That was no problem, we said. We were here to cover the Iraqi national sport of … rowing? Occasionally they would come back our way and we would wave like cheesy Americans. Then we would start filming again, in the direction of the Ministry of Information.
When we weren’t really shooting Matthew delivered a great line to the camera with exquisite poise. ‘The acid test was what would it be like to row on that?’
A stretch of water was a stretch of water to me. Wind and currents, I understood, but at the end of the day it was just water. Matthew would have gone through this psychological preparation thousands of times, visualising his arena as great sportsmen do. This came with baggage though – the nervous energy and responsibility which any cultured individual would feel, smelling that history all around and picturing walking his equipment down to the shore, knowing that these two budding Olympians had done this time and time again in among the dead bodies of the Tigris.
That night I had a surprise for Sir Matthew. Our conditions may have been basic at the Bureau but we did share a chef with Reuters next door. He was called Ayyub-al-Obeidi. His CV was interesting. His last position of note? Well, decent staff are hard to come by these days. He was only the chief chef for Saddam Hussein, wasn’t he? What a story that was. It was like one of those seven degrees of separation things, where you can trace a path to Hitler through seven connections – except this time we got there in one. He didn’t speak much English, and though always friendly, his lack of communication probably was apt. I guessed there was a lot he didn’t like to talk about.
Frankly, he would have been party to it all. It seems fair to suggest that the more Saddam ate, the more he bragged, and the more he drank with ‘important’ guests, then the more his crackpot ideas became. We all dream when we’ve had a few. His dreams would have become other people’s nightmares. Our chef would have only been next door. He was obviously a top-drawer chef – after all, if you think that Olympic failure could mean Uday removing your hands, then clearly you didn’t want to cock up the catering. In general, he was reserved. Perhaps this culture meant you had a private dignity about your past, or maybe he still lived in awe – I’m sure the effect on some Iraqis was such that they still feared that Saddam would rise from the grave at any point.
Saddam’s favourite dish was Masgouf. Who could turn down that well-known irresistible fish dish? Or his other favourite – chicken stuffed with rice and peas and almonds? You’ve probably seen it on Jamie’s TV shows many a time. I couldn’t wait to try camel toe. In the end we had meatballs in batter! But it was the best – and what a story he had to tell. How wasted was he cooking up for us after all he had seen and done? I suspect he would never tell that story.
By night we retired to the back room. It was always the same wherever you found a little piece of Britain around the world – luxuries lay out the back that locals would never see. If you ever went to an embassy, the ambassador would never be short of the finest of everything. Were we the only people in Baghdad playing Call of Duty on the X-Box that night?
Matthew walked in to see what all the fuss was about – he had never heard of the game. Instantly, he was hooked – and he was an Olympian at that, too. Once a champ, always a champ.
The next day, we went straight to meet Hamza Hussein. Hamza had been at Beijing in 2008 along with seven other Iraqis. North Korea had pulled out, making places available. It was Iraq’s moment to not quite shine. He was due in the double sculls event. Iraq also had a sprinter, a judokaya, a discus thrower, an archer, and of course, for old times sake, the weightlifter. On 24 July 2008 the nation was banned from competing. I have no recollection of this story. The ban was because of political influence in the team – and Uday had been dead for five years! Unsurprisingly, Baghdad had been outraged. Amazingly, as far back as July 2006, several members of the Olympic Committee had been kidnapped, meaning that the IOC feared corruption in selection and that any subsequent meetings hadn’t been quorate. On 29 July, they lifted the ban.
But further controversy loomed – only the track and field athletes could compete, as the Iraqi Olympic Committee had missed the entry deadlines. You could see it was nothing but a shambles.
Finally, the International Rowing Federation relented – Hamza and Haider were allowed in. They did the whole of Iraq proud. By finishing last. In the weightlifting, which had made their Olympic name (!), their only athlete, Mohammed Jassim, faced a drugs ban.
You could never be on track to Olympic glory, or indeed self-respect, if you were this much off the rails. If they ever made it to London, you just knew there would be a tube strike on the day of their event and they would never see the light of day – in fact it crossed my mind that they might just disappear and that political asylum might be the way forward. That was a throwback to another era but these two guys were certainly hindered by the details in their passport.
We went to meet Hamza at Firdos Square. I wanted to take Matthew down to see where Saddam’s statue was felled by the Yanks in 2003. Just opposite the square was the Blue Mosque – the story here was that when the Americans were staging that dramatic shot, Saddam was only metres away inside it, which is staggering to think that they so nearly had him, and that he had no better plan that being underneath their noses. You would have to say it was a combination of luck and stupidity on both sides. Now, there stood some bullshit abstract green structure, supposedly intended to symbolise freedom. I didn’t buy all that arty farty stuff but we couldn’t have Matthew out here without attempting to do a piece to camera with that in the shadow. We had to be quick – and as he stood under where the statue had been with his own sense of history, the fate that befell many an athlete under Uday wouldn’t have been lost on him.
I called it off though. It would draw too much attention to ourselves. Instead, we waited for Hamza to arrive in his Iraqi track suit. He recognised his hero Matthew instantly. What a moment that must have been for him.
