AN estimated 600 athletes are expected to compete in the Special Olympics Jamaica (SOJ) annual Summer Games which gets underway at 9 o’ clock this morning at the Stadium East complex.

The sporting disciplines to be competed in the 30th staging of the national championship are track and field, badminton, volleyball, roller skating and bocce. The increasingly popular bocce is a ball sport in which players use an underarm action to bowl at a target. Points are gained by the ball’s proximity to the target.

The official opening ceremony for the two-day championship will also be held today — 5:00 pm at the nearby National Arena.

Glendon West, an integral cob in the SOJ movement and a member of the games organising committee, stressed that proper time management is key, particularly with participants from the National Senior Trials using the Stadium East venue for warm-up purposes.

“We start tomorrow (today) at 9:00 am and we’ll be having field events as well as the 100-metre races.

“It should be a smooth event despite the national trials taking place on those days. We don’t want to have that clash between us and the National Trials, so we are trying even harder to ensure we finish on time,” West said.

The SOJ hauled in global recognition earlier this year after Jamaica’s outstanding displays at the Pyeongchang 2013 World Winter Games.

The Jamaicans won two silver medals in ice figure skating to go with their second-place finish in floor hockey at the eight-day Championships in the Republic of Korea.

The next Special Olympics World Summer Games will be held in Los Angeles in 2015.

The Special Olympics International (SOI) body provides people with intellectual disabilities the chance to show their athletic abilities and targets the breaking down of barriers that exclude these people from mainstream society.

The disabilities can either be acquired or genetic and can include cases of Down’s Syndrome, traumatic brain injury, autism and cerebral palsy.