Cayman Islands Special Olympians Set to Compete In North Carolina
Cayman Islands Special Olympics Open Water Swimming
On October 11, Open Water SOCI athletes Andrew Smilley and Kanza Bodden along with Unified partner, Lois Moody will compete in the Mott’s Channel Sprint to be held in Wilmington Beach, North Carolina.
The swim is a 1.3 mile straight course swim in much darker and colder water than they are used to off Seven Mile Beach.
Andrew Smilley has previously done the Tiburon Mile Swim in the San Francisco Bay area and has participated in numerous Flower’s One Mile Swims as well as many of the 5k swims held in Cayman. He will be competing in the Mott’s Channel Sprint with the regular singular swimmers.
Kanza Bodden swam the Flower’s One Mile Swim for the first time this year with her Unified partner, Lois Moody, but this will be her first international open water swim competition as a Unified swimmer. The Cayman team will be reuniting with other Special Olympic athletes from Virginia who previously came to Cayman for the Open Water Training held in 2013.
The team will be accompanied by SOCI Aquatics Coach Penny McDowall who feels that competitions like this are a necessary part of the preparation for the World Games which are held every four years. “A major theme of the LA2015 Games is the emphasis on Unified Sport” she observed. “ This is where blended teams of athletes with and without intellectual disabilities train and compete together. It was inspired by a simple principle: training together and playing together is a quick path to friendship and understanding.”
Kanza, Andrew and Lois are part of the SOCI delegation to 2015 World Summer Special Olympic Games which will be held in July 2015. The athletes are swimming the event in preparation for similar open water conditions that will be held in the 1500 Meter open water competition in Los Angeles. ”An announcement of the entire delegation will be coming soon” says SOCI Chairman Nick Freeland. “It will be the largest delegation that SOCI has ever fielded with entrants all of of the five sports offered by SOCI - Aquatics, Athlete, Basketball, Bocce, and Football.”
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