Back in The Ring

By Sean Gregory

Last fall, in southern Iraq, a Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) official approached Maurice (Termite) Watkins, 47, at breakfast. Watkins, a professional boxer turned pest-control contractor, had spent the previous six months killing scorpions and camelback spiders around U.S. military bases and reconstruction sites in Iraq. The official, regional coordinator Mike Gfoeller, had heard that Watkins could fight more than mosquitoes. "What are the odds of you getting an Iraqi boxer qualified for the Olympics?" Gfoeller asked. Termite spoke from the heart. "About one in a million."

Those chances seemed good enough for Gfoeller. Iraq had a new boxing coach, and six months later the country had its Athens-bound fighter--Najah Ali, 24, a flyweight with a computer-science degree from Alrafdean University in Baghdad. Freed from the torturous reign of Iraq's former Olympic CEO, Uday Hussein, and spurred by a trickle of private investment in sports, several other Iraqis will join Ali as unlikely Olympians this summer. For the first time since 1988, Iraq's soccer team has qualified for the Olympics. Iraqi women's sports--destroyed under Uday's rule because athletes feared he would rape them--are recovering. A female sprinter, Al'aa Hikmet, will make the trip to Athens. Some 30 Iraqis will march in the Aug. 13 opening ceremonies. During the 2000 Games in Sydney, four Iraqis competed. "We still don't have nearly enough resources," says new Olympic chairman Ahmed al-Samarrai, an exbasketball player who defected to Britain in 1983. "But what we have is much better than nothing. And in Athens we'll be able to show the world that Iraq is back."

Iraq's resurgence gained momentum in January, when Iraqi sports officials elected al-Samarrai as head of the National Olympic Committee of Iraq (N.O.C.I.). Al-Samarrai saw that the N.O.C.I. had to alter its business strategy. Drawing on oil revenues and Saddam Hussein's seized assets, the CPA granted the N.O.C.I. a $10 million operating budget this year and a $3 million capital budget earmarked for a renovation of the national soccer stadium in Baghdad. The N.O.C.I. estimates that it needs $25 million to keep sports going and an additional $98 million to renovate gyms and soccer fields. The Iraqis are used to such shortfalls; Uday diverted Olympic money to his palaces and planes. But in the post-Saddam era, the N.O.C.I. has truly embraced the Olympic ideals: Citius (Swifter)! Altius (Higher)! And now Consortium (Let Coke and Nike pay the bills)!

The sponsorship strategy has yielded a few early successes. For the soccer team, the N.O.C.I. has inked two-year deals with LG Electronics, a South Korean company; Iraqna, a subsidiary of Egyptian conglomerate Orascom; and Bestseller, a Danish apparel company. Each contract is worth between $300,000 and $550,000. The N.O.C.I. has reached out to U.S. companies with less success. A delegation met with Nike and Motorola in April. "It was the pitch from hell," says Hayder al-Fekaiki, director of IraqiSport, a London-based start-up that the N.O.C.I. hired to help negotiate its sponsorship deals. He cited the unfortunate timing: insurgents had just dragged dead contractors through Fallujah. Neither company signed pacts.

Al-Fekaiki says he also met with two representatives from Bechtel, the U.S. construction giant working in Iraq, at a January conference in Amman, Jordan. "We got no active response," he says. "A company like Bechtel is funded by U.S. taxpayers to do a job in Iraq. I don't think it sees its existence in Iraq as long term." Francis Canavan, a Bechtel spokesman in Baghdad, says the employees at the conference do not recall talking to al-Fekaiki. He points out that Bechtel, which won $2.9 billion in reconstruction contracts from the U.S. government, has set aside $25,000 to match, "dollar for dollar," employee contributions for Iraqi school supplies. "To suggest that any decision [on an N.O.C.I. request] reflects our commitment to Iraq is simply unfair," says Canavan.

Although N.O.C.I. officials are quick to express their disappointment at the low level of corporate interest, they acknowledge that given the daily shootings and car bombings, such investment carries great risks and for some companies little reward. "We're trying to sell Nike rights that have no value," says N.O.C.I. adviser Mark Clark. "Let's be realistic--these [companies] have to run a business." So for now donations (54,000 soccer balls from the U.S. State Department) and a sort of international buddy system (Ali is sparring in the U.S.; the weight lifters have trained in Romania) are picking up the slack. With Najah Ali now fearing a hard-charging coach named Termite rather than a psychopath named Uday, come August, sports may bring long-awaited glory to Iraq. And what company wouldn't want a place on the medal stand?