The Pride of a Nation

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The sidelines of the volleyball court in Tehran's Olympic training center are littered with the usual detritus of a warm-up game: stray balls, gym bags, sweaty tracksuits—and a jumble of crutches and prosthetic legs. The final countdown to the Paralympics, opening in Athens this week, has begun, and Iran's sitting-volleyball team is readying for what it hopes will be its fifth consecutive gold. Team manager Ali Kashfia, watching from a battered turquoise wheelchair, nods appreciatively as he watches a particularly elegant set-and-spike maneuver, a smile splitting his scarred and twisted face. The 40-year-old veteran of the past four Paralympics lost his legs, one eye and the hearing in one ear when he stepped on a land mine in 1983, during the Iran-Iraq war. But Kashfia insists he does not regret what happened to him. "Look at all I have now," he says, speaking of his gold medals, the friendship of his teammates and his country's respect. "Playing sports has opened more gates than anything my previous life could have offered."

It was men like Kashfia whom the Iranian authorities had in mind when it expanded a fledgling parathletics foundation to include wounded veterans returning from the front. Hundreds of thousands of Iranian soldiers died in the eight-year war, and more than 400,000 were injured, many by land mines. The celebration of martyrdom, a tenet of Islam's Shia branch, provided the backbone for a revolutionary rhetoric that idealized sacrifice—an important propaganda tool for a young theocracy struggling to justify an ongoing war and a harsh Islamic regime. Veterans who had risked life and limb to defend their country were hailed as living martyrs. But for many, such as Kashfia, hero status was not enough. "The injured felt useless, with no role in society," says Mahmoud Khosravivafa, president of the National Paralympic Committee and himself a disabled vet. "They still wanted to serve their country, so we offered them another arena: handicapped sports. If we can't stop people from becoming disabled, we can always improve their lives. Sport is a way to bring the handicapped back into society."

It's an arena in which Iran's disabled have excelled. Unlike the U.S. or Germany, whose Paralympic successes mirror those of their regular Olympic teams, Iran's Paralympians consistently outperform their able-bodied counterparts. Iran climbed from a medal ranking of 37 out of 55 teams at the Barcelona Paralympic Games in 1992 to 16 out of 123 in Sydney. And it is the sitting-volleyball team that is the country's pride. Although Iran can be counted on to win medals in individual sports, such as shooting and power lifting, sitting volleyball is the only event—handicapped or otherwise—in which it has won gold as a team. What started as a solution to a pressing problem—how to transform visible reminders of a devastating war into an advertisement for glorious sacrifice—has grown into a movement that 15 years after the war has little to do with veterans. There are more than 120 regional handicapped leagues whose results are listed in the newspapers, and a weekly TV program features disabled athletes.

In Athens, the sitting-volleyball team is going for gold for the first time without veterans among its ranks. This may have consequences not just for Iran's Paralympic hopes but for the country's leadership, which still relies heavily on the symbolism of the veterans to stay in power. With Iran's war martyrs fading from the picture, however, the government, made up largely of aging clerics and politicians, has one less card to play. The veterans have little relevance for an increasingly young population that barely remembers the war and is instead angry about unemployment and corruption—and seemingly consumed with testing the limits of a strictly enforced religious dress code without getting busted.

But for now, Iranians young and old are united behind their world-class sitting-volleyball team. Despite the lack of veterans, Kashfia isn't worried; in terms of tactics and technique, he says this team is the best Iran has fielded. Yet he acknowledges that vets bring a certain character to the team—which is why, he muses, Bosnia is the one to watch, and beat, this year. "They just went through a war themselves," he notes. "They have the energy that comes from surviving."