Prize Speech by President Herman Count van Rompuy, Chairman of the Advisory Council,Theophano Foundation

This year’s Theophano Prize is special in many ways.

First of all, it is Special OLYMPICS while we are so close to Mount Olympos. I’m sure Zeus agrees with our choice for this year’s prize! By the way, we are also close to the monastery of Mount Athos. Humanity, solidarity and charity are virtues that are also highly regarded in that tradition. So we are right on all fronts!

In choosing this laureate, the Theophano Foundation also wanted to show how attached it is to humanity in these times of dehumanisation. The attention each athlete receives at SO is in stark contrast to the total lack of importance attached to each person in the two war zones. By the way those wars are going on, not so far away from Thessaloniki, both barely around 1,300 km. It is the return of tragedy in history. The values of SO are the opposite of the unvalues of war. Empress Theophano gave great attention to education and culture during her reign a thousand years ago, also as a means of transcending differences between people and cultures. The city of Thessaloniki itself has not been spared from tragedy and atrocities during its long history. So this city is all the more sensitive to humanity today.

The enthusiasm and fraternity of SO’s athletes are an antidote to today’s evils. That is why this jury and our Foundation itself is so proud today.

Twenty years ago, I first attended an opening of SO Games in Belgium. I left the stadium with a warm feeling thinking about the enthusiasm of the participants, their families and those who accompanied them. This was all unexpected for me. After that, I went back to the Games a few times. Each time, I experienced it as a breath of fresh air.

SO is much more than a sporting event. The classical Games are mainly about medals. At SO it is really about values. Of course there is dedication, training and competition, rather there is that overwhelming feeling of togetherness and respect. Every human being counts, whoever they are, whatever their limitations or gifts. That is the foundation of our civilisation or it should be. It must be fought for, every day. It must not ‘perish from the earth’ as President Lincoln once said at Gettysburg.

SO is the embodiment of that core value, of that personalist ideal. Nothing is more important than the human person. He or she is more than just an individual. A human being becomes a person by being connected to others. The I then becomes We. The best thing an individual can do is to become less of an individual. Sport at SO is a means, not an end in itself. The basis is ethical, not purely commercial. That too is an antidote to the commercialisation of almost everything. SO’s global success proves that there is still plenty of support for this among ordinary men and women. We can only be grateful to the initiators at the time and those responsible today. Chairman Tim Shriver and CEO Mary Davis and their team are the inspirers and facilitators today. It is both an organisation and a movement.

SO is a global movement. It draws on a message that is also ours in Europe. SO is above all the sum of countless individual stories. Each athlete and his or her family have been through a difficult journey. The ‘ode to joy’ -remembering the European anthem- that they bring, does not come spontaneously. It has been preceded by grief, trial and error, disillusionment and recovering. We only see the result. We must also think of those who have not achieved that result, who are equally our brothers and sisters in humanity.

The Theophano Prize differs from other European prizes because it is awarded far from the original heartland of the Union with my city of Brussels as its symbol. Although Empress Theophano reigned, we look for our laureates not so much among policy-makers rather among those who represent values. The first laureate was the Erasmus programme which made 10 million young people more European and more human by studying and living abroad with other peers. The second laureate was Turkish-German couple Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci who developed the very successful vaccine in full COVID time that saved millions of lives. Third was the great conductor Daniel Barenboim for bringing Palestinians and Israelis to play together in his West-Eastern Diva orchestra. The fourth laureate was UNO secretary general Guttieres for the humanitarian task at the beginning of the war in Ukraine so that the world’s poorest could still be supplied with grain via the Black Sea. Today SO is our guest who allows people with mental disabilities to develop as full human beings.

Empress Theophano was more than an empress. She devoted herself to education for many including her son, the later emperor so that he not only received a military training. To the extent possible, Theophano also brought ‘soft’ values to a society at the time dominated by so-called male virtues rather than vices. Even today, there are large countries where machismo prevails to the point of violence and horror.

This award wants to be special. Special Olympics is therefore not an accidental choice. The Theophano Foundation is going to continue our work. For a Western European like me, raised in Greco-Latin culture for six years, the combination of East and West is almost natural. Together, we want to build even more bridges in today’s world. We want the globalisation of humanity and fraternity, equality and respect. These are values found in most religions and cultures. Those values should not only apply to the people of your own country, race, tribe or culture. They must be universal or they are not. The globalisation of trade and investment, of mobility and the internet, of sport and media, of science and knowledge, has already been talked about enough. We need to give globalisation a deeper and a higher dimension. Our age is no longer satisfied with an abstract discourse on grand principles. Only the embodiment of values in people themselves is credible and authentic. The best answer to cynicism is people working for each other in concrete ways, in everyday life. We must continue to dream even against the spirit of the times. The world belongs to the dreamers. SO also started with a dream as thinkers and writers dreamt of the unified Europe centuries ago. Their dream also came true. ‘All men must become brothers’ the great poet Schiller wrote 250 years ago and Beethoven and the EU immortalised those verses. In that famous verse, the poet speaks of the Elysion, a kind of paradise. Where we can, we should make little paradises of our own. Special Olympics did and is doing just that.

Again: congratulations Special Olympics!