Haider was at college so the plan was take a ride in the 4x4 and pick him up. En route, Matthew would be quizzing Hamza on what it took to become a rower in Iraq and how on earth he had got involved, plus what it meant to him to compete for Iraq in troubled times. Well, you can understand that it would be a welcome distraction, a chance for the world to look favourably on his nation post-Uday and for his countrymen to have something positive to unite behind.
It was a ten minute journey to the rowing club. In typical Baghdad traffic, it took forty-five. I didn’t like us being sandwiched in the dust of the city, rammed in on either side, but this was daily life in Baghdad. We pulled up outside the rowing club. You would never know it was there. It opened as long ago as 1976.
Heading down through a track in between the houses in a sort of semi-industrial estate, we emerged at the river but were forced to turn right, appearing in what seemed like a huge car park built on wasteland. Then we encountered the massive gates to the club, beyond which was a different world. The lawns were smart, the gardens well-groomed and green plants were everywhere; the club itself on huge stilts. If you lost yourself for a moment, you would think you were in Kew Gardens. Even in Baghdad, the world of rowing was still for the privileged. It was incredible to think that all this existed even through wars. With Matthew in tow, the two Iraqis were in dream territory – the Olympics’ worst-funded athletes coming face to face with one of the all-time greats. They were equals only in terms of passion and commitment.
Inside, they had the latest Concept 2 rowing machines and decent weights. But it was small – lino on the floor. Like every gym, the music was blaring out. I was tempted to flick the tape out and put ‘Pump My Pussy’ on for old times sake.
I asked Matthew what he thought of their actual boats.
‘One of them is old and has been patched up a lot and that does affect it, but one is in good shape and a reasonable boat.’
You could see that their problems started here. At least this time, they had experienced the opportunity to travel to a regatta in Boston and tr
ain with the American team – a good bit of patronising PR for the Yanks, but more importantly a genuine opportunity for them to experience something close to top-flight competition. There were only so many times you could race against yourself and call yourself competitive.
But this was no Henley – there was no honours board, nor were there trophies. Ironically, there was a DIY leader board at the gym in the BBC Bureau where we would all write up our times. And if they were lucky enough to receive an overseas invitation, picking up some free kit on the way, they still came back to this. No sponsor would be paying to adorn their vests with their international brand.
Matthew thought their facilities were better than he had feared, even though it wasn’t the high-tech gear he would be used to. Anyone could tell, though, that Matthew, with all his ability and strength, would have struggled to get his own Olympic dreams moving from a start like this.
All the young athletes in the gym were in awe of him, and rightly so, and even though Matty was making a documentary, there is a part of the rower that will always take over. That forty-five minutes in the car had put pressure on our schedule but it didn’t matter when Matthew got lost in the rowing moment. In the heat of battle, they were all competitors. In the disproportionate world of the game of life, they were a fraternity. He wanted to talk the sport, share what he could with whoever wanted to listen, and he invited Hamza and Haider to train with him when they came to the UK for the 2012 games. He meant it sincerely. If he wanted, he could have put his hand in his pocket and funded that gym for the boys, but we all knew that wouldn’t solve the problems and was nothing more than a one-off hit. It left no infrastructure. It would only create an artificial high of false dreams.
Even when it came to combining his new career of journalism and his old of rowing, his expertise was second to none. Sara, who was filming, wanted to rig up a couple of cameras to film inside the boat – Matthew took over, knowing exactly the angles to place them at. That was years of video analysis and playback which brought that superior knowledge – Haider and Hamza would never get that opportunity otherwise, and the BBC would also benefit with incredible shots. And when it came to rowing, he led the way, helping carry the boats down to the shore. He was a gent with no need to stand on ceremony. Olympic legend or not, it was the kind of singular sport that bred self-sufficiency and focus. For all those years, Matthew would have taken his own boat down to the river as he did the Iraqis’. It was that kind of sport and he was that kind of guy.
Haider and Hamza would train for four or five hours – as long as they could until the light went. You could see they were quality athletes – they carried themselves as sportsmen. They weren’t Jamaican bobsleighers at all.
‘They’ll be lucky to qualify,’ Matthew said. ‘Haider might have a chance but I doubt it. Hamza is too old.’
Matthew was mindful that Hamza was still six or seven years younger than when Sir Steve Redgrave won his last gold medal but he admired them for their work ethic and their love of the sport. It wasn’t their fault they would never be contenders. Every day they would walk onto a pontoon where you would be lucky not to fall over. The safety boat that followed them was nothing more than an old wreck, but it did the job.
We filmed from in there. Matthew encouraged, trained and chatted with them on camera as they went up and down the Tigris. He was impressed with what they could achieve against the odds: in this day and age, unless you are training 24/7 with enormous backing, there is always going to be somebody better than you.
‘If they qualify, it’s a tremendous achievement,’ he confirmed but he did so out of respect, not humour.
