Lawrence Casiraya
INQUIRER.net

MANILA, Philippines –More than 600 intellectually disabled athletes will gather in Lingayen, Pangasinan next month for the four-day national Special Olympics.

This year’s games serves as a prelude to the next World Special Olympics to be held in Athens, Greece.

Special Olympics Philippines (SOP), a non-profit organization that started in 1978, conducts these national games every two years.

In the most recent Special Olympics held in Shanghai, China in 2007 or a year before the Beijing Summer Olympics, a team of 40 athletes represented the country and won a total 52 medals, nine of them gold.

The team competed and won in gymnastics, athletics, powerlifting and bocce (an Italian variety of lawn bowling), among others.

The Special Olympics seeks to provide a venue for the intellectually disabled to excel through sports.

Special Olympics organizations exist in over 180 countries worldwide with programs serving nearly three million athletes.

Intellectual disability is described as a condition of impaired or incomplete mental development which originates during early childhood characterized by delayed development in several areas including learning.

There are now close to 10,000 intellectually disabled athletes registered under SOP, according to the group’s chairperson Dr. Maria Therese Macapagal. These include those with Down’s syndrome, cerebral palsy and autism.

“Many of them are mild cases that you won’t readily notice because there’s intervention already,” Macapagal said.

Nonetheless, SOP is hoping that through sports, the intellectually disabled can receive more favorable attention from the public. The group is mounting a campaign against using the “R” word – “retarded” or “retard” – to stereotype the intellectually disabled.

“It’s a lifelong condition that has to be remedied. It can be remedied with proper intervention at the early stages,” Macapagal said during a press briefing Tuesday announcing this year’s national Special Olympics.

According to the World Health Organization, anywhere between 3 to 7 percent of any given population is intellectually disabled.

But Alex Babst, SOP national program director, believes that there are many cases of intellectually disabled people that go unreported in the Philippines because many families try to hide them or reject proper treatment for fear of public ridicule.

According to him, the intellectually disabled are also behind the physically handicapped when it comes to job placements.

“The Special Olympics serves to highlight intellectually disabled people and their ability, not disability,” he said.