The Atlantic has published an interesting article on Saddam Hussein by Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down: Tales of the Tyrant. This passage about Saddam’s oldest son, Uday, and the Iraqi Olympic team caught my eye:
Raed Ahmed was an Olympic weightlifter who carried the Iraqi flag during the opening ceremonies of the Atlanta games, in 1996. “Uday was head of the Olympic Committee, and all sports in Iraq,” Ahmed told me early this year, in his home in a suburb of Detroit. “During training camp he would closely monitor all the athletes, keeping in touch with the trainers and pushing them to push the athletes harder. If he’s unhappy with the results, he will throw the trainers and even the athletes into a prison he keeps inside the Olympic Committee building. If you make a promise of a certain result, and fail to achieve it in competition, then the punishment is a special prison where they torture people. Some of the athletes started to quit when Uday took over, including many who were the best in their sports. They just decided it was not worth it. Others, like me, loved their sports, and success can be a stepping-stone in Iraq to better things, like a nice car, a nice home, a career. I always managed to avoid being punished. I was careful never to promise anything that I couldn’t deliver. I would always say that there was a strong possibility that I would be beaten. Then, when I won, Uday was so happy.”