Heroism, Hugs and Laughter

By John Skow

It was hot, the hot kind of hot Indiana hot weather that sends the family dog scrooching under the pickup truck to enjoy the shade. But in South Bend, on the Notre Dame and St. Mary's College campuses, heroic athletes from 70 countries were running and jumping and laughing from the sheer joy of it all. No, these were not the Pan American Games, which were to start a few days later, downstate at Indianapolis. The competitors there, everyone knew, would run faster and jump higher. But not happier; world happiness records were being set here at the Seventh International Summer Special Olympics.

At the Notre Dame gym, lean, well-conditioned gymnasts are performing difficult maneuvers on the flying rings and the parallel bars. Obviously, they are athletes. No first-time observer of this Olympics for the mentally handicapped would wonder why they are competing. At the gym's other end, however, the scene takes the first-timer farther from the familiar, with a floor exercise called "rhythmic ribbons." One by one, young women, most of them shaped by the rough hand of Down's syndrome and all of limited physical ability, walk or run slowly over a patterned course, swirling a long ribbon tied to the end of a stick. Is that all there is to it? Yes. Except that Down's people tend to be short, and short-limbed, and sometimes awkward, the newcomer reflects, and the swirling ribbon is a marvelous way for such teenagers to be graceful, to dance. Any lack of comprehension is swept away as these seven athletes stand on the victory platform to receive their medals and roses. They are so happy, so gloriously pleased to be alive, that passersby watch in astonishment. The rarity they are seeing is momentary, only a flash, but it is beauty.

Out on the not-quite-melted running track, Alice Miller, 67, of South Bend, is hard at work under the hot sun. She is a lean, quick-smiling grandmother with cottony white hair, and what she does is hug. When an athlete here finishes an event, he or she gets a hug -- that's a rule, one that might be expanded to the wider world, and Alice is great at it, having practiced on four children and eleven grandchildren.

Some of the athletes are near collapse at the end of long races in the high- 90s heat, and medics cool the runners down with towels soaked in ice water. But Eric Tosada, a springy 18-year-old track man from Puerto Rico, doesn't even bother to sit down after clicking off 3,000 meters in 9 min. 38 sec., a new world record for Special Olympians. (The overall world record is 7 min. 32.01 sec.) He bounces around delightedly, and comes to prideful attention when his picture is taken. Another kind of athletic accomplishment is that of George Kelsey of New Jersey, who cannot push with his arms and so maneuvers his wheelchair by reversing it and shoving it along backward, with his left toe, through the 30-meter slalom course. His face is twisted with effort, but he too is laughing with joy as he finishes.

The courage of Juan Alberto Duarte of Paraguay is incandescent. He runs every step of his 300-meter heat with a crooked, skipping swing of his legs, and twice, on nothing but determination, manages to pass the runner ahead of him. But in the end he is last, the ninth of nine. Only eight medals and awards have been prepared. The officials do not know what to do. Eunice Kennedy Shriver does, however. She hotfoots it down from the stands, gives Duarte a second hug and decrees that he get a medal for extraordinary heroism. She is entitled to such expansiveness. She and her husband started a summer camp for the mentally handicapped in the backyard of their Maryland home in 1961, and this was the beginning of the Special Olympics. Eunice Shriver is said to despise public speaking, but her speech was a brief, clear moment in an overlong and somewhat celebrity-clogged opening ceremony. She spoke of the "courageous spirt and the generous heart," and then she told the 5,000 mentally handicapped athletes gathered in Notre Dame Stadium that they had earned the right to live like the rest of us, and with the rest of us.

There was a lot of courage and generosity going around. Almost everything in South Bend was done, and done well, by volunteers, among them some 1,200 members of a service group called Civitan. Community people back in Elizabeth City, N.C., held bass-fishing derbies and bowlathons and the like to help Beverly James compete. She is the tenth of twelve children -- "eight of whom have finished college," her mother Penny says with pride -- and her father Roscoe has Parkinson's disease. Beverly, 19, who functions at a second-grade level intellectually, is pleasant and mannerly, but she is shy. Townspeople collected enough money to send her mother and two women coaches along for support. Last Tuesday afternoon she hit her start on the button and ran a fast 8.7 50-meter dash, her personal best by 1.9 seconds, good enough for a bronze medal. Her head coach, Sandy Davis, was so choked up he couldn't talk straight.

"You get chill bumps and tears in your eyes," said Cindi McCollough, 31, a swimming coach for the Georgia team who had taken time off from work to make the trip. As she spoke, a slightly confused swimmer began to splash through a third lap of a two-lap, 50-meter freestyle race; a coach, fully clothed, dived in to bring him back. It was a funny moment, and everyone laughed. Good manners tell you, of course, that you do not laugh at a mentally handicapped person's blunder. But this, it was clear, was different. The laughter was friendly, and letting it spill out was just fine; we were all family.