Post by LongBlade on Jul 8, 2008 16:32:04 GMT -5
PARALYMPICS
After years of war, Iraq's Paralympics team takes prominent position
By Andrew E. Kramer
NEW YORK TIMES
July 08, 2008
www.statesman.com/sports/content/sports/stories/other/07/08/0708iraqdisabled.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqis love sports. Anyone who doubts it should consider the rat-a-tat of automatic weapons fired after every Iraqi soccer victory. Yet after five years of war, Iraq's chances of fielding a competitive Olympic team are vanishingly small.
Playing fields, pools and gyms are in disrepair. Athletes are targets for assassination. Only one, a weightlifter, qualified for the Beijing Olympics, the second Summer Games since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
War and hardship, though, have not destroyed all of Iraq's dreams for international competition. The country, which has been in three wars in two decades, has a robust Paralympic team.
"As a country that participated in many wars since 1980, we have many disabled people," said Ahmed Abid Hassan, a wheelchair fencing coach. "Our Paralympic team is better than our Olympic team."
The Olympics and Paralympics are not related, but the organizers have an agreement to hold them in the same city. The Paralympics begin Sept. 6, after the Olympics.
While guiding a squad of fencers in wheelchairs through their paces, he pointed out that the Paralympic team had qualified 20 athletes for the games in Beijing, in contrast to the single Olympic athlete. Twelve of the Paralympic qualifiers are disabled war veterans.
Iraq is sending fencers in wheelchairs, amputee swimmers, blind runners and paraplegic weightlifters to the Paralympics. Of the athletes with confirmed berths, Paralympic team coaches say, seven are medal contenders.
Working out in sweaty gyms in hardscrabble neighborhoods, with creaky wheelchairs and hand-me-down gear, the Iraqi Paralympic team of 2008 is wrapping up what is surely one of the most trying Olympic training seasons.
The coach of the wheelchair basketball team, Ibrahim Abdullah, a basketball player who did not use a wheelchair, was fatally shot in the head during a firefight. He was 6 feet, 6 inches tall. Players said his head had been visible over a wall as the shooting started.
And a blind athlete, Qasim Muttar, who was a promising player of goalball — soccer played with a ball that contains bells — died after being run over by an American convoy while crossing a street.
Others overcame strikingly long odds.
The poverty that forced Rasul Kadhim to hawk nuts from an iron street cart in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum, as a child also paved his road to Beijing.
In a story typical of the mostly poor disabled men on his team, Kadhim, a weightlifter, sculptured his torso into pure muscle by pushing the 200-pound cart, though polio had paralyzed one of his legs. "I pushed the cart with only one leg," he said. "But I always had the strength, the power."
And in a sad twist, also not atypical, Kadhim's older brother, who had inspired him to leave the cart and go into sports, was killed by a car bomb in 2006 on the same dusty street where Kadhim had worked.
"God willing, I will win a medal for Iraq," he said.
Disabled war veterans were a taboo topic in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That has changed under the U.S. occupation, said Fakhir Ali al-Jamaly, the secretary-general of Iraq's Paralympic committee. New opportunities opened for international competition. At the same time, more athletes disabled in the fighting joined his teams.
The Paralympic team includes men and women wounded in the current war, though none qualified for Beijing. The veterans heading for China fought in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Faraj Hasab Khudhair, Iraq's star wheelchair fencer, lost a leg below the knee to a mortar shell in 1986. Khudhair, a fit, leanly muscled 41-year-old, said he ventured out during U.S. airstrikes in his Diyala Bridge neighborhood of Baghdad to get to training sessions. "When clashes erupt, will that mean I stay home?" he said, sounding as if he were discussing rainy weather.
In a scorching hot, tin-roofed room with a cracked-tile floor, off a twisty back alley in eastern Baghdad, he spins his rattletrap wheelchair in tight circles and practices parries and ripostes. It is too hot to don padding or helmets to spar. A prosthetic leg leaned against the wall.
To be sure, Iraq's regular Olympic team has suffered its share of woes, too.
Two years ago, for example, all 18 members of the Olympic tae kwon do team were kidnapped and killed in Anbar province in western Iraq while returning from a match. Their bodies were later found in a mass grave, still in their tattered sports uniforms.
Ahmed al-Hijiya, who led the National Olympic Committee of Iraq, was kidnapped and killed in 2006.
And this month, the International Olympic Committee provisionally suspended the Iraqi national committee, citing political interference in its makeup. The decision put in doubt whether even the one weightlifter will go to China, but it did not affect the Paralympic team.
From their inception, the Paralympics were an arena for disabled war veterans. They began with a track and field competition organized in 1948 for British veterans of World War II with spinal cord injuries. Over time, the Paralympics drew more athletes with congenital birth defects and injuries from automobile accidents. This year, only a minority of the approximately 4,000 Paralympic competitors are veterans.
