BAGHDAD: As Olympic training venues go, the dust-coated weights room tucked down an alley behind Baghdad’s bomb-proof barriers isn’t much.
The glass doors have cracks and so do many of the aging weight stacks. A gutted air conditioner lies abandoned on the floor. There’s no electricity much of the time, anyway.
None of that deters Iraqi weightlifter Safaa Rashid Mahmud al-Jamaili.
After years of war that forced him to stop training, after seeing his brother kidnapped and his family become refugees, the 22-year-old al-Jamaili is headed to the London Games following the doping elimination of another competitor.
“I feel very happy that all my efforts weren’t wasted and that I will join the Olympics,” al-Jamaili said.
Though a last-minute qualifier, he’s determined to bring home Iraq’s first medal in decades, following in the footsteps of another weightlifter, Abdul Wahid Aziz, who won bronze for in 1960 and remains Iraq’s sole Olympic medalist.
Al-Jamaili faces an uphill battle in a country still wracked by violence and with a meagre budget for athletics.
Life may be a little easier, but sports remain a low priority in Iraq. Widespread sectarian violence has dropped in recent years, but shootings and bombings still occur nearly daily.
“My situation, and the situation in Iraq, is hard,” al-Jamaili said after a workout at the shabby sports club in a Baghdad neighbourhood where, just days earlier, a car bomb nearby had killed 11 people. He has no access to nutritional supplements, no high-tech equipment, no team of specialists.
But al-Jamaili has already overcome greater challenges just to keep competing.
His family fled their home due to the violence, but especially after his older brother was kidnapped and held for three days.
Al-Jamaili, then 17, was with his brother on that day in 2007. He remembers walking together, feeling lighthearted because he had just returned from winning a gold medal in a regional youth championship. Then, several armed men accosted the brothers. Al-Jamaili managed to run away, but his brother was captured.
The family sold possessions and borrowed money to pay a ransom before his brother was finally returned. Then, they all fled north and al-Jamaili worked full-time to help the family earn money. Weightlifting was out of the question.
When subsiding violence allowed the family to return the next year, he went back to the sport he’d begun when he was 10.
“I felt I’d lost all my strength. But after time and training, my strength started to return,” he said.
His strength returned quickly enough for him to win six gold medals that year at the Arab Championships in Lebanon.
These days, al-Jamaili lives with 13 other family members in a four-room house. He works out twice a day for a total of three hours, sometimes on his own, sometimes with his trainer, Bilal Adnan.
But his efforts didn’t pay off at the Asian Championships in April in South Korea. He came fourth in the 85kg category and fell short of qualifying for an Olympic berth.
“I was mentally destroyed,” he recalled. “I said to myself, ‘All my hard work and my dreams – all of this has disappeared.'”
Then, nearly two months later, he got new hope following the disqualification of one of the participants in Korea.
Iraq’s Olympic Committee swiftly put together trials and Al-Jamaili won.
Next month, he’ll travel to London as the sole qualifying member on the nine-person Iraqi team. The rest needed wild cards.
Having only just qualified, al-Jamaili realizes his own chances may be slim, but he’s refuses to let that discourage him.
“God willing, I am determined to get a medal,” he said. “And hopefully, make the Iraqi people happy.” (AP)