In June this year, 77 Special Olympics athletes, together with their coaches, family members, and supporters, travelled from Ireland to North Carolina to participate in the 10th World Summer Special Olympic Games. The Games went on for 10 days, and, by the end of that time, Ireland's athletes had won 85 medals: 29 gold, 33 silver, and 23 bronze.
Also in North Carolina at that time were The Yard, a Dublin-based broadcast and post-production company, who were making a documentary about Ireland's participation in the Games. Since the 2003 Games will be held in Dublin, the first time they will have been held outside the States in their 30-year history, the documentary gives us a flavour of what to expect when 7,000 athletes arrive in our fair city in four years times.
It's All About Attitude, the title of the documentary, is also the motto of the Games. Special Olympians are athletes with learning disabilities, and sometimes also physical disabilities. The 77 athletes who travelled from Ireland to Raleigh, North Carolina, had been training for years to compete at world level. Their nine events were athletics, swimming, equestrian, soccer, basketball, golf, gymnastics, ten-pin bowling, and table-tennis.
The atmospheric documentary follows the team through from their departure at Dublin Airport, to the extravaganza of the closing ceremony on the Fourth of July, and the huge welcome they received on return to Ireland again. In between, we see the Irish team members settling into life in North Carolina, getting some last-minute training from their coaches, coping with the heat, and competing at their events. There's also some very funny behind-the-scenes footage: watch out in particular for the wisecracks made by the soccer team.
The families are rightly as much a part of this documentary as the athletes, and they appear among the coverage of the events and sometimes interminable awards ceremonies, talking candidly and movingly to camera about what it means to them to have their sons and daughters compete at the Games.
The crew of the Yard had the slightly surreal experience of being interviewed and filmed themselves for a day by a Fox television crew who wanted to get the Irish media's perspective on the Games for their nightly News At Ten. The Yard has spliced fragments of Fox's nightly reports on the Games into its own documentary, which gives it a newsy edge, and captures something of the huge American interest in the Games.
ALTHOUGH the Games went on for several days, it was definitely a big achievement for the Yard to get around to including all nine far-far flung events the Irish participated in; some so far apart that even other team members didn't get to see each other compete. Having reported from North Carolina at that time myself, I can testify that holding even a pen, let alone camera equipment, in those searingly hot and humid temperatures was an effort.
Golf, for instance, was timetabled to begin more or less at dawn, to avoid the heat that descended like a dumbbell from about 9 a.m. onwards. Well, viewers of this documentary will know that soaring temperatures is one thing Ireland's Special Olympic athletes won't have to contend with next time round.
The programme also gives an insight into the logistics of running the Games, which were attended by some 50,000 people. America's trademark yellow school buses from all over the State were responsible for ferrying athletes and onlookers between events in the far-flung East Village and West Village. To look at the thousands of people constantly shuttling between venues all day is to hope wryly that Dublin will have sorted out its traffic problems by 2003, or we'll be seeing a 10-week Games instead of a 10-day event.
Watching the documentary is also to realise straight away that the Games would be impossible to stage without their accompanying army of local volunteers, who have given up almost two weeks of their time to help out, fuelled up, they explain cheerfully, by the spirit and camaraderie of it all. When it comes to the task of recruiting the thousands of volunteers for Dublin, RTE should run ads with clips from these inspiring fellow-volunteers in America.
Three cheers for The Yard, who gave all their services free: director Cormac Larkin, producer Sam Gleeson, cameraman Gary Culliton, and sound operator Catherine O'Shaughnessy.
It's All About Attitude airs on RTE 1, on October 25th at 6.30 p.m.
