Michael Phelps and Eunice Kennedy Shriver Win Sports Illustrated's Sportsman of the Year Awards

Congratulations to Michael Phelps for winning SI's Sportsman of the Year Award. He joins greats like Tiger Woods, Brett Favre, Pete Rose, Wayne Gretzky, and Muhammad Ali (and 49 other greats) who've also won the award through its 55 year history. It's a monumental achievement, but so it what was accomplished this year during the Olympics. Consider the following stats from NBC:

• 215 million people in America tuned in to watch the Olympics (2008 US population estimates are close to 306 million... that's a staggering percentage)
  
• nbcolympics.com received 1.7 billion page views during the Olympic Games
• Video clips were viewed 75 million times on the site

Those are insane numbers, especially when compared to other Olympic broadcasts that drew rather dismal ratings. Dick Ebersol, chairman of NBC Sports says, "and it was almost entirely because of this wunderkind from Baltimore. What he accomplished transcended sport and became a cultural phenomenon." In more numbers, of the 10,000 Olympic athletes on nbcolympics.com, Phelps accounted for 20% of the traffic.

SI wrote a very long and heartfelt article about Phelps, which you can read in its entirety here. It's very good reading - interesting and heart-warming, for lack of a better term. I found myself smiling a little here and there as I read it. I'd recommend it to any who read this blog. Now that the Phelpsmania has kind of fallen by the wayside, I've talked to a few people who've questioned the decision, but the article explains why so much better than the above numbers could ever hope to. Sure, that's a part of it, but there's a lot more to the story.

Go, read. Be heart-warmed.

This year also marked the first time SI awarded the Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year Legacy Award to celebrate lifetime achievement. The inaugural award was given, rightly, to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, the founder of the Special Olympics.

The first Special Olympics games were held in Chicago in 1968, where about 1,000 athletes competed in front of an audience of roughly 100. Eunice opened the day with the oath that is still used to open every Special Olympics:

Let me win,
but if I cannot win,
let me be brave
in the attempt.

Since I cannot say it any better than SI did:

While skeptics shook their heads and most of the press ignored the unprecedented competition, Shriver boldly predicted that one million of the world's intellectually challenged would someday compete athletically. She was wrong. Today, three million Special Olympics athletes are training year-round in all 50 states and 181 countries. They run races, toss softballs, lift weights, ski moguls, volley tennis balls and pirouette on skates. There are World Winter Games, the next ones coming up in Boise, Idaho, in February, and World Summer Games, which will be staged next in Athens in 2011. Documentaries, Wide World of Sports presentations, after-school TV specials, feature films, cross-aisle congressional teamwork and relentlessly positive global word of mouth have educated the planet about Special Olympics and the capabilities of the sort of individuals who were once locked away in institutions. Schooling, medical treatment and athletic training have all changed for people with intellectual disabilities as a result of Shriver's vision; more important, so have attitudes and laws.

[...]

But to say that the lot of people with intellectual disabilities has improved because of Special Olympics would be a gross understatement. Shriver's movement did nothing less than release an entire population from a prison of ignorance and misunderstanding. It did something else, too—create a cathartic covenant between competitor and fan that is unlike anything else in sport. You watch and what you see is nothing less than a transformation, the passage of someone who has been labeled unfortunate, handicapped, disabled or challenged to something else: athlete.

Eunice Kennedy Shriver knew this could happen. Forty years ago she could see it all. For that, SPORTS ILLUSTRATED recognizes her as one of those revolutionaries who saw opportunity where others saw barriers, someone who started a movement and changed a world.

You can read the powerful and truly moving story here, and you can read about the origin of this award here.