WHEN young athletes with intellectual disabilities rubbed shoulders with Shanghai basketball icon Yao Ming at a recent fundraising event in the city, it was a proud moment for Dr Timothy Shriver, chairman and CEO of the Special Olympics.

Boston-born Shriver, who heads the world's largest sports organization for children and adults with intellectual disabilities, was delighted to see the young Special Olympians meeting and dining with the former NBA Houston Rockets star, plus speed skating legend Yang Yang.

The event, which also featured well-known media figure Yang Lan, raised 1,944,000 yuan (US$311,753) for the Shanghai Special Care Foundation and helped promote the forthcoming Special Olympics World Winter Games.

During the trip, Shriver met some of the new leaders of China and exchanged ideas and visions for the development of the Special Olympics in China. He shared these with Shanghai Daily.

The Special Olympics holds training and competitions all year round, involving more than 4 million athletes in 170 countries in some 53,000 events annually at local, national and regional levels.

Every two years, the organization holds the Special Olympics World Games, and this month the 2013 winter games will be held in Pyeongchang, South Korea. The event is expected to attract almost 3,300 athletes and coaches from 112 countries.

The Special Olympics is a separate organization to the International Paralympic Committee, which runs Paralympic Games for athletes with a range of physical and intellectual disabilities immediately after the Olympic Games.

To Shriver, every special child has their own gifts and the potential to become a star like anyone else. As head of the Special Olympics, he has been fighting discrimination against people with intellectual disabilities for decades.

"Thousands of years of human history seem to have the same pattern, which is to exclude people with intellectual disabilities. I've studied this in the ancient Greeks and in Biblical times in the Middle East," explained Shriver.

"In almost every culture, there's an assumption that if a child has an intellectual disability, for example Down's syndrome or autism, then somehow they're hopeless. That's the biggest barrier; because they are not."

Having started his career as a high school teacher and holding a PhD in education, Shriver knows how painful such negative attitudes are for the families of the children.

"If I were to say I have a child with intellectual disabilities, people would say, 'Oh, I'm sorry.' It's very painful for parents to hear that," Shriver said.

"Imagine someone who suddenly saw you and said, 'I'm sorry' about who you are. You haven't done anything. You just happen to look different. This attitude is very deep and will take us decades to fight.

"We're fighting it and every day we do a little better but it's very deep prejudice. This is a big problem in China; this is a big problem everywhere."

Shriver's mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a member of the Kennedy family, ran Camp Shriver which evolved into the Special Olympics. His connection to China goes back to his father, Sargent Shriver, who as chairman of the Special Olympics brought the concept to China in the 1980s.

"My father came here for the Special Olympics and there were some big challenges," Shriver recalled. "There was a sense that disability didn't exist. There was a lot of hiding - intellectual disability in particular. My dad met with people and they would say, 'Well, we don't have any of these people'."

"Obviously there are people with disabilities everywhere - hundreds of millions in the world. But at the time, China was going through many changes, moving toward fully opening to the outside world," he said.

In the years since, Shriver has witnessed the development of special care for intellectually disabled children in China, with the establishment of nearly 1,000 special schools.

He attributes much of this change to the work of Deng Pufang, the paraplegic son of former leader Deng Xiaoping, who has campaigned for people with disabilities. "I think Deng Pufang brought a sense of great commitment in China. When he recognized that the disability campaign had to include not just people with physical disabilities but intellectual disabilities as well, China began to become a great partner of ours."

Shriver's first visit to China was to Shanghai for the Asia Pacific Games in 1996, by which time and the climate for the Special Olympics was much more receptive. Shriver met Chinese leaders from central and Shanghai government and felt the chance had come to make a big change.

"The central and municipal government, the students at Fudan University we visited; everywhere it was clear to me that there was a chance to make a big impact. We had some people here who were really incredible leaders, who had vision and passion and worked hard to get it done, not just talk," Shriver recalled.

Shortly afterwards, Shriver had a meeting with former President Jiang Zemin in Beijing and from there things gained momentum in cities such as Shenyang in Liaoning Province, Fuzhou in Fujian Province and Shenzhen in Guangdong Province.

"With municipal leaders, movie stars, directors, athletes, we began to see this coming together - government, volunteers, the private sector, businesses. Then the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games in Shanghai brought all this together," he said.

Shriver says the support of President Hu Jintao at the event was a memorable moment.

"I still can't believe that President Hu Jintao came here, (taking part in) a tug of war and cheering at the opening ceremony," Shriver said.

"This to me was like a vision of something you could almost never dream possible. When I think back, all the work the leaders did - day after day for more than a decade - to make that possible was quite extraordinary."

The success of the 2007 Shanghai Special Olympics World Summer Games left a legacy of better services and helped improve awareness of people with disabilities in the city and beyond.

"If you look in Shanghai you see a very different city than six or seven years ago for people with intellectual disabilities," said Shriver.

"First of all, the awareness is much higher and much more positive. Years ago, if you mentioned intellectual disabilities, people would say, 'that's hopeless.' Today, I think people in Shanghai, and China more broadly, will answer with a much more positive outlook. There's a sense that these citizens have capabilities, equality, gifts; not just disability."

Shriver also highlights the significance of Shanghai's Sunshine Homes for people with intellectual disabilities.

Very big legacies

"The whole idea of Sunshine Homes did not exist before the World Games. Great leaders, Dr Shi Derong (CEO of the 2007 Special Olympics World Summer Games Shanghai), then Mayor Han, Party Secretary Xi Jinping, when he was here, were all involved in promoting a legacy of better care, better services, more positive attitudes, better services and stronger political commitment.

"For us, these are very big legacies, much more powerful than a building or road."

When Shriver talks about the Special Olympics movement he stresses that events are not, like the Olympics, held only once every four years, .

"People hear the word 'Olympics' and think it's one games. But for us, every local event is also an Olympics," Shriver explained. "So if we organize an event in Pudong at a special school, let's say a basketball tournament for two groups of four teams, for us that is the Special Olympics."

"It's no different to the World Games in Shanghai 2007. For us, to participate in the Special Olympics at any level is to participate fully in the Special Olympic spirit."

Currently, the Special Olympics movement is promoting "unified sport," where a team is composed of both people with intellectual disabilities and those without. This build a sense of inclusion, said Shriver.

"It's not disabled, just teammates. This is a very powerful trend that has been picked up by other countries around the world and we want China to pick it up in a very big way. If we include in sport and include at school - where the child with special needs is at the same school as other children, then we begin to raise a future generation that doesn't have these negative attitudes," Shriver explained.

"That's our big hope and that's why we need education in China about inclusive sports, inclusive education and inclusive employment. But these are very difficult goals to achieve. We have to take one step in a time and push as hard as we can.

"The development of special care in China is encouraging and hopes are high, but there are still big challenges for people with intellectual disabilities. Although the law says they should be employed and should receive comprehensive education, the practice is not there yet," said Shriver.

The Special Olympics chief is hopeful of getting backing to make inclusiveness a reality.

"It's not easy but we hope that the government will commit itself to these targets: better education, better health care, better employment. If you build the community with the people together, playing these games, that can be the mechanism for changing bigger problems," Shriver said.

If these can be achieved, Shriver has an optimistic vision of the future.

"China could be the place where the child could be treated well; a place where the child goes to school; a place where his child could play with his friends with community support; a place for him to have a job, maybe working in a hotel or restaurant or an office. That's what China could be."