<\/p>\n\n Group photo of the Telekom volunteers at the awards ceremony.<\/p>\n
\u00a9\u00a0Special Olympics Deutschland Carina Gromer (geb.Pilz)\n<\/p>\n
Afterward, everyone headed together toward Ludwigsparkstadion to experience the official opening ceremony, which drew about 16,000 attendees. With the arrival of the Olympic flame, the Games were symbolically opened by a special duo, which also marked the start of volunteer activities along the sidelines of the soccer field.<\/p>\n
Among the 27 sports represented, Telekom was the presenting partner for soccer. Both traditional teams (composed exclusively of athletes with intellectual disabilities) and unified teams (people with and without intellectual disabilities) competed in the soccer tournament.\u00a0<\/p>\n
First place in the \u201cUnified Women\u201d category went to Team FSH Soccer Essen, which Telekom had already been supporting prior to the games. Back in May, the team trained in specially branded Telekom jerseys alongside professional players Celina Degen and Anna-Lena Stolze of 1. FC K\u00f6ln with a focus on ball control and shooting accuracy. The team from Essen was able to demonstrate these skills in Saarbr\u00fccken as well, allowing Hiroto Kishi (representative of Telekom\u2019s sports sponsorship) and Laura Nolte (two-time Olympic champion in the two-man bobsled) to award them the gold medals.<\/p>\n
The Magenta Volunteers provided active support on the sidelines. Their duties ranged from recording scores to assisting the teams, organizing the water supply and making stadium announcements.<\/p>\n
Thomas regularly volunteers at sporting events and sums up his experiences this way: \u201cBut what I got to experience last week in Saarbr\u00fccken really tops everything I\u2019ve experienced as a volunteer so far.\u201d The warmth, openness and honesty of the athletes inspired the Magenta volunteer and created that special atmosphere for which the Special Olympics are known. Like many of his fellow volunteers, he\u2019s already looking forward to Telekom\u2019s next involvement with the Special Olympics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nearly 4,500 athletes with intellectual or multiple disabilities from Germany and twelve other countries gathered in Saarland, where…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":43709,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20989],"tags":[21115,11785,32337,37515,149,37517,37516,23434,710,37519,37518,25927,259],"class_list":["post-43708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-deutsche-telekom","tag-corporate-responsibility","tag-deutsche-telekom","tag-engagement","tag-fc-koln","tag-football","tag-good-magenta","tag-goodmagenta","tag-responsibility","tag-soccer","tag-special-olympics","tag-special-olympics-2023","tag-sponsoring","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43708\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43709"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}