Many athletes at the Olympic Games this summer will undoubtedly have overcome numerous obstacles to represent their country in Beijing. But only one has been forced to endure a hate campaign.

Sprinter Mehboba Andyar has received threatening midnight phone calls, been jeered at by hostile neighbors and harassed by police. The anger is directed at the 19-year-old runner for being Afghanistan's sole female Olympic athlete. In a conservative Muslim society where few women have roles outside the home, many Afghan men believe females should not compete in sports.

"There have been so many phone calls from people saying I shouldn't be an athlete. There are often strange men hanging outside my home," she said. "Sometimes stones are thrown at the windows at night, and we have had threatening letters. I don't worry about these threats, but if my family didn't want me to go (to Beijing), I wouldn't."

Neighbors scream abuse and threaten her with physical harm each time she leaves her small mud-brick home in a Kabul slum to run. Last month, police officers arrested her father after a neighbor complained that Andyar had been entertaining strange men. Even though she was merely giving an interview to a French journalist and his translator, she says the police hauled the three men to the station. They were soon released after the precinct police chief intervened and apologized, she says.