Iraq's Lake of Dreams
Intense efforts are now under way in New York and Iraq to create a rowing club in a place that isn't sure it wants one, by men who are sure that it should. The place is Kurdistan, better known for mountains than rivers and lakes; that's in Iraq, 39% of which is desert. The club—two years in the making—is a symbol of the frailty of Olympic dreams amid the harsh reality of East-West relations.
Those dreams took a severe hit at the Asian Olympic Qualification Regatta in Chungju, South Korea, on the final weekend of April. The best hope of the Iraqi national rowing team, Haeidr Nawzad Hamarasheid in single scull, finished just two boats short of the sixth place needed to get him to London; the double-sculls boat finished a more distant 12th. No Iraqi will row at the 2012 Games, unless one of them receives a "wildcard" invitation by Thursday.
It was an unexpected jolt to a feel-good story that burst into global consciousness in 2010. A four-day clinic on Lake Dukan in Northern Iraq, organized by two coaches in America moved by accounts of rowing amid dead bodies and sniper fire in Baghdad, led to six weeks of training in the U.S. Suddenly the Iraqis were stars, featured in print and video world-wide. And for a while their rowing flourished. In November 2010, Mr. Hamarasheid won a bronze medal at the prestigious Asian Games in Guangzhou, China—impressive for an athlete competing internationally for only two years in a sport relatively new to Iraq.
Soon after, though, Iraqi rowing pulled back from its new friendship. Plans for a clinic in Baghdad in May of 2011 were canceled, and the one coach who traveled from the U.S. found contact cut off abruptly and without explanation. "There is a vocal minority that are still very sensitive about the American presence in Iraq who cause pressure on the guy in the middle," said Matt Smith, secretary general of the international rowing federation known as FISA. He identified the man in the middle as Abdul Salam K. Dawood, president of the Iraqi rowing federation, who in February of this year was arrested without explanation and held for about a week before being released.
Meanwhile, independent of any official affiliation, a group of rowers launched their audacious plan to create a club and staff it with a fulltime coach, all at the site of that first clinic on Lake Dukan.
"We love rowing—it's that simple," said Matt Trevithick, the driving force behind the Lake Dukan Rowing Club. Mr. Trevithick rowed at Boston University (2004-08) and in 2010 worked in the provost's office at the American University of Iraq, Sulaymaniyah (AUIS), about 30 miles from the lake. The idea came to him that May after reading about the Iraqis' attending that one-time clinic. "These guys were training in horrendous conditions on the Tigris, what one article called 'the river of death,'" he said. "Creating a permanent club would benefit the national team—good coaching and safe training—but also serve local interests, and ideally draw from the entire region, getting more people rowing younger."
FISA likes the plan, and the club also has the support of the U.S. government. "We love it when private citizens put their money where their mouth is," said Rebekah Drame, who manages the Sports Diplomacy Program for the State Department in Baghdad.
But none of this enthusiasm translated into help. That was left to Mr. Trevithick and his volunteers, mostly former rowers from Boston University but also including Bruce H. Smith, head of Community Rowing in Boston and one of the coaches at that first clinic. Central to their effort was Azzam Alwash, a U.S. citizen born in Iraq and a founding board member of AUIS, who agreed to use that relationship to secure lakefront land for the club. Mr. Alwash is head of Nature Iraq, an organization dedicated to protecting the country's environment. "If Iraqi rowing does well, it will draw attention to clean up the rivers of Iraq," he said.
Mr. Trevithick and his group began midway through 2010, creating a website and tapping the rowing fraternity for pledges of money and boats; Mr. Azzam leaned on AUIS to sponsor the club. But for 20 months nothing happened at Lake Dukan, a manmade reservoir surrounded by mountains. That changed this March, with a grueling nonstop, 2,500-mile, seven-country trek from Slovenia to the lake.
"We needed to deliver the boats to establish some physical presence at the lake," Mr. Trevithick said. Two German clubs contributed two used racing shells, and one club sold them a used trailer at cost. Two new boats were donated by Filippi Boats of Italy, and shipped to the Slovenian Rowing Club in Bled, site of the 2011 world championships.
Four men met in Bled. Mr. Trevithick and his college rowing buddy Andreas Brinck drove the trailer with two boats from Germany; Mr. Smith flew from Boston; Mr. Azzam came from Milan with a rented van powerful enough to tow four boats. Even before leaving Slovenia, Mr. Smith was called back to Community Rowing on business. So on a cool afternoon this odd apparition hit the road: three men towing an open trailer packed with four racing boats—the longest 42 feet.
The trip was a study in contrasts. Broad, well-maintained highways in Slovenia and Hungary, surprisingly bumpy surfaces in Austria, frustrating one-lane roads in Romania and parts of Bulgaria; busy, modern Bucharest jammed with traffic, and long stretches in Romania with people plowing fields with horses. As the first day came to an end, the trio grasped the reality of their pace: It would be 12 hours of driving before the sun rose again, 24 before it set, and so with the next day.
Turkey was the worst. First they were detained four hours at the border while customs puzzled over their cargo; then they were stopped twice within 20 minutes in speed traps for exceeding the limit by about three miles per hour. In contrast, guards at the Iraq border gleefully recognized their country's newest sport and even posed for pictures, suddenly serious, guns at their sides.
At 4:30 p.m. on the third day—72 hours after leaving Bled—they reached Lake Dukan, tired and dirty. For the two rowers, who did most of the driving, all they wanted was to unload the single sculls and, as Mr. Brinck put it, "get in five good strokes on the lake." But they found the water crowded with speeding motorboats showing little concern for the wake-sensitive visitors.
That chaotic scene foreshadowed the task ahead. While the New York law firm of Lowenstein Sandler labors pro bono to secure the club's nonprofit status amid IRS regulations, Mr. Trevithick negotiates with AUIS so the university can purchase land and hire a coach. All this is happening now, before the club tries to lure the national team to what is essentially a Western project.
"I am optimistic that given a choice between snipers on the Tigris and the serenity of Lake Dukan, they'll choose us," said Mr. Alwash. "Like the movie 'Field of Dreams,' I believe that if we build it, they will come."