Show of sportsmanship

NEWPORT BEACH — Anthony Rath served as the ambassador Friday morning at Newport Heights Elementary School’s annual Olympic games. The kindergartner is legally blind, but the school didn’t make him ambassador out of pity. It was more like admiration.

Anthony, 7, can barely see, but he still plays baseball, football and basketball, and can even ski down a mountain. As his mother, Tracy Rath, has come to realize, vision isn’t everything in sports.

“He feels and hears,” Rath said. “He’ll tell me a skier’s coming. I’ll ask, ‘How can you tell?’ and he’ll say, ‘Can’t you hear the swish?’ ”

So it was no sweat for Anthony to run onto the Newport Heights field Friday alongside Principal Kurt Suhr, who carried a flaming torch to kick off the annual event. During the opening ceremony, PTA member Kristin Higman presented the ambassador with a plaque for his efforts.

“Congratulations, buddy,” she told him. “Keep it up.”

Afterward, Anthony joined his kindergarten classmates in running laps around the track; other grade levels followed throughout the day.

Suhr said the event, in which parents and others pledge students to run, routinely raises around $20,000 for the PTA.

The event was Olympian in the truest sense, as each class chose a country, learned about its culture and dressed in its native garb for the morning ceremony.

Tina Fellers’ second-graders wore red berets for France, while John Daffron’s third-graders, studying Iceland, made puffin costumes out of construction paper.

Not all the outfits made it onto the jogging track, though. Adrienne Urban’s students celebrated India by dressing in saris — long, flowing dresses — and other traditional clothes, but replaced them afterward with T-shirts from the school’s DARE program.

“For the people who wear saris, it would be hard to run in them,” said Brittnee Grosskopf, 11, of Newport Beach.

“It’s hard to even walk in them.”