At 71, George Bowden is the oldest of the nearly 3,000 athletes in this year’s New York Special Olympics Summer Games. This weekend he competes in the volleyball skills competition, which he entered for the first time nine years ago. So far he’s done pretty well for himself, coming home with one silver medal and eight gold medals.

“I have a lot of them,” the trim Staten Island resident said the other day over a cup of sugar-free vanilla ice cream. He also competes in the golf and floor-hockey skills tournaments in the Fall and Winter Games. “I do them all,” he said, and laughed. “I’m not particular about them.”

Mr. Bowden is outgoing but soft-spoken, and he uses his warm green eyes and boisterous chuckle to communicate much of how he feels. When his coach, Pat Borgersen, said complimentary things about him to The New York Sun, Mr. Bowden turned to the reporter to make sure she was writing them down.

“He’s our social butterfly,” Ms. Borgersen said. “He can strike up a conversation with anybody.”

That generalization prompted Mr. Bowden to mention a new friend he’d met at the Metro Games this year – “the woman who hugged me,” he said, smiling devilishly.

Ms. Borgersen rolled her eyes and said: “Everybody hugs you. That narrows it down to eight or nine ladies.”

Besides the reporter, one of Mr. Bowden’s newest friends is Kimberley Ferdinando, Miss Staten Island 2005.

“He’s always been super-friendly,” Ms. Ferdinando, 23, said from her office at “Dateline NBC,” where she works as an assistant producer. “He’s so proud of his age and the fact that he’s an athlete at his age. Every time I introduce him to someone, he asks them to guess how old he is. They say 60 or 65, and he goes, ‘I’m 71!'”

This month, Ms. Borgersen was invited to pick two of her seven athletes to go to the Summer Games, and she chose Mr. Bowden, based on his stellar attendance at their twice-weekly practices. The only time he missed a practice this season, she said, was when he had a birthday party.

“He’s wonderful,” she said. “He’s very caring. He’s also a good sportsman. When he came in third place in the Metro Games, he was congratulating his fellow athletes. He doesn’t care where he comes in, as long as he has fun.”

Mr. Bowden didn’t try his hand at competitive sports until he was 62, after retiring from his job as a custodian at a state office. Around the same time he decided retirement wasn’t his speed, and he found a job as a messenger at Lifestyles for the Disabled, a day habilitation program for mentally challenged people on Staten Island.

When he’s not at work or practicing for Special Olympics competitions, Mr. Bowden likes to go on walks and visit his friends. He likes the ladies, especially a few who work at the CVS Pharmacy near the house where he lives with a family. He’s also a photographer, taking pictures of new people he meets, and about once a month he’ll take the ferry by himself to Manhattan, where he takes pictures and eats lunch by himself in Battery Park.

“For a 71-year-old he does well for himself,” the manager of the office where he works, Linda Rose, said. “He’ll get on a bus and go wherever he feels like.”

A stay-at-home mother with whom Mr. Bowden lives, Lisa Wheeler, has been trying to put together Mr. Bowden’s history and said there are several missing pieces. Mr. Bowden seems so joyful that his troubled life story comes as a surprise.

George Bowden, son of Joshua and Mary Bowden, was born at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Manhattan. He was immediately institutionalized, as were all five of his older siblings. Mrs. Wheeler speculates that the Bowden children all suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome. His mother disappeared and his father remarried.

Diagnosed as mentally handicapped, he has spent much of his life in state institutions. When he was 36 and living at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, a young reporter named Geraldo Rivera exposed the school’s squalid conditions and abuse of disabled students, and it was shut down. The only bright spot in Mr. Bowden’s memory of his time there is of playing softball on the Willowbrook Field, which is now where he trains for his events. After Willowbrook was closed, Mrs. Wheeler said, he was conned by an acquaintance into marrying an immigrant named Cathy.

“They told me to do it,” Mr. Bowden said, noting that he did not much like being married. Mrs. Wheeler said she believes that Cathy was a drug user who died of AIDS a few years later.

Mr. Bowden ended up in the care of a married couple, who received money from the state to look after him. They forced him to sign over his Social Security checks to them and made him apply for credit cards, which they took and used without his permission. When the state discovered his caretakers’ actions, lawyers were brought in and Mr. Bowden was transferred to a respite home. He stayed there for a year, until Russell Wheeler, a friend from work, took him into the Wheeler residence more than three years ago.

“He’s taught my kids a lot,” Mrs. Wheeler said. “They’ve learned patience. My 14-year-old daughter, Brittany, helps him write cards to his sisters. It gives her a sense of satisfaction.”

The first Special Olympics was held in 1968, at Soldier Field in Chicago. At the time, the insurance company attached to the Games refused to let the athletes swim in a regulation pool, lest one of them drown, and insisted on using a makeshift rubber swimming pool with 4-foot-high sides that volunteers held up.

Thirty-seven years later, the Special Olympics has grown in scope, popularity, and dignity.

At tonight’s opening ceremony, Senator Schumer is expected to address the crowd. The competition lasts all day tomorrow and Saturday, and the event wraps up with a Victory Dance on Saturday night.

Mr. Bowden says he’s not the least bit nervous about the weekend’s competition. “I’m not scared,” he grinned. “I like it.”