Special Olympics Part 1

I speak pretty fluent Italian having served a LDS mission in Milano, earning a minor in Italian at BYU and watching Lilo & Stich voiced over in the sweet melodic language many times.  So I signed up to help out when the world came to Boise to participate in the 2009 World Winter Special Olympics.

The first day in town we were hosted by local families who took us for a tour of the BSU stadium.  Italians could care less about "Futbol Americano" but they had a ton of fun doing cartwheels and summer salts over the blue turf in the stadium.  Despite not knowing each other's language both the families and the athletes seemed to have an awesome time.

Before the opening ceremonies the host families dropped us off with our bags at the welcome center.  The National Guard were in charge of getting our bags to the proper place and here we are dropping off our valuables, money and equipment.  I was blown away by the number of athletes from all over the place.  This was my first glimpse of how big this moment really is.  You can see Greeks, Canadians, Japanese, Italians, a guy from Ecuador, Fins and the National Guard.  We lost a pair of skis and three bags all belonging to the Head of Delegation.

Here we are waiting to go into the opening ceremonies.  We stood around outside the Idaho Center for about 2 ½ hours with about 50 other countries.  The girl in the middle holding the snowflake is from a local high school and each delegation had one.  So fifty of these kids walk out with their country on a snowflake written in English and they are trying to find the country they belong to and don’t speak a lick of what ever is spoken in Slovakia or Morocco and the Italians are there in the front waving at them to come here.  We had our picture taken with 15 other snowflakes while we waited.  I think the funniest was probably a bunch of white Italians standing under the snowflake from Hong Kong.  It was interesting to see the High School kids faces light up when they saw someone waving at them and speaking a foreign language and then the despair when someone holding the “Gibraltar” realized these weren’t the Gibraltarians.

We weren’t allowed to wave flags so we waved fuzzy colored hands.  I had to be in the back because there is only one person taller than me on the entire team.

Not a great photo but the flame all lit up.  The opening ceremonies were boring for 2000 athletes who don’t speak English when the speakers were going.  But when the music started or there was cheering to be done it was hard to get them off their chairs.

Here we have Luca.  He does down hill skiing at the intermediate level.  We talked a lot about American cars, country music and pin trading.  The Italians all were super cool designer glasses and Luca was no exception.  He’s wearing Dolce & Gabana that tint when you get in the sun. 

After our first day of Alpine we found this kid playing guitar close to the Lodge.  The athletes all started dancing and wanted to sing along to “I am the Walrus” by the Beatles.

The Italians are very impressed by the discipline of our local law enforcement.  They also tried multiple times to trade Special Olympic pins for the troupers badges.   

Nicola got dehydrated and needed to recover at the medical center.  We gave him some Tylenol and made him drink Power Aid (he couldn’t stand the stuff).  Here we are relaxing in the examination chairs after ½ a liter of liquid.

Here we have Alessando waiting for the start of the 4X100M snowshoe relay.  We were in forth for the first three legs but our power house finisher Marco beat out the Chinese in the last leg to punch us up to third.

Here we have our group of snowshoers, our head of delegation and a couple of visitors from Italy.  We have 5K, 1600M, and 100M runners.  I was blown away by how fast these guys run.  Pino, the coach on the bottom row far left told me a couple of months ago they decided the coaches would race against the athletes and the coaches ended up last out of five teams.

We spent quite a bit of time hanging around waiting for events to start.  At the venue for snowshoeing they run 10 different distances with at least 3-4 heats per distance.  Fortunately for Gianna her heat and distance for the day was run early so she got to eat.  You can see from the number of lunches stacked up around her that we had quite a few that ran races in the afternoon and had to wait to eat.

Mara finished last in her divisioning heat.  They time each of the snowshoers and then rank them from fastest to slowest and then start running the medal races.  It was amazing to see the determination on the field even with 30 meters to go and every one finished Mara kept the pace she had been working on and finished around minute.

This is the floor hockey team from Panama, I saw them at the speed skating venue and wondered how in the world they practiced for speed skating.  I found out later they didn’t have any games that day and wanted to see some ice.

On Tuesday we took a little tour of a couple of the local venues that we don’t have athletes competing in.  This is speed skating, this is one of the Japanese competitors.  Some of the athletes had hockey skates.  The Russians had fantastic form

We stopped by the floor hockey area at Expo Idaho.  They had 7 or 8 courts going at a time.  They use a donut shaped rubber/foam puck and a stick to slide the puck around on the ground.  We caught the very last bit of the Germany vs. USA game.  Germany scored in the last minute to pull ahead and win 7 to 6.

Michael’s sponsor is a company called “Rent and Go”.  They sent him to the games with a hat.  Here I am teaching him how to wear it. 

After loosing his skis and being sick on Sunday Nicola was very excited to be on the hill participating.  He participates at the advanced level they do slalom, giant slalom and super-g.  These guys come flying down in about 45 seconds.  My math is rough but I think with the distance they cover the fastest athletes reach speeds of close to 30 mph.

Alessandra and her coach Micaela celebrate after taking gold in the intermediate super G.  It happened to be Alessandra’s 20^th birthday as well.

Michael and Nicola after the awards ceremony for the advanced super G.  Michael took silver.

Luca took gold in the intermediate super g (shaking hands with the Red Cross lady).  He was very pumped about taking first place.  Emiliano (#118 on the left) was cold and wanted to go back into the tent where they stage the athletes before the awards ceremony.