We agreed that it was difficult to know if they knew how good they were in this context and how far they had to go to be Olympian but they were united in two things – they wanted to represent their country at the highest level and they were destined to go to the Olympics. This is why we were making the show – it was proper old school, the stuff dreams were made of. Could there be any other athlete at London 2012 whose training facilities were lined with bodies? Some days they wouldn’t be able to row as they waited for the corpses to float on down the river. They couldn’t touch them in case they were booby-trapped. On others, they would just push themselves off and go, making a course around them.
They lived with it. It was their day to day.
Inevitably Matthew asked both of them if any of their friends had been badly injured or killed during the troubles. They had. It brought home their Olympic dream and was a reminder to those who say sport and politics don’t mix. That eternal flame burned within and gave them personal aspiration and international focus for their country – the taking part rather than the winning still did count after all. You could say, ‘why bother?’, but then you could argue it was more important than ever to make the effort.
Over the next couple of days, we took more general shots of Hamza and Heider in everyday life – the story was about them, after all. Who wouldn’t admire them? It was one of the rare occasions in my eleven years at the BBC when I ceased to see the subjects as TV fodder and looked at them as the human beings.
Matthew, too, found the whole Baghdad experience a cultural reward. Some people come to Iraq with pre-conceptions that it is all guns blazing but he came with open eyes, listening to your every word rather than you hanging on his because of who he was. Nothing was too much for him. Without a second glance he would wash up with the crew or stick the kettle on, or fight for his life on Call of Duty. Yes – we asked him about Olympic glory – but the honours bestowed upon him hadn’t changed him. He wouldn’t talk about it unless you quizzed him but how could you sit there and not? He probably knew that, like a million times before, he would get the ‘So, what was it like?’ question. It was something he had done and now he was having new adventures. It had been an amazing time in his life. To win one Gold was incredible, to win four out of this world. Sir Steve Redgrave had been the best, as an athlete and as a mentor. He’d had a fantastic opportunity in life and worked his butt off to maximise his talent, and probably we wouldn’t see that era of rowing again, even though the bar was so high that we now took success for granted. He was aware that their combined legacy created a massive pressure for the next generation.
To be in his presence as an athlete and as a human being, to sit down at the end of the day and hear him say all this, was awe-inspiring. I showed him the ultimate respect of not asking him about his own coxless pairs. I am sure he had heard that joke a million times. He had no self-doubt but not a whiff of arrogance, despite the fact that he was an old Etonian and a descendant of – get this – William the Conqueror.
For different reasons, we have both lived the dream. And it had taken this trip with Sir Matthew Pinsent to bring it all home. It was almost like the Beeb had laid on a final jolly for me, knowing that I would quit the next year. None of my previous thirty visits to Iraq had been like this.
What a contrast to when I first touched down on Iraqi soil back in 2003. I had seen it all, from Stuart’s foot to the Yanks nearly killing the World Affairs editor. We were bombed again a couple of years later in the Sheraton – a bus opposite the hotel fired shells into our floor as we woke one morning. John Simpson emerged in his boxers on to our floor as we came under attack – these were the daily perils that we brushed off as minor details.
Then there was all the filming with John at the Al-Yarmouk Hospital in Baghdad on the day hundreds of bodies were brought in and all we could see were the feet bobbing up and down off the end of the truck. Much of what we did was about the dead. I had seen more corpses than I knew people alive. I will never forget going to Halabja where Saddam gassed the Kurds or visiting Fallujah with John filming all the babies born with birth defects because of chemical weapons. There was Ali Abbas, who in 2003 suffered 35 per cent burns and the loss of his arms – not to mention his family being wiped out and his house destroyed. He was just twelve years old at the time and had become the face of the war. In July 2009, we took him home
for the first time.
To have been there at the first democratic elections meant nothing to me personally but I knew it was a Berlin Wall moment for the Gulf, and I loved walking in the footsteps of history. Not to have been there when Saddam was hung close to New Year 2006 remains a regret, but nobody saw it coming and we already had four security guys out there by the time John arrived. I say nobody saw it coming. Obviously some of the American guards who filmed it on their phones knew what was happening.
John and I were there for Saddam’s trial, but it was a closed shop. Correspondents were carefully selected to report and for us it was John, of course. I never saw Saddam himself – John would be dropped in the Green Zone within a mile or so of the court and taken on a coach to the building where the done deal was being done. I loved even being that close. We were at the equivalent of Hitler’s trial, even though I would sit and drink coffee all day waiting for him. I was both on the doorsteps of history and the doorsteps of Starbucks.
To see John in there made me proud. As the only BBC man inside, he was in with some of the world’s finest, and each night, he would meet us with tales of Saddam’s blasphemy and his disregard for the legitimacy of the trial itself. There was little unrest on the street but inside it was a circus. There had been a $25 million bounty on Saddam’s head. The word was that a family member had ultimately sold him down the same River Tigris that Sir Matthew Pinsent had showcased the Olympic dreams of two his countrymen on.
Baghdad and I were done. It had been one hell of a journey and this was the last ride on the Craig Summers rollercoaster. It was time to go home, and it was time to go home for good.
Bodyguard Page 33
