The Real Game-Changer at World Games

Almost 20 years ago, Special Olympics used athlete data as well as emerging research to identify a telling trend: Individuals who have intellectual disabilities also will tend to have poorer #healthcare. Through Healthy Athletes, Special Olympics works to bridge these gaps so athletes can not only perform their best, but be their best.

Just across the busy courtyard at Messe Graz, another world is entered. For the last week, everything has been about sports, competition, and Opening Ceremony. Today, we shift our focus to something completely different but just as integral to these Games: Health.

Over the course of the Special Olympics World Winter Games #Austria2017, over 2,600 athletes from 105 nations will have the opportunity to attend Healthy Athletes screenings. This means that athletes from all over the world, receiving all different levels of treatments & screenings, will have the chance to receive access to medical professionals & volunteers who are trained to treat them.

Healthy Athletes focuses on 7 disciplines: Fit Feet, Fun Fitness, Opening Eyes, Health Promotion, Healthy Hearing, Special Smiles, and the recently added Strong Minds.

Since its inception, over 1.7 MILLION athletes have been screened thanks to Healthy Athletes — And these Games are sure to add hundreds more athletes to this list.

On the first day of screenings, data collected illustrated that across all 7 disciplines, a total of 1,400 screenings took place across each of the 7 Healthy Athletes disciplines.

Why is this so important? They are not only life-saving, but they are life-changing. Through screenings at Healthy Athletes events, our athletes receive referrals to get the treatment that they desperately need.

If you tuned into Saturday night’s Opening Ceremony broadcast, no doubt you saw Special Olympics Southern California’s Dustin Plunkett right alongside ESPN anchors Kevin Neghandi & Lindsay Czarniak as well as Robin Roberts from Good Morning America. In 2004, a Healthy Athletes Special Smiles screening saved Dustin’s life. The doctor on-site wrote him a referral & a week later, a second dentist caught him in the early stages of gum cancer. Without this, it is no telling what could have happened to Dustin, who hadn’t seen a dentist in 10 years due to extremely poor treatment — something not unfamiliar to our athletes.

In addition to critical screenings, Healthy Athletes focuses on educating athletes to take better care of themselves through stations which teach topics ranging from hygienic hand washing to sun safety and tobacco prevention.

For the remaining days of World Games, a major focus will not only be competition but also making sure these athletes make it to their screenings.

For more information on Special Olympics health programming, made possible by the Golisano Foundation, please visit http://www.specialolympics.org/health.aspx.