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Michelle Obama to declare 2015 Special Olympics open in Los Angeles

Xinhua, July 25, 2015 Adjust font size:

Honorary co-chair of Special Olympics World Games 2015 (SOWG) and U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama has confirmed her attendance at the opening ceremony of SOWG on July 25, announced at the opening ceremony news conference on Friday.

The First Lady of United States has confirmed to attend the Opening Ceremony. "She is declaring the Games open tomorrow night," LA 2015 President and Chief Executive Patrick McClenahan said. "It's the largest event LA has hosted since the '84 Olympics," McClenahan said, "for Special Olympics, just a remarkable opportunity for us."

Bing as the birthplace of Special Olympics, Los Angeles has its inherent advantages. "Because we are in the city it stars, we have more Olympic athletes, we have more stars, we have more celebrities, that's important to us, because we need people to see people who with intellectual disabilities are, and we need them to hear their stories," said Janet Froetscher, the CEO of Special Olympics.

"We will have a quarter of our athletes that are playing unifying sports which you know as athletes with or without intellectual disabilities play on the play field together, so for us that will be one of the biggest time to do that," Froetscher told Xinhua.

There will be 290 events -- 267 for Special Olympics athletes and 23 Unified Sports competitions pairing athletes with and without intellectual disabilities.

"Reach Up LA" is the theme song of LA 2015 Special Olympics. The creator of the song, Siedah Garrett, said during the conference that "I would love it if people feel the energy and emotion what into preforming and creating the song."

She said "Special Olympics athletes are amazing, it just bring me tears and make me very emotional talking about them. Because they have such can do attitude when their whole life are said 'you can't', 'you are retarded', 'you're disabled', 'you can't, you can't, you can't'. And this competition shows 'yes, they can'."

The inspiring Opening Ceremony of the Special Olympics World Games Los Angeles 2015 will take place on Saturday, July 25, 2015 to honor over 6,500 athletes from 165 countries and regions in the historic Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, the only venue in the world to host two Olympiads (1932 and 1984) with performance, the Parade of Athletes and the culmination of the Final Leg of the Law Enforcement Torch Run and lighting of the Special Olympics cauldron.

The show will be directed by Emmy Award winner Debbie Allen and produced by Five Currents, which produced the opening ceremony for the 2014 Sochi Games. Notable guests include first lady Michelle Obama, Stevie Wonder, Michael Phelps, Jimmy Kimmel and Yao Ming. Organizers are expecting about 62,000 people to be at the stadium.

Held every two years and alternating between Summer Games and Winter Games, the Special Olympics World Games is a direct descendant of the July 1968 event organized by Special Olympics founder Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

Summer editions of the SOWG were held in the United States through 1999, then went international, to Dublin in 2003, Shanghai in 2007 and Athens in 2011.

Los Angeles was selected in 2011 by Special Olympics International to be the site of the 2015 Games, over a bid from South Africa. Endi