Changing face

BAGHDAD -- Carrying the symbolic dreams of a new Iraq on her shoulders, Ala'a Hikmat sprints around a garbage-strewn dirt track during her evening practice, hopping over a yellow hose-pipe at every turn. The 19-year-old runner from Baghdad, the only woman in Iraq's 45-member delegation to Athens, will compete at the Olympics next month against a vastly faster field in the women's 100- and 200-meter races.

She doesn't expect to win. But her path to the Olympics -- and the exceptional cheer and optimism she's brought to bear on a year of frustrating training in an uncertain war zone -- mirrors the journey of the entire Iraqi Olympic sports movement.

The Iraqi National Olympic Committee is reinventing itself after a horrifying history under Uday Hussein, son of deposed dictator Saddam Hussein. Uday packed the leadership with cronies and was said to have personally supervised the torture of athletes who disappointed him.

Until last year, Iraqi soccer players trembled at the prospect of having their feet caned if they lost at a major tournament. The judo champion who will carry the Iraqi flag at the opening ceremony in Athens -- and his coach -- spent time in Uday's private dungeons after performing below expectation.

Hikmat is part of the new world of Olympic sports in Iraq, which couldn't be more different from the dark and forbidding empire Uday built from the mid-1980s until the war.

"I get more from running than I give to it," she said, seated on a cot in a corner of her family's house that doubles as living room and bedroom. "Who wouldn't love to represent their country?"

She has persevered in a training regime interrupted even last week by shootouts in her neighborhood, university entrance exams, and disappointing waits for visas to train abroad this summer.

"At this point I'm sometimes so fed up that I almost don't want to go to Athens anymore," she said last week after her track and field teammates accidentally left her behind when they departed for a two-week training camp in Jordan.

"But then I remember, I don't want to represent just myself," she said. "Someone who represents only herself has accomplished nothing. I want to represent my country."

Despite pressure from peers who think she's not ladylike, or is even un-Islamic for competing as an athlete, Hikmat is happiest at the track, where almost all her training partners are teenage boys who appear to admire her.

Unlike most other Iraqi Olympic athletes, Hikmat bears no scars from the perverse culture that thrived in national athletics before the war.

For the leadership of the Olympic Committee, it's a different story.

Its officials now work in a rented, airy riverfront villa on the Tigris, near the Green Zone in central Baghdad. Its officials are mostly retired athletes, elected by individual sports federations.

Within minutes, many of them will tell you horror stories about how their careers came to an abrupt end when they crossed Uday.

Jamal Abdulkareem Al-Zubaide coached the national tae kwan do team until 1997, when Uday accused him of trying to undermine his leadership and threw him in prison. Zubaide said he was beaten and shocked electrically during his two months there.

Now Zubaide is a member of the Olympic Committee, and marvels that he can openly approach the committee's president to discuss funding shortfalls or long-term coaching strategy.

And the president, Ahmed al-Samarrai, a former brigadier in the Iraqi Army who defected in 1993 after attracting Uday's scorn, plans to build a torture museum and a new swimming and gymnastics training facility on the site of the former Olympic Committee headquarters, a forbidding structure that was torn down by looters after the war.

Violence still taints his life; last week, assailants attacked Samarrai's convoy in downtown Baghdad, throwing grenades at his car and wounding one of his guards.

"Our mission is to present the new Iraq to the world," Samarrai said just before the failed assassination attempt. "Considering the situation in Iraq, the lack of security, the lack of facilities, it is a miracle that we have any athletes qualifying for the Olympics."

This year, the entire national athletics program had a $10 million budget, set aside by the erstwhile US occupation authority. Samarrai says he needs at least $35 million a year to start building decent sports programs.

Only one weightlifter and the soccer team qualified for the Olympics on merit. The rest of the Iraqi Olympic delegation, Hikmat included, is competing by special invitation.

All this doesn't faze Hikmat. She views herself as a flag-bearer of a new Iraq, a country she hopes will find its equilibrium in time for her to live a peaceful life as a teacher.

Her father died five years ago; her mother, a teacher, has raised her son and daughter alone since then.

Her family was forced to move during the fighting because their landlord raised the rent. Even now, bound for the Olympics, she trains in a pair of second-hand counterfeit Nike sneakers she bought for $10, their fabric so worn out it's almost see-through.

Despite those experiences, she doesn't repeat the commonly voiced complaints heard in Baghdad.

"We must have patience, because nothing can be achieved overnight," Hikmat said of the turbulent life she has led since the US invasion. "It's natural when a war takes place that it takes a long time for things to get back to normal."

Her worries, in general, concern issues far more mundane and personal than Iraq's political trajectory. For instance, she's never run with shorts or the kind of form-fitting body suit that most women track competitors wear.

"What they wear, we consider lingerie in Iraq," she said, laughing. "This is an Islamic country. They would think badly of a girl who wears shorts."

Her mother wears the hijab, or traditional head covering. But Hikmat, whose father was Sunni Muslim and mother Shi'ite, said she doesn't believe her non-denominational Islamic faith should dictate all her life choices.

"I pray, but I don't wear the hijab as I'm supposed to do," she said. "When I run, it's too hot to wear a veil."

At home, she wears pink flip-flops and a T-shirt that says "ELEGANT" across the front. At the track, she keeps her nearly waist-length ponytail together with a white flower-patterned band.

At 5 feet 6 inches and 150 pounds, she's stronger and more muscular than the gaggle of spindly boys with whom she trains.

Until early July, she spent as much time worrying about her university entrance exams as she did planning for the Olympics. Now that she's passed her exam, with just weeks to go, she can focus exclusively on running.

While her outlook is sunny, she has faced her share of hassles. Official Iraqi Olympic team uniforms looted during the war are for sale in markets for $20, but Hikmat doesn't have proper training clothes, much less team gear.

She was supposed to train in Germany for more than a month this summer, like the male runner who left in June, but officials never got her a visa.

Olympic committee officials scolded her for telling reporters she didn't have proper equipment, even though none of them disputed that fact.

With much relief, Hikmat and her coach left for Amman, Jordan, last Thursday to join the rest of the national track team.

At the Olympics, she hopes to top her personal records, which are far slower than the times for most women sprinters in international competition. Hikmat's best time in the 100 meters is 12.5 seconds; in the 200 meters, 24.32 seconds. The times of the winners at this month's US Olympic Trials in those events were 10.97 and 22.28.

"I will not be that well prepared. I will not give my best performance," she said. "I hope that I don't lose the ability to hope."`

Thanassis Cambanis can be reached at tcambanis@globe.com.