Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who founded the Special Olympics, is the 35th recipient of the Theodore Roosevelt Award, the NCAA's highest honor.

She will be recognized January 13 at the NCAA's Honors Dinner in Indianapolis.

Kennedy Shriver, who was a swimmer and track and field student-athlete for Stanford University in the early 1940s, is the fifth of nine Kennedy siblings, which include a president, two senators and an ambassador. But it was her relationship with her sister, who has mental retardation, that eventually led to her work with Special Olympics, for which she now serves as honorary chair.

This worldwide movement's roots go back to the early 1960s and the Shriver backyard, which Eunice transformed into a day camp grounded in the then-radical belief that both children and adults with mental retardation could take part in and benefit from competitive sports.

"I was convinced that with training and practice they could run a race, throw a ball, swim and play team sports," she said. "This would allow them to feel, for the first time in their lives, how liberating and empowering it is to train and to learn, to strive to test one's skills, and to achieve one's personal best."

Beyond the athletics realm, Kennedy Shriver felt that the lessons taught to the competitors through the Special Olympics would translate into competence in other more practical areas, similar to the NCAA's goal for its student-athletes.

"Above all, I hoped that the families and neighbors of persons with mental retardation could see what these athletes could accomplish, to take pride in their efforts and to rejoice in their victories," she said.

Her dream became a reality in 1968 at Chicago's Soldier Field, where 1,000 athletes with mental retardation from 26 states, Canada and France competed in track and field, hockey and aquatics. By 1999, when Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina, hosted the 10th Special Olympics World Summer Games, 7,000 athletes from 150 countries competed in 19 sports and were cheered on by more than 45,000 spectators.

The Special Olympics is just part of the worldwide effort Kennedy Shriver spearheaded to improve the lives of people with mental retardation. She also pioneered programs to research the causes of mental retardation, increase understanding and acceptance of children with mental retardation and improve the quality of their care, and address the problems of teen pregnancy and drug and alcohol abuse.

That effort had its genesis in 1957, when she took over direction of the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, which her father started as a memorial to her brother, who died while serving in World War II. Operating under its two stated objectives, the Foundation's civic contributions are numerous. Those objectives are (1) to seek the prevention of mental retardation by identifying its causes and (2) to improve the means by which society deals with citizens who have mental retardation.

In 1961, the Foundation established the President (John F.) Kennedy Committee on Mental Retardation. The next year, it developed the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development. One year later, the Foundation established fitness standards and tests for individuals with mental retardation, similar to the President's Fitness Awards program.

In 1964, the Foundation's efforts also led to changes in civil-service regulations so that persons with mental retardation could be hired on the basis of ability rather than test scores.

Seventeen years later, in 1981, Kennedy Shriver addressed another public-health concern when she founded Community of Caring, a school-based program that deals with the issues of teen pregnancy, school dropouts and drug abuse. Community of Caring seeks to develop emotionally healthy students and give them positive feelings of self worth. Today, Community of Caring programs are working in 600 public and private schools in 26 states and Canada.