A day camp in Maryland, a park-district idea, and a stadium on the lakefront.

Special Olympics grew out of a summer camp. English Wikipedia says that in June 1963 Eunice Kennedy Shriver, a sister of President John F. Kennedy, started a day camp at her home in Maryland for children with intellectual disabilities. The camp, known as Camp Shriver, was meant to give children who had few chances to join organised sport a place to swim, play games and take part. Kennedy Shriver was then head of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, and Wikipedia says the foundation went on to fund similar camps run by universities, recreation departments and community centres.

The Chicago event began with a teacher. Wikipedia says Anne McGlone Burke, then a physical education teacher with the Chicago Park District, had the idea for a one-time, city-wide, Olympic-style competition and approached the Kennedy Foundation in 1967 for support. Kennedy Shriver encouraged her to widen it beyond the city. FOX 32 Chicago, in a dated history piece of 20 July 2023, says the games were organised by Burke, whom it describes as an Illinois Supreme Court justice, together with Kennedy Shriver and the Kennedy Foundation, citing the Chicago History Museum.

The games were held on 20 July 1968 at Soldier Field in Chicago. FOX 32 reports, quoting the organisation’s own history, that the opening ceremony included a teenage runner carrying a torch to light a tall John F. Kennedy Flame of Hope, and that the programme ran from swimming and running to floor hockey. In her opening remarks, the station reports, citing National Geographic, Kennedy Shriver said the new organisation would offer people with intellectual disabilities “the chance to play, the chance to compete and the chance to grow.”

The launch was also an announcement. Wikipedia says Kennedy Shriver, the honorary chair of the Chicago games, used the event to announce the formation of Special Olympics and to say that more games would follow every two years as a biennial international event. FOX 32 gives the same pledge, for 1970 and every two years after. Wikipedia says the Canadian physical education professor Frank Hayden, who had worked with the Kennedy Foundation, served as executive director of the games through 1972.

Kennedy Shriver was guarded about one popular explanation. Wikipedia says that when The New York Times asked her in 1995 whether her sister Rosemary had been the inspiration, she said that was not exactly the case, adding that the games should not focus on one individual.

Permission to use the word, then recognition from Lausanne.

The name needed approval. Wikipedia says that in 1971 the United States Olympic Committee gave Special Olympics official approval to use the name “Olympics,” three years after the Chicago launch. In 1988 the organisation was officially recognised by the International Olympic Committee. Wikipedia notes that, like the International Paralympic Committee, Special Olympics is recognised by the IOC, but that its World Games are not held in the same year as the Olympic Games or alongside them.

The games also moved beyond Chicago and beyond summer. Wikipedia says the second games, in 1970, returned to Soldier Field and included athletes from France, and that the World Winter Games began in February 1977 at Steamboat Springs, Colorado. The World Games were later held outside the United States, with winter editions in Austria in 1993 and a summer edition in Dublin in 2003. Today the World Games generally alternate between summer and winter editions in two-year cycles.

The logo comes from a sculpture. Wikipedia says the Special Olympics logo is based on “Joy and Happiness to All the Children of the World,” a sculpture by the Georgian artist Zurab Tsereteli. The State University of New York at Brockport hosted the 1979 Summer Games, and Tsereteli was then a visiting artist in residence there. He worked with the Kennedy Foundation and gave the sculpture to the university. Wikipedia describes the resulting mark as a “stick figure,” an abstract but human form meant to convey movement and activity, and says it is intended as a symbol of growth, confidence and joy.

A sculpted figure, a torch and an oath.

A multi-sport event or federation identity has to hold together a programme of very different competitions under one sign. The mark may appear on a start banner, a finish arch, a bib number, a medal ribbon, a television graphic and a souvenir cap, often in the same week and in different host cities. That pushes designers toward a compact symbol that can be stamped in one colour, and a wordmark that stays legible when it is shrunk onto a lanyard or stretched across a gantry.

Single letters and short monograms are a common answer. A letter can be cut from tape, stencilled onto a ramp or embroidered on a sleeve, and it reads at speed. Finish-line imagery is another resource: the arch, the tape and the clock give an event a stage that photographers return to every year, and the identity is often designed to sit on that stage.

Federations carry a second layer. A governing body may hold the rights to a competition name while host cities create their own edition emblems, so the parent mark has to sit comfortably beside a changing local design. Organisers often keep the core symbol stable and let colour, city name and year do the changing.

A flame beside the stadium and an oath written by an adviser.

The flame is the movement’s second symbol. Wikipedia says Flame of Hope is the name given to the torch carried to and lit at Special Olympics games, the name used at the 1968 opening ceremony that FOX 32 described. In 2018, for the fiftieth anniversary, the Chicago Park District dedicated the “Eternal Flame of Hope,” a sculpture by Richard Hunt, on a plaza next to Soldier Field where the opening games were held.

The words have a source too. Wikipedia says the athlete’s oath, “Let me win. But if I cannot win, let me be brave in the attempt,” was introduced by Kennedy Shriver at the Chicago games in 1968, and that it was written by Herbert J. Kramer, then public relations adviser to the Kennedy Foundation.

The sports programme has also shaped the name. Wikipedia says track and field, swimming and floor hockey were the three official sports offered in 1968, and that events are introduced in training before joining the competition schedule. In recent years the organisation has developed Unified Sports, which puts athletes with and without intellectual disabilities on the same team.

The anniversary year brought new language as well. Wikipedia says that as part of the 50th anniversary celebration in 2018, Special Olympics launched a new mission called the “Inclusion Revolution.” Leadership had already moved beyond the United States: in May 2016 Mary Davis of Dublin, Ireland, was named chief executive officer.

For a design guide, Special Olympics shows how an organisation can borrow the Olympic word, with permission, while building its own symbols from a sculpture, a torch and a sentence. Compare the Olympic Games, whose name it was cleared to use in 1971, and the Paralympic Games, another movement recognised by the IOC. For this guide we use torch red and flame gold on white with a friendly humanist sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Special Olympics’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.