Katy Wilson still remembers the first time she was teased. She was a little girl in school when someone told her she should kiss a boy who allegedly had a crush on her. She obliged.
Everyone laughed when the boy pushed away. It took a moment for Wilson to realize they were laughing at her.
"Kids with disabilities just want to be treated like everybody else," Wilson, 30, said last week at a presentation to Coca-Cola employees. "We just want to have friends and have fun."
That's where the the Special Olympics comes in. Wilson, of Flowery Branch, has competed for about 25 years in a variety of sports, including gymnastics and track and field. She has collected over 100 medals and ribbons along the way.
"I am so proud to be a Special Olympics athlete," she said. "It is a very important part of my life."
This month, four other Georgia athletes will have their chance to earn their own awards at the Special Olympics World Summer Games in Athens, Greece, which kick off Saturday.
"I'm very excited to be going to Athens for the first time," said Erin Hoffman, 33, who will compete in aquatics. Georgia's contingent also includes Chris Currere and Daniel Hester, both 25 and competing in powerlifting, and Paul Partus, 29, who will participate in the aquatics competition.
About 7,000 athletes will compete in the summer games, with 25,000 volunteers and almost 3,000 media representatives scheduled to attend.
Special Olympics traces its roots back to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who visited institutions for people with intellectual disabilities in the late 1950s and early 1960s and was appalled by what she found. In 1962, she started a summer day camp for children and adults with intellectual disabilities at her Maryland home. In 1968, the first International Special Olympics Summer Games were held at Chicago's Soldier Field.
The Special Olympics now has programs in more than 180 countries, with almost three million athletes competing in 30,000 events a year spanning 30 sports.
Parents tell stories of kids who blossom in competition, and of opportunities opening up. Wilson, for example, has traveled to Morocco and met Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush in her role as a global ambassador for the Special Olympics.
Georgia was recently recognized as the largest Special Olympics state program by number of active participants. It attracts substantial support from the business community.
The UPS Foundation, the charitable arm of Sandy Springs-based UPS, donated $80,000 this year to Special Olympics Georgia for five state competitions hosted for children and adult athletes. The shipping company also sent hundreds of volunteers to the Georgia games this year.
Coca-Cola, which has supported Special Olympics since 1968, has created a TV campaign, in-store promotional materials and Facebook applications for the Athens games. It will donate 500,000 euro, or about $720,000, to the local organizing body for the summer games.
Muhtar Kent, chief executive of Coca-Cola and a member of Special Olympics' international board of directors, is scheduled to play a doubles tennis match at the World Summer Games, despite not having played much in the past 30 years.
Georgia has "one of the best local programs in the world" for the Special Olympics, said Peter Franklin, Coca-Cola's group director for worldwide sports and event management.
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