t be all bad. But I certainly wouldn’t wish it on anybody else.”

“… I looked at my dad, who has the same disease, and saw how it never stopped him. I realized it didn’t have to be a limiting factor and it’s best just to get on living life. To be honest with you, I don’t think this has taken much away from me.”

(Photo from Maclean’s)

From Tom Brokaw, NBC News, a feature about American athlete Kevin Pearce, who was considered one of the best snowboarders bound for the Olympics until he was gravely injured in a training run. He sustained a traumatic brain injury, and is now working to regain his speech, vision and physical coordination.

Brokaw says Pearce has a “special relationship” with his brother, David, who has Down syndrome, a “kindness and patience” that the family has drawn upon during its recent crisis. Pearce’s mother says the wisdom she gained from David helped prepare her to cope with Kevin’s accident and recovery.

” I had never realized before this happened that the great gift of David in our life has been to prepare me for this experience,” she said. “And I feel way better equipped to deal with this thanks to having had David in our life for 24 years.”

UPDATE: A Facebook page honoring Kevin Pearce has garnered almost 44,000 fans as of Wednesday morning. Notes Sports Illustrated:

The site has received notes of support from fans and fellow snowboarders, but also from many survivors of traumatic brain injuries who have described the productive lives they now lead.

There’s also a Facebook page created by fans of David Pearce.

(Photo from NBC News)

From AP/Business Week:

Special Olympics organizations around the country are cutting back on services and staffing as contributions and sponsorships decline. Special Olympics Inc. saw its year-end assets fall to $58.4 million in 2008, a 33 percent drop from $87.8 million in 2007. The Washington-based parent organization reportedly lost tens of millions of dollars when the stock market tanked in 2008.

Economizing measures by groups around the country range from the elimination of some mountain sports in Northern California to the suspension of statewide games in Oregon. Special Olympics Tennessee has stopped allowing new participants in some events, reduced the number of participants in others, and frozen salaries.

Sports Illustrated writer Selena Roberts nominates Eunice Kennedy Shriver for the magazine’s Sportsman of the Year award. An excerpt:

Without her relentless lobbying, it is very possible that those with mental challenges would still be hidden from view, institutionalized instead of embraced. Without her access to the halls of political power, those children who lived life being called “retards” by the misinformed and unfeeling wouldn’t have had a voice.

… There was no pretense to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the fifth of nine children of Joseph and Rose Kennedy. She had a vision unclouded by what others believed, by how society stereotyped the mentally disabled, by the conventional norm of sports. She was all effort in altering the view, a sporting woman sustained by the joy of winning against misperception — just like the athletes she championed.

(AP/SI photo)

From the BBC, [UK] Telegraph, [UK] Times:

Athletes with intellectual disabilities will be permitted to participate in the London 2012 Paralympic Games, following a vote by the International Paralympic Committee.

They had been banned since the year 2000, when journalist Carlos Ribagorda infiltrated Spain’s gold medal winning basketball team and learned that only two members of the victorious 12-man squad had intellectual disabilities. Ribagorda exposed poor methods for evaluating athletes, and reported that some of Spain’s players were engineers and university graduates.

IPC president Sir Philip Craven hailed Saturday’s decision as “the outcome of a unique and excellent cooperation between sports governance and the scientific community.”

From the New York Times and AP:

A new study published today in The Journal of Applied Physiology concludes that prosthetic legs worn by double amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius give him an unfair advantage over able-bodied runners.

Researchers said Pistorius’s blades allow him to turn over his strides more quickly and with more power than a runner with biological legs.

The debate over the runner’s prosthetic legs has been raging for several years. Pistorius was cleared to race in the Beijing Olympics after a lengthy dispute, but failed to make the necessary qualifying time.

From ABC News (with Person of the Week video by Charles Gibson):

Varsity cheerleaders at Pleasant Valley High School in Bettendorf, Iowa, expanded their team by inviting athletes with disabilities to join them.

The Sparkles Squad now practices and performs at games with the varsity girls. The squad is comprised of ten girls aged 8 to 15 with conditions ranging from autism to Down syndrome.

“The big thing is that when we started we thought we’d be teaching them cheers,” said [Sarah] Herr. “But we didn’t think they’d be teaching us. They’ve taught us so many things about life and it’s really amazing.”

… “I think that it’s really given them a feeling of belonging and acceptance. Usually when someone has a disability, society can only see what they can’t do, but through the sparkle effect, we’ve really exposed what they can do,” said [Sarah] Cronk.

(ABC News photo)

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