Her starting blocks are two uneven, shallow holes kicked out of the dirt track. There is no discernible starting line and the finish 100m away is just a scratch in the sand. The track is rock hard and unforgiving; no serious athlete would consider running here. But for decades the al-Kishafa stadium in Baghdad has been the training ground of Iraq’s athletic champions, and Ala’a Hekmet, a charming, intensely focused 18-year-old, is its latest star.
”It’s a courageous track, that produces the most courageous athletes in Iraq,” says her coach Abdul Zahra al-Soudani. For the past hour he has been watching Hekmet stretching, jogging gently and working on her starts.
Today is a light workout. She has an important race in a few days and then she is off to a training camp in Germany – the final preparation for the race of her life: the 100 metres at the Olympics in Athens in August.
Hekmet has the ease of a natural sprinter. Her shoulders are broad, her thigh muscles as thick as twisted steel cables. Al-Soudani first spotted her at a students’ track meet and started training her in February last year, just before the war. But, the invasion having put that on hold until last summer, her style is still a little raw. Her arms flail to her sides and she leans forward too much as she runs, says her coach. But still, she is fast. She set her personal best on a proper track in Jordan last year at 12,5 seconds, and she should push below 12 seconds this summer. That would have been enough to break the world record in the late 1920s, but will leave her some way off the pace of her idol Marion Jones when she runs in Athens, and a very long way behind the 10,49 world record, set 16 years ago by Florence Griffith Joyner.
”At the Olympics all the athletes will be older than me and more experienced than me,” Hekmet says. ”Their countries are not like ours. There, lots of young girls are athletes, here there are very few. All the professionals will be faster than me. It will be a very difficult competition.”
Like many in the small group of Iraqi athletes competing in Athens, Hekmet, Iraq’s only female competitor, was excused from having to qualify, thanks to a wild-card entry system designed to include athletes from across the world. Each morning she studies computer maintenance at a local college, then, most afternoons her devoted mother Hanna takes her in a taxi across town to the al-Kishafa stadium for training.
The family comes from a poor middle-class background. Hekmet’s father was an army officer who died of a heart attack five years ago. Her mother, a sprinter herself in her student days, was forced out of her job as a school teacher because of a row with Saddam Hussein’s regime, and now the family live in a small rented house with a corrugated iron roof, little running water and only intermittent electricity. Hekmet receives a stipend of 75 000 Iraqi dinars (R360) a month from the national Olympic committee, barely enough to pay for taxis, her food and the second-hand pair of tatty Nike trainers she picked up in Jordan. Several times, while returning from training, she has had to dodge gun battles in the street outside her home in the heart of Baghdad. ”I can run, but not faster than a bullet,” she says.
She talks about qualifying to become an engineer in the future, but clearly loves her sport. ”If you don’t love running, you can’t win. When I reach the limit of my energy as I’m run ning, I just feel I want to push more and more. At the start line you feel very scared but once you start running you forget everything. All you feel is your body moving and then you reach the limit and you know you are going to win.”
Six Iraqi athletes have been given wild cards. They include a second track and field athlete, A’ala Hussain, who will run in the men’s 400-metre hurdles; Raid Abbas Rashid, a tae kwon do fighter; Najah Salman Ali, a boxer; and Ali Abdul Munim-Mohammad, a weightlifter. One male swimmer has also been invited and two young Iraqi men, Mohammad Abbas and Zaid Saeed, are competing for the place at a swimming camp in Vancouver.
The only Iraqi sportsmen to qualify on their own merit for the Olympics are the under-23 football team, who came top of their group in a remarkable final match on Wednesday, becoming the first Iraqi football team to reach the Olympics. They beat Saudi Arabia 3-1 and watched their main rivals Kuwait and Oman end their match in a goalless draw. Minutes after the final whistle the streets of Baghdad erupted into a torrent of gunfire in celebration.
The officials in charge of rejuvenating Iraq’s sports talk in hallowed terms of the effect it may have. Several times over the past year, officials from the US-led Coalition Provisional Authority have stood in public with athletes chanting their new slogan ”Iraq is Back”, as if sport alone will be enough to overcome the failures of the occupation.The US authorities have given $10m for a sports programme in Iraq and an additional $3m to rebuild the al-Shaab stadium, the biggest pitch in Baghdad.