After years of war, Iraq's Paralympics team takes prominent position
By Andrew E. Kramer
NEW YORK TIMES
July 08, 2008
www.statesman.com/sports/content/sports/stories/other/07/08/0708iraqdisabled.html
BAGHDAD, Iraq — Iraqis love sports. Anyone who doubts it should consider the rat-a-tat of automatic weapons fired after every Iraqi soccer victory. Yet after five years of war, Iraq's chances of fielding a competitive Olympic team are vanishingly small.
Playing fields, pools and gyms are in disrepair. Athletes are targets for assassination. Only one, a weightlifter, qualified for the Beijing Olympics, the second Summer Games since the U.S. invasion in 2003.
War and hardship, though, have not destroyed all of Iraq's dreams for international competition. The country, which has been in three wars in two decades, has a robust Paralympic team.
"As a country that participated in many wars since 1980, we have many disabled people," said Ahmed Abid Hassan, a wheelchair fencing coach. "Our Paralympic team is better than our Olympic team."
The Olympics and Paralympics are not related, but the organizers have an agreement to hold them in the same city. The Paralympics begin Sept. 6, after the Olympics.
While guiding a squad of fencers in wheelchairs through their paces, he pointed out that the Paralympic team had qualified 20 athletes for the games in Beijing, in contrast to the single Olympic athlete. Twelve of the Paralympic qualifiers are disabled war veterans.
Iraq is sending fencers in wheelchairs, amputee swimmers, blind runners and paraplegic weightlifters to the Paralympics. Of the athletes with confirmed berths, Paralympic team coaches say, seven are medal contenders.
Working out in sweaty gyms in hardscrabble neighborhoods, with creaky wheelchairs and hand-me-down gear, the Iraqi Paralympic team of 2008 is wrapping up what is surely one of the most trying Olympic training seasons.
The coach of the wheelchair basketball team, Ibrahim Abdullah, a basketball player who did not use a wheelchair, was fatally shot in the head during a firefight. He was 6 feet, 6 inches tall. Players said his head had been visible over a wall as the shooting started.
And a blind athlete, Qasim Muttar, who was a promising player of goalball — soccer played with a ball that contains bells — died after being run over by an American convoy while crossing a street.
Others overcame strikingly long odds.
The poverty that forced Rasul Kadhim to hawk nuts from an iron street cart in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum, as a child also paved his road to Beijing.
In a story typical of the mostly poor disabled men on his team, Kadhim, a weightlifter, sculptured his torso into pure muscle by pushing the 200-pound cart, though polio had paralyzed one of his legs. "I pushed the cart with only one leg," he said. "But I always had the strength, the power."
And in a sad twist, also not atypical, Kadhim's older brother, who had inspired him to leave the cart and go into sports, was killed by a car bomb in 2006 on the same dusty street where Kadhim had worked.
"God willing, I will win a medal for Iraq," he said.
Disabled war veterans were a taboo topic in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. That has changed under the U.S. occupation, said Fakhir Ali al-Jamaly, the secretary-general of Iraq's Paralympic committee. New opportunities opened for international competition. At the same time, more athletes disabled in the fighting joined his teams.
The Paralympic team includes men and women wounded in the current war, though none qualified for Beijing. The veterans heading for China fought in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and the Persian Gulf war of 1991.
Faraj Hasab Khudhair, Iraq's star wheelchair fencer, lost a leg below the knee to a mortar shell in 1986. Khudhair, a fit, leanly muscled 41-year-old, said he ventured out during U.S. airstrikes in his Diyala Bridge neighborhood of Baghdad to get to training sessions. "When clashes erupt, will that mean I stay home?" he said, sounding as if he were discussing rainy weather.
In a scorching hot, tin-roofed room with a cracked-tile floor, off a twisty back alley in eastern Baghdad, he spins his rattletrap wheelchair in tight circles and practices parries and ripostes. It is too hot to don padding or helmets to spar. A prosthetic leg leaned against the wall.
To be sure, Iraq's regular Olympic team has suffered its share of woes, too.
Two years ago, for example, all 18 members of the Olympic tae kwon do team were kidnapped and killed in Anbar province in western Iraq while returning from a match. Their bodies were later found in a mass grave, still in their tattered sports uniforms.
Ahmed al-Hijiya, who led the National Olympic Committee of Iraq, was kidnapped and killed in 2006.
And this month, the International Olympic Committee provisionally suspended the Iraqi national committee, citing political interference in its makeup. The decision put in doubt whether even the one weightlifter will go to China, but it did not affect the Paralympic team.
From their inception, the Paralympics were an arena for disabled war veterans. They began with a track and field competition organized in 1948 for British veterans of World War II with spinal cord injuries. Over time, the Paralympics drew more athletes with congenital birth defects and injuries from automobile accidents. This year, only a minority of the approximately 4,000 Paralympic competitors are veterans.