Track and field competitor Dana Hussein of the Iraqi national Olympic team displays her country's flag upon her arrival at the airport for the Beijing 2008 Olympics. - AP

BEIJING (AP):

SOME ATHLETES have been through far more adversity than others to reach the Beijing Olympics. Iraqi sprinter Dana Hussein is one of them.

A sniper took a potshot at her while she was training in Baghdad. She runs in donated spikes. And all the risks she takes were almost for nothing: A dispute with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) nearly kept Iraq out of the Games.

Triumphs of the human spirit; it's not winning but taking part. Hussein embodies both those sporting ideals. In Beijing, the terrors of Baghdad are being replaced by a new fear: having to measure her speed against the world's best.

She expects to grow through the experience, and overcome her fear, if not win.

How fast can you run? "I don't know," she said yesterday.

Like the wind? "I hope so, God willing."

Desert flower

Hussein is like a desert flower, somehow able to blossom in a hostile environment. Iraqi life, she says, has made her mentally tough. She expects that to help her when she crouches in the blocks and looks down the track - 100 metres that the 21-year-old will need to run faster than ever to get past the first heats.

Her personal best, 11.7 seconds, is slower than the Olympic qualifying standard. The IOC says all four Iraqi athletes in Beijing got special invitations to be here. Although there's been talk in the past of doing away with Olympic wild cards for athletes who don't make the grade, only the hardhearted would argue that the Iraqis should have been locked out.

Since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein, athletes in various sports have been kidnapped or killed in Iraq. Before that, Saddam's son Odai was in charge of sports and put athletes and players through hell, torturing and jailing those that disappointed or crossed him. Some have spoken of being shackled for days against walls, of beatings, whippings and executions.

And sports in Iraq have shown a rare power to unite amid disunity: Iraqi victory in the prestigious football Asian Cup in 2007 - with one Kurd, one Shiite and one Sunni leading the attack - unleashed a flood of joy.

Last-minute deal

Given the past, it would have been a crime had the IOC and Iraqi officials not come to their senses and struck a last-minute deal that allowed Iraq to take part in Beijing. Hussein had wept bitterly, head bowed, tears dripping down her nose, when she was first told last month that she and other Iraqis could not compete because the IOC was angry that the Iraqi government had dismissed the country's Olympic Committee and appointed its own body that the IOC would not recognise.

Her coach tried to console Hussein by saying that perhaps she could compete at the London Olympics in 2012.

"In this horrible situation, who can say I'll even be alive in 2012?" Hussein wailed, in a scene filmed by CNN.