The final editions of SO Australia's Aussie Stars newsletter, include the medal tally - for details of who won which medals in each sport, view Aussie Stars here and here:
At Special Olympics we don’t keep official medal tallies because the focus is on individual achievements of people with an intellectual disability, but hey we all like to know how many medals are heading home to Australia!Congratulations all round! Thanks to Special Olympics Australia for keeping us so well informed during the Games. Safe travel home.
Team Australia has been amazing both on and off the field throughout the Special Olympics World Summer Games in Los Angeles. So here is the ‘unofficial’ medal tally for Team Australia.
Team Australia 2015 will return home with:
Gold – 23; Silver – 19; Bronze – 18; Place Ribbons (4-8) – 22
The Games prompted some thoughtful media articles with wide distribution, like these:
Special Olympics and the Burden of Happiness
Lawrence Downes, New York Times, 31st July 2015
... The glow has to last, because the athletes will need it when they get home and become invisible again.
This is the conundrum of Special Olympics, an organization so good at making its athletes and the public happy, so bursting with good will and smiles, that nobody has to take it seriously. It has waged a nearly 50-year battle for inclusion and acceptance for people with intellectual disabilities, and people still think it’s a track meet.
It’s not that the organization has given up the broader struggle, which by many measures is failing. The Special Olympics chairman, Timothy Shriver, convened a round-table discussion at the World Games to try to get world and corporate leaders, the United Nations and other organizations to commit to greater support for people with intellectual disabilities, a group perennially left out of global development programs and priorities. They are not on the world’s agenda, however much their ever-smiling advocates keep trying to put them on ...
Paul Daugherty, sports writer and author of An Uncomplicated Life: A Father's Memoir of His Exceptional Daughter, had two pieces published on Special Olympics during the World Games:
Paul Daugherty, Los Angeles Times, 31st July 2015
I've never been crazy about the descriptive "special" as applied to people with disabilities. It's limiting and overly defining. It's everything I've never wanted for my 25-year-old daughter Jillian, born with Down syndrome. I don't want her to be special. I want her to be included. Besides, doesn't everyone believe his or her children are special?Special Olympics can open your eyes
The special in Special Olympics shouldn't be used to describe the disabilities of the competitors. That comes off as patronizing. It should apply to how they compete, though. They are special that way ...
Paul Daugherty, CentralJersey.com, 1st August 2015
... The Special Olympics are not only about athletes competing, though having witnessed Jillian in several local and state swim meets, I can tell you Special Olympians are as competitive as the rest of us. But more than that, the Special Olympics are about a realized ideal.
Watch these Olympians. See how they interact. The hope they share, the happiness they make, for themselves and each other. We ask our jocks to espouse fair play, to shake hands when they’re done. To show us the uplift that sports can provide. Special Olympians do that instinctively ...
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