Special Olympics Round 2

Mara finished last in her qualifying heat but went on to win her division in snowshoe. A lot of the teams from third world nations didn't have enough equipment. Other teams were more than happy to lend a hand and let them borrow shoeshoes.



At the end of the day the snowshoe team pulled in quite the haul of metals. The medals themselves were well crafted and kind of heavy. Each division only had at most 8 people in it so most of the athletes took home some kind of hardware. They were joking they would have to hide them from customs and security on the trip home.


Some of the teams at the games had never seen snow before. This is the snowshoe team from El Salvador. They would train on the beach in the sand and had to rent snowshoes when they got to McCall.


Ah...the many colors of coats at the games. Green coats were the people in charge, yellow was security and blue for the 4500 other volunteers. With the coat on I could basically get in anywhere.


Despite not having any Italians in the figure skating, I think it might have been the most inspiring event I got to see. These athletes come out and get on the ice and do stuff most of us would put ourselves in the hospital trying to pull off. Twists, jumps, spins and twirls. I was floored at the grace and ability of these participants. This is a bad picture of the Russian who took gold in one of the higher levels of men's figure skating. His performance was spectacular and had the whole of the Qwest arena on it's feet at the end.


Michelle Kuan and Scott Hamilton gave out medals at the figure skating. The gold winner of this division bent over and picked Michelle up in a huge bear hug.


Dick Cheney came on Thursday to the figure skating. I'm not a huge fan of the guy but it was cool to see someone that famous up close.


This is me and Alessandro, the head of delegation. We had just been interviewed by the Channel 7 News. Alessandro made being a delegation assistant a lot of fun. He worked well with the families we stayed with, the athletes, the coaches and me. He made friends everywhere he went and across any language barrier.


One of the coolest parts of the Special Olympics is called Healthy Athletes. They run each of the athletes thought a series of health screens. This is Luca at Healthy Feet.


This is Giulia at the Healthy Eyes stop. For the athletes who needed glasses they would get to pick out a frame style and they would grind the lenses right there to send home with them. They also had sun glasses for those with perfect vision. They had athletes in who were getting glasses for the first time in their life who had gone for years with nearsightedness. Even in our team we found a few who had outdated prescriptions.


Last day of competition, most of the team had left at 4:00am that morning. I got to take Nat and Ellie up on the hill to participate.


This is our small group at the closing ceremonies. The ceremony was mostly the athletes walking around trying to trade jackets and shirts and pins and everything else and a lot of dancing. The volunteers had a big party afterwords with some really good eclairs, I had picked up a sinus infection at that point and just wanted to go home.


Emilio fell asleep during the closing ceremonies. The music was loud and there were people all over the place bumping into the back of his chair and he slept through the whole thing.

We had the family and the ski team over for Sunday dinner. The family and the athletes communicated pretty well. The kids drew pictures for the athletes and Micheal ended up giving his hat to Nat's little sister Maddie (I think he had a crush on her). He used the "bacci" excuse to kiss her cheek a number of times.


I ended up trading the head coach for the ski team a coat he kept from the Nagano 2005 games. This was the right before we sent everybody home to the hotel.

All in all an experience that greatly changed my perceptions.

Thanks Italia and thanks to the Special Olympics.