The fear is gone

Iraqi wrestler Ahamad Weali remembers when one of the Iraqi wrestlers vanished at an Arabian tournament. "The whole team was punished," Weali says. "They called us all together after our return and told us that we would receive awards from Uday Hussein. We were taken to the prison, where all of our hair was shaved off and we were beaten with ropes and chains. That was for the Greco-Roman wrestlers. The freestyle wrestlers got electric shocks."

That was the fear that Iraqi athletes lived with during the two decades when Saddam Hussein's older son (a.k.a. "The Butcher's Boy") ran the national Olympic committee. Under his rule, making the national team was often a ticket to the torture chamber if they didn't perform well.

"We were afraid to represent our country," said Weali, 24, who is one of several Iraqi athletes getting a fresh start in the US. "The dream was a fear for us."

The nightmare ended last year after the regime was toppled and Uday's corpse was found riddled with bullets from a shootout with American soldiers. Since then, Iraq's sports program has been rebuilding from the ground up, with a new Olympic committee and millions of dollars from the International Olympic Committee, international sports federations, and foreign governments. "Iraq is back," proclaims Maurice "Termite" Watkins, the American who coaches the boxing team. "That's what we say every day at practice."

It will take years, though, before Iraq's international sports program is back to what it was before the old regime's abuses and ongoing war damage reduced it to ruins.

Virtually every competitive venue and training facility has been destroyed, looted, or turned into something else during the war and its aftermath. The men's soccer team had to play its home Olympic qualifying matches in neighboring Jordan because its stadium was being used as a tank park.

With their country still in turmoil, the Iraqi athletes have become nomads, traveling to whichever country offers them a place to train and plane tickets to get there.

Najah Ali, the country's best boxer, and wrestlers Muhammed Mohammed and Ali Salman have been living at US Olympic Committee training complexes. The archers trained last summer at the USOC site in Chula Vista, Calif. Two swimmers are working out with Canada's Olympic hopefuls in Vancouver. The soccer team prepared for its matches in Germany.

Whatever it takes to get them there, the Iraqis will have a team competing at the Athens Games in August, with approximately 30 athletes marching behind the national flag.

After being expelled from the Olympic movement last year, Iraq is back in the IOC's good graces. Its 41 sports federations and 214 clubs have been reorganized and held free elections to choose their leaders for the first time in more than 35 years. Money, coaching, and training support, much of it from the US government and USOC, have been flowing. The IOC and USOC haven't put a dollar figure on the amount of aid.

"We are running in the right direction," says Mustafa Saraj, international affairs director for Iraq's national Olympic committee.

Still, the Iraqis are years behind the rest of the world. If the IOC hadn't given them a half-dozen wild-card entrants in sports like track and field and swimming, Iraq would have had no individual athletes qualified for this summer's Games.

Except for the soccer players, none of the athletes are at a world-class level, and the development pipeline has dried up.

"There's nobody behind them." says Watkins of the shrunken pool of world-class athletes in Iraq. "For 10 years, they didn't have any incentive to go up there."

Under the old regime, a poor performance brought more than personal disappointment. If an athlete or team failed to live up to Uday's expectations, they frequently would be summoned to the nine-story Olympic headquarters in Baghdad, which had a 30-cell dungeon with a spiked "iron maiden," and they would be punished in medieval fashion.

"I was lucky, because I would win my competitions," says Ali, the boxer, who'll be competing in Athens as a wild-card entrant. "But I heard about all these things, especially about the soccer team."

Uday, who also ran the soccer federation, singled out what he considered "his" team for particularly brutal punishment. After a 1997 loss to Kazakhstan in a World Cup qualifying match, the players were caned on the soles of their feet. After other defeats, they were dragged along pavement until their skin was scraped raw, then forced to jump into a vat of raw sewage.

For athletes in other sports, floggings were so routine that they now describe them matter-of-factly.

"These guys are candy-coating it," says Watkins, a 47-year-old Texas pest controller who was working for the Coalition Provisional Authority before he was asked by the new Iraqi sports ministry to coach the boxers. "I've seen pictures. When they say they were beaten, it wasn't like a spanking. They had blood running down their backs."

For athletes who might have considered defecting while competing out of the country, the regime had a sinister deterrent. Families and teammates of athletes who didn't return were tortured. "I had to bring my father with me to the headquarters," says Ali, "to guarantee in writing that I would come back."

Over time, the fear -- grounded in grisly reality -- proved corrosive to what had once been a competitive national sports program. Iraq, which had sent a team to every summer Olympics since World War II, had won only won one medal, but its wrestlers, boxers, and weightlifters had been respectable and its soccer team had been one of the best in the Middle East.

But as word of the punishment faced by top athletes under Uday spread, promising athletes (particularly women, who feared rape) stopped trying to make the national teams. Four years ago, Iraq sent only four athletes to the Sydney Olympics, less than a 10th of the number that attended the 1980 Games in Moscow.

"There were athletes avoiding to be involved," said wrestler Ahmed Jasim. "Because they were afraid of being tortured and jailed by Uday."

When word first spread that Uday was dead, the athletes were skeptical. "He and the others were thought to be like gods," says Saraj. "They can live forever."

Once the corpse was shown on television, it was clear that the "age of fear" had ended. "We can taste the difference," says Saraj, "between the old regime and the way things are now."

The most striking rebirth, which started with a June 2003 meeting in Kuwait City of international Olympic officials, has been the spirit of the athletes, who for the first time can compete without dreading Uday's sadistic whimsy.

"It is totally different now," says Weali. "We can feel we are real athletes. The age of fear, for ourselves and our families, is over."

Which is why none of them are complaining about the nomadic life. "This is a privilege for us," says Jasim.

After working out on a threadbare mat on a stipend of $2 per month under Uday, the Iraqi wrestlers who have been training in the US have been working in fully equipped gyms, sleeping in well-appointed dorm rooms, and eating in buffet-style cafeterias. "It is like the American dream," said Jasim, who is staying on after the Titan Games to train in Colorado Springs.

In less than two months, the Iraqis will take their place in the parade of nations at the opening ceremonies in Athens, and for the first time in two decades, they will compete for the joy of sport alone.

"Now when I fight, I fight for my country and myself," Ali says. "Not for some guys."