In a Washington Post profile of Tim Shriver, writer Manuel Roig-Franzia examines the Special Olympics chairman’s campaign to discourage language that makes fun at the expense of people with intellectual disabilities.

Shriver has received apologies from President Obama, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel and Bill O’Reilly (sort of) for “colloquial jabs about ‘retards’ or quips that equate Special Olympians with ineptitude or remarks that equate “retarded” with stupidity.”

To Shriver, the discussion is more than a mere linguistic fight, writes Roig-Franzia; it’s a welcome opportunity to have a public conversation about what Shriver terms the “humiliation” faced by this population.

The crusade has brought both admiration and derision for Shriver, who will soon be the only member of the Kennedy family serving in a high-profile position in Washington. An excerpt:

… Shriver — who wants to be a catalyst for social change — would like to further expand the mission [of Special Olympics], addressing unemployment (90 percent of people with intellectual disabilities do not work, he says, but half of Special Olympians have jobs) and taking on elite private schools in Washington, such as his alma mater, St. Albans, and Sidwell Friends because they don’t routinely admit students with intellectual disabilities, as many public schools do.

But there are only so many fights to pick at once. In Bethesda, Shriver helps organize “unified” sports contests that place young people with disabilities on the same teams as those who don’t. At the same time, he has sent his own kids to top private schools, such as Maret, that he says are not “inclusive” and guesses he “could be accused of being hypocritical. But this is a 100-front war.”

(Photo from the Washington Post; More photos here.)

Vancouver Sun columnist Miro Cernetig reacts to the decision by CTV not to broadcast the opening ceremonies of the Paralympic Games across Canada. The Canadian television network subsequently reversed itself and broadcast the ceremonies, but only in British Columbia.

Cernetig urges network executives to “rectify their unfortunate slight of the world’s Paralympians” by broadcasting the closing ceremony. Excerpts follow:

If the job is to shoot yourself in the foot, look hard-hearted and show you don’t quite get the true spirit of the Olympics, CTV’s bean-counters take the gold.

… We don’t put the Olympic cauldron on half-burn for Paralympians.

Nobody is pretending the Paralympics is a TV mega-event on the scale of the Olympics. There are no celebrity Paralympians raking in the millions or pro athletes dipping their toes into amateur sport to go for the gold.

But when it comes to stories of human tenacity, athleticism and sheer grit, most of us agree the Paralympians deserved — even for a half-hour of prime time — the national spotlight as they marched into BC Place.

Some video coverage of the Paralympic Games can be found at Paralympic Sport TV here.

(Reuters photo of the opening ceremony from the Vancouver Sun)

Writing in the Vancouver Sun, Jeff Lee says the 2010 Winter Paralympic Games, which kicked off this weekend in Vancouver, is “an event that organizers say should help change the way people view others who are missing limbs or eyesight or have bodies that don’t function the way theirs do.”

More than 60,000 people gathered Friday for the event’s opening ceremony, hailing 1,300 competitors and officials who came from 44 countries to compete in the Games.

“As a sport event, the Paralympic Games are about extraordinary athletes who are exceptionally talented at their chosen sport,” said Carla Qualtrough, president of the Canadian Paralympic Committee. “As a movement, the Paralympic movement is about changing perceptions, dispelling myths and challenging assumptions.”

Editorial: Keep your Olympic spirit alive with the Paralympic Games — Vancouver Sun.

Full coverage here

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)