Celebrating Success in Sport and in Sobriety : Rehabilitation: At Al-impic Games, recovering substance abusers compete and mark their accomplishments.

Inside the stadium at the College of the Canyons here, where 10,000 recovering alcoholics and drug addicts had just paraded around the track, 39-year-old Josita Bear swelled with pride over her performance in a 440-yard dash.

“It’s so neat,” Bear said, after coming in sixth in the race for women age 30 to 39. “It’s so great to see all these sober people.”

Self-esteem and mutual support were the bywords Saturday at the 23rd International Al-impic Games, a series of sports and leisure competitions sponsored by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services to help recovering addicts with rehabilitation.

The games began in 1973 after founder Kurt Freeman, a retired rehab center director, decided that recovering substance abusers also suffered from “recreation deprivation.” Soon, what started as a 50-person event at a single rehab center had ballooned into a massive, all-day sporting event with an activity for everyone, from track-and-field to card games for the less physically active.

Saturday’s games started with a parade in which teams representing more than 80 recovery programs throughout Southern California marched proudly, bearing banners and wearing matching T-shirts, as friends and family members cheered from the bleachers.

Many of the teams stopped briefly before the crowd to do a dance to hip-hop music. One group, from the “Deaf and Sober” program at the Clare Foundation in Santa Monica, received a silent cheer in which the crowd of onlookers waved enthusiastically to the athletes.

Following the parade, the teams dispersed across the field to their respective events. Joseph Tawater and John Kern, both 31-year-old patients at the Antelope Valley Rehabilitation Center in Warm Springs, came to compete in pinochle.

Both men said they have spent the last several years in and out of jail for using and dealing a variety of drugs. And both men said they were profoundly moved to see so many substance abusers gathered in one place, sober and trying to stay that way.

“They are all stone-cold dope fiends,” Kern said, “and they are all here.”

Then there was the contingency from the American Indian Eagle Lodge, a sobriety center in Long Beach founded for Native Americans. It included Bear, a member of the Hidatsa tribe in North Dakota.

Bear not only did well in her foot race, but she and her teammates won first place for the banner they had painted for the games’ opening ceremonies. It depicted in bright colors a large city on one side and a group of people marching away from it toward a reservation with the words “Recovery . . . a new way of life.”

This year’s Al-impiad also attracted Monique Meeks, 33, who graduated from the American Recovery Center in Pomona two years ago. A lifelong track-and-field athlete, she was entered in the 50-yard dash, the 100-yard dash, the 440-yard dash and the standing long jump.

“I’ve been running since I was in the fifth grade,” Meeks said. “I never even stopped when I was using.”