Rain Can’t Dampen Special Day

As my plane flies over Lake Tahoe and glides down upon the Biggest Little City in the World, I read the morning sports pages.

A baseball pitcher is mortally insulted at his team’s contract offer of several million (or is it billion?) dollars a year. A baseball manager’s alleged gambling links spread like a spider web. A Canadian inquiry into steroids causes me to wonder if maybe they should try to find one or two clean Olympians and call it a moral victory. Across our nation, college student-athletes line up to get into jail cells.

I fold my paper and prepare to leave behind this enlightened real world of sport, to spend a day in a different world, where all that matters is the playing of the games. A weird concept, to be sure, but worth a look.

The Special Olympics began in 1961 as a summer camp for children with mental retardation. It has become a full-blown Olympic Games for children and adults.

Reno is hosting the fourth International Winter Special Olympic Games, involving 1,400 athletes from 14 countries.

It rained, snowed and sleeted on the Opening Ceremony, Ma Nature testing the special spirit of these Olympians. Not a complaint was heard.

“Our kids aren’t used to the cold,” a coach from Hawaii says. “They got soaked, but they had a great time.”

Dozens of skaters whiz around the speed-skating oval, warming up for their races.

One coach stops an awkward, rail-thin boy and gives him instruction on the coordination of arm and leg action. The boy skates off, wobbly.

“That’s it!” the coach shouts, then lowers his voice and says to himself, “Sort of.”

Circling the rink there is a dazzling diversity of skill levels and sizes, but one skater stands out. She is 4 feet tall and probably 60 pounds. She is wearing a pair of gloves that might fit Howie Long.

Dawn Horwath is 14 and has been skating since she was 6. She is from Hawaii.

“For the first five months, she hung onto the wall,” says Dawn’s father, Bob Horwath. “Finally she came off the wall and skated with a walker-type device, actually a broken chair. One day she pushed that aside and started skating.”

Now, Dawn is in the Special Olympics, skating against girls and women nearly twice her size.

In her morning heat, Dawn was trailing the two other skaters, so she simply cut across the middle of the rink. Not that she’s a cheater.

“If someone in the race were to fall, Dawn would probably stop to help,” Bob says. “She goes for it, but the idea of being here, competing with kids, is more important to her than winning. She just wants to be part of it.”

Dawn can’t write her name and isn’t very verbal, but she can follow simple directions and is extremely sociable. She appears to be having an enormously good time.

During her medal race, five laps around the oval, Dawn searches the crowd for her parents and grandparents, and waves happily. After three laps, well behind the other two skaters, Dawn crosses the start-finish line and raises her arms in triumph, smiling.

“Again, Dawny, again!” shouts her mother, Ann Horwath, in a friendly voice.

Without losing the smile, Dawn resumes her race.

“I can’t tell you how much this has built her self-esteem,” Bob says. “It shines through in other parts of her life. It’s one of the only programs where they (children with retardation) have a chance to win. In everything else, they trail the pack. This has helped her blossom. Now we go to a skating rink and she skates better than the normal kids.”

Dawn Horwath finally sails across the finish line, a distant third in the three-girl race, and throws her arms in the air again. Another win.

The floor hockey team from Canada catches my eye, because of No. 99 and No. 5.

No. 99 is a thin 6-footer with a grim, no-nonsense look on his Hispanic, goateed face. He jogs onto the floor for pregame warmups and drops to the polished concrete to whip out a set of pushups on his fists.

No. 5 is a handsome young man who looks like a French-Canadian hockey player, except that he stands a shade over 4 feet tall. He has a steely glint in his eye.

These two have come to play.

“We’re brothers,” No. 5 tells me after the game. “We grew up together in the same foster family. Seventeen years together.”

Ed Knowles (No. 99), age 31, and Joe Gallo (No. 5), age 28, were both abandoned by their respective parents in infancy and were taken in by the foster family.

In the Special Olympics, where you accentuate the positive, these life circumstances are a simple twist of fate that brought two brothers together and eventually served to improve Western Canada’s floor hockey club.

Floor hockey is played on a basketball-court-sized rink. The puck is a large felt bagel that the players poke and skim along the concrete “ice” with the tips of their broomsticks.

The Canadians play with skill and strategy, but they are shorthanded. One of their star players is in the medical tent, weak and nauseous.

“He’s dehydrated,” a team official explains. “He won’t drink the water here. He says it tastes bad.”

A minute into the game, Gallo sprints across the court and fires a 20-foot slingshot past the Georgia goalie. The rout is on. You didn’t expect Canada to have trouble with Georgia in hockey, did you?

It’s a serious game, but clean.

When Gallo crunch-checks an opponent, a team official calls out, “We’re gonna trade you to Philadelphia, Joey!”

Occasional glares are exchanged, but no punches, gouges or slashes. Maybe malice is the providence of a more perfect intellect.

Back in Canada, Knowles is supported by welfare, and Gallo ecently got a job washing trucks. Even though they are both in the highest-functioning level of retardation, good jobs are very hard to find. They are perennial underdogs.

But on the hockey floor, Gallo is a captain and Knowles has aspirations of becoming a coach.

In the outside world, they are assigned to a gray area of society, an underdog class.

“They are in the most frustrating level (of retardation)--almost normal,” says one of the team’s coaches.

Here, Joe Gallo and Ed Knowles are two hockey stars fighting to win a medal for their country.

In the Canadian cheering section is a pretty brunette in a red speed-skating suit, waving a flag.

She wears a gold medal on a ribbon around her neck, having just won the 100-meter event. How much did she win by?

“I don’t know,” Lecia Mitch says, “I wasn’t looking back.”

Mitch is 22. She is classified in the highest skill level of retardation, and lives in a training residence, preparing to move out on her own, to become completely independent. She is Canada’s best Special Olympics speedskater, and plans to compete eventually in so-called generic races, against non-retarded skaters.

Mitch says she can’t wait to show her medal to her mom. I ask if she would have been disappointed to finish second.

“Nope,” she says. “What we look for is sportsmanship. To be happy for other people, you know?”

Sounds nice, but that’s easy for a winner to say. How will she handle defeat?

An hour later, Mitch skates in the finals of the 500 meters, five laps. She is racing a woman who shoots off the line to a startlingly quick 20-yard lead.

Mitch dogs her opponent, steadily closes the gap and, with a half-lap to go, sees an opening and tries to pass on the inside. She catches a skate-toe on the ice and goes down hard.

On the award stand, Mitch accepts her silver medal with a smile and raises the winner’s hand in triumph. She tries to raise the hand of the fourth-place finisher, too, a girl from Maryland who fell in her race and crashed hard into the boards.

The Maryland skater, 20 minutes after her fall, is still sobbing and is led off the stand by two volunteers.

Lecia Mitch heads back to the hockey rink to watch her boys play a tough team from Washington D.C. It looks bad for the Canucks. They’re down, 3-2, and Gallo crunches into the boards and goes down in a heap.

He’s on the concrete for long minutes but is finally helped to his feet, woozy and shaky-legged. He elects to stay in the game. He didn’t come 2,000 miles to spectate.

The Canadians rally and win, 4-3, to close in on the gold. The players trudge off the floor with the weary, satisfied look of winners.

I ask Joe Gallo and Ed Knowles what they will do if their team wins the gold.

They answer in unison, like twin brothers:

“Party!”