|
 |   |
EVENTS Fantasy Central Inside Game Multimedia Central Statitudes Your Turn Message Boards Email Newsletters Golf Guide Cities Work in Sports
CNNSI.com GROUP
COMMERCE
|  |
From killing fields to sporting fields
By Luba Vangelova, Special to CNNSI.com Cambodia has entered its first-ever Paralympics this year as a wild card, replacing the British standing volleyball team that qualified but then withdrew. Even Cambodia’s coach admits his team has “high hopes, but low potential.” But he says dwelling on their long odds of victory against the likes of former medalists Germany and Slovakia would be missing the point. “We fulfilled our goal,” says coach Daniel Kopplow. “The main point is to be here.” Cambodia’s lengthy civil war left many legacies, among them a landscape littered with unexploded landmines. One out of every 384 Cambodians has been injured by a landmine, a statistic that ensures the country’s three-year-old National Paralympic Committee has a large pool of potential athletes from which to draw. But another legacy of the war is poverty, and elite disabled sports are not one of the economically struggling country’s higher funding priorities. So most of the team’s funding has had to come from overseas. The German government and its National Olympic Committee pitched in with coaching expertise. They sent Kopplow, a volleyball coach from the German Sport University - Cologne, to Cambodia a couple of months ago. Australia then paid for the players’ trips to Sydney and otherwise supported the team financially. The current team has played together for nine weeks; only half its members were veterans of the team’s previous incarnation. Kopplow says the new recruits had all played volleyball before, thanks to the sport’s popularity in Cambodia, where it’s not uncommon to see nets loosely strung between trees in fields. “But I wouldn’t call them volleyball players,” he adds. Kopplow rented a room in a house in a Phnom Penh suburb. His players, who hail from around the country, slept on the covered rooftop under mosquito nets. They practiced four hours a day at an international school that lent the team its facilities. For the first month, Kopplow coached without an interpreter. “I used sign language and drew pictures on a board,” he says. “You can make yourself understood, but it took time. I had to stop play every time I wanted to tell even one player anything.” Two of the players are each missing one arm; the rest are leg amputees that play with one good leg and one prosthetic. Some were athletes before their accidents and were happy to find a way to remain active. They have also found a release in sport. “When I had my accident, I was very sad with my life,” says 46-year-old team captain Cha Hok as the players took turns answering media questions through an interpreter. “But since I became one of the volleyball team [players], I have support from the government and it gave me inspiration to live.” Im Vandy, who contemplated committing suicide after his landmine accident, says “sport is very good for me. Physically it makes me strong, and it also gives me a healthy mind.” Some of the players are active in the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Chim Phan, for example, a former rice farmer who now assembles wheelchairs for the disabled, also travels among villages recruiting organization members. In 1997 he ran and rode a tricycle from Paris to Brussels to raise awareness and urge more countries to sign an international landmine treaty. The players are also helping slowly change their fellow citizens’ attitudes in a country where the disabled, though plentiful, are considered inferior. “Generally [the disabled] are considered third-class people,” Kopplow says. “They’re supposed to have bad karma, to have done something in a previous life to deserve this.” “If you’re disabled and haven’t got a job, it’s not very acceptable,” Phan adds. “But lately a lot of organizations and the government have campaigned for awareness, so people are starting to give support to them.” Everyone in the suburb where the volleyball team stayed had heard about the players and their Sydney ambitions. Whenever Kopplow ventured out on his motorcycle, strangers would shout otherwise indecipherable greetings that generally ended with “Australie,” he says. In Sydney, the Cambodians will be competing against nations with more advanced prosthetics. But Phan says that, “in my opinion, [winning] doesn’t depend on the prosthetic leg. It depends on the ability of the team and the physical training.” Just because the players are thrilled to simply have reached Sydney doesn’t mean they don’t care about the match outcomes. “I hope there will be no more landmines in Cambodia,” says Cha Hok. “And I also hope that my team would win.”
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
