the Shackle Report

The week’s reading, straight off the razor wire:

Makes it all seem worth it:

ATHLETES DISABLED BY WARS LEAD IRAQI TEAM IN WORLD GAMES

Iraqis love sports. Anyone who doubts it should consider the rat-a-tat of automatic weapons fired after every Iraqi soccer victory.

—Well, I’m not gonna doubt it unless they put the guns down. But maybe the shooting of the guns isn’t a good way to measure their enthusiasm. They seem to kind of do that whatever happens.

Yet after five years of war, Iraq’s chances of fielding a competitive Olympic team are vanishingly small.

—Give it time. When Head Drilling makes it out of the Special Olympics and into the big time, they’ll take the gold. Weird the Scots didn’t come up with that one.

And a blind athlete, Qasim Muttar, who was a promising player of goalball — soccer played with a ball that contains bells — died after being run over by an American convoy while crossing a street.

— Americans are notoriously competitive, you can tell by the missiles and bombs if you doubt it, and goalball is starting to really take off in America. Here they call it “Libertyball”, though.

The poverty that forced Rasul Kadhim to hawk nuts from an iron street cart in Sadr City, a Baghdad slum, as a child also paved his road to Beijing. In a story typical for the mostly poor, disabled men on his team, Mr. Kadhim, a weight lifter, sculptured his torso into pure muscle by pushing the 200-pound cart, though polio had paralyzed one of his legs. “I pushed the cart with only one leg,” he said. “But I always had the strength, the power.”
And in a sad twist, also not atypical, Mr. Kadhim’s older brother, who had inspired him to leave the cart and go into sports, was killed by a car bomb in 2006 on the same dusty street where Mr. Kadhim had worked.
“God willing, I will win a medal for Iraq,” he said.

—He’s shown himself to be pretty much on your side so far.

Two years ago, for example, all 18 members of the Olympic tae kwon do team were kidnapped and killed in Anbar Province in western Iraq while returning from a match.

—Ok, Ok, you guys love sports! Got it!

— Scot Crawford