Transcript

BRENDAN TREMBATH: The Olympics are just two months away and international teams are beginning to leave for China to prepare for the Games.

The Palestinian Olympic team, about to head off, is made up of two runners, two swimmers, and their coaches. Warming up for the Games has been particularly tough because the best training facilities are often on the other side of Israeli checkpoints.

Middle East correspondent, Ben Knight, reports.

BEN KNIGHT: Every day, Hamse Abdouh trains for the Olympics. Most days, he does it here at the YMCA pool in Arab East Jerusalem. But it's not much of a pool.

There aren't even proper diving blocks here, this is an 18 metre pool and in fact as I'm speaking to you now, he's just finished his first lap. He only gets six strokes before he reaches the end of the pool. There is a 50 metre pool, an Olympic-sized pool in Jerusalem but it's too expensive for him to use on a regular basis so he's just finished another lap. This is where he trains.

Each week, he swims thousands of laps in here.

BEN KNIGHT: How does it feel when you do get into a 50 metre pool, and you can't see the end?

HAMSE ABDOUH (translated): I'm scared. I feel absolute panic. How can I finish such a distance?

BEN KNIGHT: Of course, he does finish it. His best time for the 100 metres butterfly is 10 seconds off the world record. To put it politely, that means his chances of winning a medal are slim, but he knows that.

HAMSE ABDOUH (translated): it's a difficult record to achieve. I have to train morning and night.

BEN KNIGHT: It was in Melbourne last year, at the World Championships, when Hamse Abdouh found out he'd made the Olympic team.

He lives in East Jerusalem, so he can at least get to a pool every day. But the other member of the Palestinian swimming team is Zakia Nassar, who lives and studies in the West Bank and can only train on weekends when she goes home to Bethlehem.

Their coach is Ibrahim Tawil.

IBRAHIM TAWIL: We asked the Israeli authority to issue a permission for her, but unfortunately we didn't get it until this time.

BEN KNIGHT: Hamse Abdouh and his three teammates are going to the games with the help of Olympic Solidarity, a movement that helps poorer nations to train and send their athletes.

But even though the Olympic ideal of friendship between nations through sport is what got Hamse Abdouh his ticket to Beijing, it apparently doesn't apply here in Jerusalem. He refuses to compete against Israelis here.

HAMSE ABDOUH (translated): There are martyrs every day. There are problems every day. It's impossible to interact normally with Israelis.

BEN KNIGHT: Yet it's really only at major sporting events like the Olympics that something called Palestine actually exists.

That idea of building goodwill through sport hasn't taken root with Hamse Abdouh yet. For he and his coach, it's the chance to walk into the stadium at Beijing, carrying a sign that says Palestine and marching behind a Palestinian flag that counts.

Ibrahim Tawil remembers the feeling from Athens.

IBRAHIM TAWIL: When Palestine get into the stadium, and the 75 people that were there they were all the time shouting “Palestine! Palestine!” I think this was our medal. This was the real medal for Palestine.

It is a feeling that I will never forget, I felt that people are, you know, handing me all the way in the stadium.

BEN KNIGHT: This is Ben Knight in Jerusalem reporting for Saturday AM.