OttawaSpecialOlympics.org
Title
Special Olympics Ontario / Ottawa District Community
Description
Special Olympics Ontario is a charitable, non-profit organisation which provides year-round sport training for persons with intellectual disabilities. It is an organisation based on an idea developed by Dr. Frank Hayden, a Canadian physical education professor from London, Ontario whose research showed that persons with intellectual disabilities can and should participate in physical exercise. Moreover, he believed that the benefits of such activity would be seen in all areas of the athletes' lives. And so, with the help of a local school that offered space in its gym, the first organised sport program (floor hockey) for intellectually disabled individuals became available in the fall of 1968.
But Dr. Hayden didn't stop there as he truly believed that all persons with intellectual disabilities had the right to not only community sport programs but also to high quality coaching and advancing levels of competition. With no firm support from the Canadian or Ontario governments, he took his case to Washington, D.C, to the home of Rose Kennedy, who herself had a disabled daughter. It was with her financial assistance and the powerful influence of the Kennedy family, that the first Special Olympics (as the movement came to be called) event, featuring athletes from only Canada and the United States, took place at Soldier's Field, Chicago, in 1969.
Back home in Canada, broadcaster and philanthropist, Harry "Red" Foster got the Special Olympics "bug" and started spreading the word about the benefits of sport training for persons with intellectual disabilities and it was his tireless efforts and persuasive recruitment of sponsors that led to the development of the Special Olympics Ontario organisation, mandated to recruit volunteers to run grass-roots sport training programs across the province. The organisation became incorporated in 1979.
