Frank J. Hayden, whose research showing that intellectually disabled children benefited from athletics led members of the Kennedy family to ask for his help staging the first Special Olympics, and who then contributed to the Games’ astounding growth into a global movement, died on May 16 in Oakville, Ontario, near Toronto. He was 96.
His death, in an assisted-living residence, was confirmed by his family.
The Special Olympics, now an international juggernaut that provides training and competition for more than five million athletes from 200 countries each year, has made a significant contribution to the struggle for human rights, helping to fight the stigma against people with disabilities.
The roots of the Games lie in Dr. Hayden’s groundbreaking work. A professor of physical education, he published research in 1964 showing that Toronto schoolchildren with intellectual disabilities got stronger and fitter with physical training. His findings knocked down common views that people with such disabilities were inherently weak, inactive and overweight.
“It was Frank who said, ‘Of course they can participate in sport and succeed at it and be physically fit. They just have to be given the chance,’” Sharon Bollenbach, then the chief executive of Special Olympics Canada, said in 2016, when Dr. Hayden was inducted into Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame.
Dr. Hayden’s work caught the attention of Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who brought him to Washington in 1965 to help plan the first Special Olympics. (A year earlier, he had proposed a similar competition in Canada that failed to get off the ground.)
Mrs. Shriver was a sister of President John F. Kennedy — and of Rosemary Kennedy, who in 1941, at the request of her father, was lobotomized after exhibiting learning disabilities and erratic behavior. The procedure left her, a 23-year-old woman, unable to speak or live independently.
