Olympian inspires through challenge

By Earlene Ward / Community Correspondent

(Updated: Thursday, January 28, 2010, 4:51 PM)

Shane Hamman did some heavy lifting in the Olympics in 2000 and 2004 but today he's doing heavy lifting of a different sort for Rachel's Challenge.

The man who has been called the strongest weightlifter in America retired from Olympic competition after 2004 to devote his time to giving presentations for Rachel's Challenge, a program dedicated to starting a chain reaction of kindness and compassion.

Hamman was in Oakhurst to present the program to Yosemite High School students January 19 and to Rivergold and Coarsegold seventh- and eighth-graders January 20.

Each day, all students attended a one-hour assembly. Later in the day, a smaller group met with Hamman to learn how to keep Rachel's Challenge going in the schools through Friends of Rachel (FOR). Both nights there were meetings for parents and the community.

Rachel Scott was 17 when she was killed in the shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Co April 20, 1999.

After her death, her father found six diaries she had written in which she expressed her challenges and her desire to make a difference in the world. He later started Rachel's Challenge as a way to fulfill her dream.

Rachel left five challenges:

1. Eliminate prejudice: Look for the good in people.

2. Dare to dream and write down those dreams.

3. Choose positive influences.

4. Use kind words and do little acts of kindness: Small things make a difference.

5. Tell those you love how much they mean to you.

Six weeks before her death, Rachel wrote a two-page paper that she called My Ethics, My Codes of Life. In that paper she stated: "If one person will go out of their way to show compassion, it will start a chain reaction." She had also written that "People will never know how far a little kindness will go." Part of Rachel's Challenge is building a chain with each link a note of a kindness someone has shown a person.

Valarie Shaffer, the YHS student support facilitator and staff sponsor for Rachel's Challenge, wants to see the students of Yosemite Unified School District make a chain that stretches from Oakhurst to Rivergold school. One school district made a three-mile chain that represented 123,000 acts of kindness. "We can do better than that," Shaffer says.

Rachel believed if someone did something kind for one person, that person would be much more likely to do something kind for another, thus the chain reaction of kindness and compassion of which she dreamed.

Speaking of dreams and the importance of writing your dreams, Hamman said it was his dream to compete in the Olympics. By the age of 21, he was the strongest power lifter in the world, but there was not an Olympic event in power lifting. To fulfill his dream, he switched to weightlifting and did make it to the Olympics.

He encouraged students to write down their dreams and, laughing, he said boys don't keep diaries; girls do that, but guys keep journals.

As for choosing positive influences, Hamman said what goes in our head comes out in one way or another. "Violence and negativity do impact us," he said.

Rachel encouraged people, through her diaries, to "keep your character no matter who you are with." Rachel's Challenge was a Senior Project for Camille Subia.