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Beijing: Some athletes have been through far more adversity than others to reach the Beijing Olympics. Iraqi sprinter Dana Hussain 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 nearly kept Iraq out of the games.
In Beijing, the terrors of Baghdad are being replaced by a new fear: having to measure her speed against the world's best.
Iraqi life, she says, has made her mentally tough. She expects that to help her when she runs the 100 metres. 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.
Danger in sport
Since the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussain, athletes have been kidnapped or killed in Iraq. But sports in Iraq have shown a rare power to unite amid disunity: the Iraqi victory in the Asian Cup in 2007 unleashed a flood of joy.
Hussain had wept bitterly when she was first told last month that she and other Iraqis could not compete due to the debacle between the IOC and Iraq's Olympic committee.
"Who can say I'll even be alive in 2012?" Hussain had told CNN.
It's not usual in interviews to ask an athlete whether they're afraid of being killed.
Discus thrower Haidir Nasir's reply was a simple "yes".
The trip from his southern city of Najaf to training camps in Baghdad means taking dangerous roads.
"A lot of my friends, neighbours, people I work with in the sports world have been abducted, hijacked or even killed," he said.
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