SHANGHAI, 30 September 2007
On the day of the Women’s World Cup Final and two days before the Special Olympics Summer Games in Shanghai, the Special Olympics and FIFA joined forces to launch their “Global Football” partnership. This ongoing program sees the Special Olympics focusing on a single sport for the first time.
Football was chosen because of its universality, said Timothy Shriver, Chairman of the Special Olympics. It gave athletes with mental disabilities the chance to “participate in a global movement – the chance to be seen for people who are usually invisible.” At this year’s Special Olympics Summer Games there will be a “unified” competition, where people with mental disabilities will play with people without in the same team. This way, Shriver says, “It is no longer simply about helping someone, we are actually team-mates; all on the same level.”
The partnership with FIFA’s “Football for Hope” made Joseph S. Blatter a “very proud President of FIFA” in giving his support to “this absolutely outstanding initiative of the Special Olympics”. Citing the instinctive nature of the sport of football (“the game is so easy”), he pledged the full support of all 208 FIFA member associations to promote and facilitate greater participation across the world.
The targets are ambitious: leading up to the World Cup in South Africa, the Special Olympics want to double the number of players, train 20,000 new football coaches and increase the proportion of women players to 30 per cent. Specific programs in Africa aim to increase the participation from 10 countries to 25. “We don’t say we can change the whole world, but for our athletes it is a huge change in their world” said Shriver.
As the icing on the cake of the launch, Adidas’s regional Managing Director, Wolfgang Bentheimer presented Mr. Shriver with a cheque representing all the profits from his company’s “Rainbow Program”. Launched in May 2007, this is a specially designed range of products aimed at raising money for the Special Olympics.
The Special Olympics Summer Games 2007 begin with the opening ceremony at the Shanghai Stadium on Tuesday 2 October, 2007.
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