”Sport was in a mess. I think if we start with sport then we can get security through sport,” says Ahmed al-Samarrai, the head of Iraq’s Olympic Committee, who defected from the Iraqi military and fled to Britain in 1983. ”Where there is football you can find the unity of all the Iraqi people, whatever their colour, or religion or ethnicity – and then you start to break the ice. When the Iraqi flag is there in Athens, the civilised world will be delighted to see Iraq is back again in the shape of democracy and freedom.”
Raid Abbas Rashid, Iraq’s tae kwon do champion, is 27, tall and stocky and wears a thick dark beard. For a man with such a heavy build he is surprisingly supple and fights with a tightly-controlled aggression. In 1980, Rashid’s father and uncle were executed in the same week. His father, Abbas Rashid Abdullah, had been close to Saddam, and was eliminated for being a possible rival. Seven years later his brother, Rashid, was also executed. Each time the family had to pay for the executioner’s bullets. And yet the athlete chose not to keep a low profile, as might have been wise; he joined the national tae kwon do team under Saddam, earned a third dan black belt, and won medals across the Arab world.
Rashid took up tae kwon do when he was 11, graduated in sports studies from Baghdad University and worked in a sweet shop until he gave up to concentrate on his sport. ”Because my life was very tough, my childhood was deprived of everything in life, I had to fight. I grew older and I found myself loving tae kwon do. Some kind of cruelty inside me began to rise up. That is why when I fight I feel satisfied.”
Of all Iraq’s Olympians, he has the best chance of a top-level ranking, perhaps even a medal. ”First of all, just being part of this Olympic championship is a great thing for me, but my aim is to win something,” he says.
Iraq has taken part in the Olympics before but has only ever won one medal – a weight-lifting bronze in 1960. Saddam was determined to change that, putting his eldest son, Uday, in charge of the national Olympic team. Uday’s control of the team was through fear and intimidation. Those who failed to perform well enough were jailed and beaten. His Olympic committee building became a private jail, replete with torture devices, until it was flattened by an airstrike during the war.
Rashid never suffered from this, but his teammate and now coach Ali Hussein Ajar did. In 1996 Ajar, now 30, won gold in tae kwon do at the Arab championship. Two years later, at the next championships, he won only silver, news that was received very badly on his return to Baghdad. ”There was an order from above saying I should leave the sport for good and I should be jailed for three months. I have been trying to forget these days for so long,” he says. ”They call you at your house and ask you to go to the jail. If you don’t go they will take you and your family. So I went there on my own and spent three months in jail.”
After he came out he stopped competing. The tae kwon do union wrote to Uday just before the war, asking if Ajar could be reinstated. ”Uday wrote back and he said: ‘I accept, but only after the rains come in June.’ You know Iraq. It never rains in June.”
But Uday’s particular passion, and victim, was the national football side. Basim Abbas, now 22, newly-married and captain of the under-23 Olympic team, was jailed several times. In 2001 he was ordered to step in and play for al-Zawra, Iraq’s leading club, in an Asian competition. He had a strike at goal halfway through the game but missed, and his side eventually lost. ”Before the game, Uday told us: ‘If you don’t win, I’ll make you walk back to Baghdad from Jordan.”’ Abbas eventually spent six days in a jail at Radwaniyah and was ordered never to play again.
”Now, as sportsmen, we feel we can play freely, but today the problem is security,” he says. Security is so bad that for the past year Iraq’s club league has been cancelled. Abbas plays football professionally, though his monthly salary is just £140 – almost what it cost him to buy his own pair of blue Nike Air Zoom Total 90 boots. He has been offered jobs at respected professional clubs in the Gulf and in Egypt, but Iraqi officials are reluctant to let him go.
Not that all the remnants of the old regime have been swept away. Abbas’s coach Adnan Hamid is a former Iraqi star who was close to Uday and who clearly loathes the new American rulers of Iraq. ”The situation of the team is very difficult because we are under occupation,” he says. He scoffs at criticisms of Uday and his imprisonment of footballers. ”Is it better now or as it was before? Is it better to have your country occupied or just to have some small punishments? There is killing everywhere now and nobody can be sure of his life.”
Back at her home, Ala’a Hekmet sits at a small dining table with her mother, dreaming of what it will be like to step out into the stadium in Athens before a crowd of tens of thousands. ”I couldn’t even think that I would be in a team going to Athens,” she says. ”I haven’t trained well and Iraq has been under occupation, and it is difficult to expect anyone from here would go to Athens. But I will be representing my country and that is something I could never believe I would do.” — Â