Even so, the East African nation is sending half a dozen athletes to the Games. Much of their training has been at Mogadishu’s ruined stadium. Safia Abukar Hussein, 19, is scheduled to run in the women’s 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter races although she has never won a regional competition. When she was named to the team last October, her own father rejected the whole idea. He wasn’t going to risk his daughter’s chances of finding a proper Muslim husband by letting her make a public spectacle of herself in a skimpy track outfit. Eventually he consented–for his country’s sake. “All we have done, we have done so that Somalia can be remembered,” says Farah Weheliye Addo, chairman of the Somali Olympic Committee.
Forget the medals and the record books. For some teams, just appearing in Sydney is the grand prize. Being there is a way to remind the world (potential aid donors especially) that you exist. “Showing the flag” doesn’t quite capture the idea–East Timor, barely a year old and still in ruins from its quarter-century independence struggle against Indonesia, has no Olympic committee, so its four athletes must compete as “individual Olympic athletes” without a national flag or anthem. The Palestinian team’s two athletes have a flag and an anthem but no country–under International Olympic Committee rules, Palestine is a “self-rule area.” At least it has a practical-length name. The 11 competitors from the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia tend to be tagged with the soulless acronym FYROM because their country’s proper name is such a mouthful–and Greece jealously reserves the name Macedonia for its north-central administrative region.
People from most countries can barely imagine the obstacles faced by some of these athletes. Somali marathoner Abukar Ahmed Mohammed, 19, got his first pair of running shoes when he began training for distance events in early 1999. For months he has worked out twice a day for the 42-kilometer event, and he’s still wearing the same pair. “They told me I would get new shoes for the Olympics,” he says. “I want to set a world record.” (His best marathon time so far is 2:15, only 10 minutes off the fastest 42 kilometers ever run.)
To top off their problems, Hussein and Mohammed had no passports. How could they get to Sydney with no government to issue proper travel documents? Easy. Somali Olympic organizers simply paid a visit to Mogadishu’s sprawling Bhakara market. Not far from a Kalashnikov dealer’s stall a merchant was selling passports that had been looted years earlier from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Somalia’s athletes have no monopoly on hardship. Before Indonesia pulled out of East Timor last year, the occupying Army joined pro-Jakarta militias in an orgy of looting and burning to punish the separatist majority. “What they didn’t take they destroyed,” says Frank Fowley, a U.N. civil-affairs official who has worked closely with local Olympians. “The athletes had nothing. They trained using whatever came to hand.” Sydney-bound weight-lifter Martinho da Arajuo, 27, improvised his own set of weights from construction pipes and truck transmissions. Lightweight boxer Victor Ramos, 30, a silver medalist in the 1997 Southeast Asian Games, discovered that the military had turned his gym into a torture center. Every piece of equipment was gone. In July the four athletes were flown to the city of Darwin, where the Australian Olympic Committee is paying for their room, board and lodging as a gesture of friendship.
Life may be less desperate for Macedonian athletes, but it’s anything but easy. Nearly a decade after their country’s peaceful secession from Yugoslavia they have yet to emerge from the shadow of war, chaos and repression that continues to blanket the Balkans. “We are a small country with very limited funds,” says the Macedonian Olympic Committee’s secretary general, Zoran Gapic. “Sports have not been much of a priority. This has forced sports organizations to be very creative.” In fact, this year marks the first time since independence that the country has taken part in the Summer Games. Passing the hat, the MOC has managed to raise more than $100,000 for the trip to Sydney. The team includes at least one potential medalist: freestyle weight-lifter Nasir Gaxhihanov, a three-time European Champion.
Despite their problems, the Macedonians draw envious glances from Montenegro. The rump Yugoslav Republic’s people tend to be lumped with the Serbs–by everyone except the Serbs, who seem increasingly convinced that the whole world is out to get them. “We can’t participate as an independent state in any international sports forum–only as part of the Yugoslav teams,” says Mishko Jovevic, a Montenegrin journalist. “It’s hard on the players when even the Serbian fans boo them.” That doesn’t stop the people of Montenegro from rooting for homegrown heroes in Yugoslav uniforms. Among the favorites this year in Sydney are the two-man volleyball team of Vladimir Batez and Goran Vujevic, who won a bronze medal in Atlanta.
All the same, many athletes and their national fans regard the Games’ outcome as almost beside the point. “I don’t expect to be winning any medals,” says Palestinian women’s 50-meter freestyle swimmer Samar Nassar, a West Bank-born molecular biologist who lives in Amman. She freely admits she’s not even close to world-class time in her event. “My main goal in life was to make it to the Olympics. So this, I guess, is the accomplishment of my goal.”
Whatever the odds of winning, national fans everywhere will epoxy themselves to the nearest TV for the duration of the Games. “The best part will be hearing our country’s name read out to the world,” says Hikmete Slmani, 25, a psychology student in Skopje, the FYROM capital. A few resourceful Somalis can be expected to tune their generator-powered sets to live feeds via satellite from Sydney. U.N. officials are trying to persuade broadcasters to beam at least some live coverage of East Timor’s Olympians to their fans at home. If the deal comes through, emergency shipments of portable TVs will be distributed throughout the island–including the camps in West Timor which still hold some 100,000 refugees. Whatever the medal count, the home viewers will have cause to cheer. And that’s a thing they desperately need.
