Dissolution of committee may get Iraqis bounced

The Iraqis, who were the feel-good story of the Athens Games when their soccer team made the medal round, may not be competing in Beijing unless the government reverses its decision to dissolve the national Olympic committee.

FIFA, the international soccer federation, already has threatened to ban Iraq from international play for a year, which would prevent the Asian champions from qualifying for the 2010 World Cup.

The International Olympic Committee, which has criticized the Iraqi government's "serious interference," will discuss the issue when its executive board meets next week in Athens. A spokesman for the interim Olympic committee named by the government said that decision "is firm and will not be reconsidered."

While the stated reasons for the dissolution were corruption and lack of a quorum (four committee members were kidnapped two years ago and two later resigned), the move has been seen as a Shiite power play against the Sunnis, who have four committee members left over from the Saddam Hussein era, when his brutal son Uday ran the Olympic committee and had athletes who displeased him tortured.

It's happened before

If Paul Hamm gets a place on the Olympic gymnastics team despite skipping next month's trials, it won't be the first time it has happened. In 1996, Shannon Miller and Dominique Moceanu sat out the Boston trials with injuries, were put on the squad based on their scores from the national championships, and went on to win the team gold medal with the rest of the Magnificent 7 in Atlanta. Miller, a two-time world titlist, and Moceanu, the previous year's national champion, had stellar résumés, so there was no outcry. Nor will there be about Hamm, who is the defending Olympic champion and was comfortably ahead at the end of the first day at last week's nationals in Houston when he broke a bone on his right hand on the parallel bars. If his post-surgical rehab goes well, Hamm should be back in top form by the time the Games start in August. At the very least, he should be a lock to make the team as a specialist. He won the silver on high bar in Athens and is a former world champion on floor . . . Hamm's twin brother, Morgan, who tore a chest muscle last October, qualified for the trials after winning on floor at nationals and finishing third in vault and high bar. Stanford senior David Sender, who didn't make last year's global team, won the all-around title by a quarter of a point ahead of Jonathan Horton. Blaine Wilson, the Athens team medalist who was making a long-shot bid for his fourth Olympic team, walked off the floor and out of the sport after just two events. "It was just time," said the 33-year-old Wilson, who was worried about injuring himself . . . The entire global gold-medal team plus three members of the 2006 silver-medal squad will be competing in next week's US women's gymnastics championships at Boston University's Agganis Arena. Besides last year's captain, Alicia Sacramone of Winchester (the only New Englander in the competition), and world all-around titlist Shawn Johnson, there's Nastia Liukin, Samantha Peszek, Shayla Worley, Ivana Hong, and Bridget Sloan from the 2007 squad, plus Chellsie Memmel, Jana Bieger, and Ashley Priess from the previous year's team. The top 12 finishers qualify for next month's Olympic trials in Philadelphia.

Precious medals

Now that he's admitted (under oath at the Trevor Graham trial) that he was doped in 2000, will runner Antonio Pettigrew lose the Olympic gold medal he won in the 4 x 400 relay? And if so, will his teammates (including anchorman Michael Johnson) also lose theirs? That will be up to the international track and field federation and the IOC, which already stripped the medals from all of Marion Jones's Sydney relay teammates. The issue already has come up once with the men's relay when Jerome Young had his medal taken away for doping. Though the IOC wanted his teammates' medals revoked as well, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled otherwise, saying the rules at the time didn't provide for it. One key distinction: Young was an alternate who didn't compete in the final. Pettigrew ran second leg . . . Oscar Pistorius probably will have three chances, all in July, to get the qualifying time he needs (45.55 seconds) to compete in the 400 meters in Beijing. Pistorius, the blade-running South African double amputee, is planning on running in international meets in Milan, Rome, and Lucerne, Switzerland. He turned down an invitation to run this weekend in Berlin against world champion Jeremy Wariner, opting to compete in Paralympic qualifying events in the Netherlands . . . Saturday's Reebok Grand Prix meet in New York will feature two terrific sprint showdowns. The women's 100 meters puts Allyson Felix up against the last two world champions, Veronica Campbell-Brown and Lauryn Williams. The men's 100 is a duel between world champ Tyson Gay and Jamaica's Usain Bolt, whose 9.76 this month was just two-100ths of a second off countryman Asafa Powell's global mark . . . Larry Newman, the intrepid New England correspondent for Track & Field News, points out that the last three women to hold the US record for 10,000 meters have Massachusetts roots - Shalane Flanagan (Marblehead), Deena Kastor (Waltham), and Lynn Jennings (Harvard). Flanagan, by the way, is the first woman to own both the 5,000 and 10,000 marks since Mary Slaney in the early 1980s . . . Kastor, Magdalena Lewy-Boulet, and Blake Russell, who made the Olympic marathon team in last month's trials in Boston, will have themselves a celebratory jaunt through Central Park a week from Saturday, when they take the line for the New York Mini 10K . . . It took another three months, but US race walker Philip Dunn got his ticket to Beijing. Though he won the February trials for the 50-kilometer race in Miami, Dunn hadn't met the Olympic "B" standard of 4 hours 7 minutes. He finally did it at the World Cup in Russia, heel-and-toeing a 4:05:10.

Saving the best

The US men's under-23 soccer team, which dropped all three games to Turkey, Ivory Coast, and Italy at the Toulon tournament in France, had only one field player (defender Kamani Hill) from the squad that qualified for the Games. Coach Peter Nowak, who wanted to check out more candidates, used all 22 players, including three goalkeepers . . . No chance that the US women's soccer team will be bushwhacked again by Brazil at Olympus. The Americans, who were stunned, 4-0, by the Brazilians in last year's World Cup semifinals, will play them three times before the Games - at next month's Peace Queen tournament in South Korea, then in their final two July warm-ups in Denver and San Diego. The Brazilians, by the way, had to struggle to qualify after losing to Argentina in the South American tourney. They had to beat Ghana in a playoff to claim the final spot in the 12-team field . . . Kirsten Groome, who missed out on earning an Olympic open-swim berth at this year's world championships in Spain, gets another chance this weekend in Beijing's 10-kilometer test event. If she or two-time US titlist Chloe Sutton finishes in the top 15, there's a return ticket waiting. Mark Warkentin already has the US men's spot . . . The controversial Tibet leg of the Olympic torch relay has been shortened from three days to one (likely June 18 or 19) to help make up time for the three days that were lost during the mourning period for the Chinese earthquake victims. The Sichuan leg, which was scheduled for the middle of next month, has been postponed until early August . . . The US men's and women's basketball teams had better stock up on NoDoz at Olympus. All of their preliminary games will be at night (morning in the States), with the men playing the Chinese and the Spanish world champions at 10:15 p.m., the same time the women will be facing Mali and New Zealand. The men's team will be picked at the end of June after a three-day camp in Las Vegas and return there three weeks later for five days of training and an exhibition game against the Canadians, then will head to China.

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com; material from Olympic committees, international and domestic sports federations, interviews, and wire services was used in this report.