Dejected Iraqi athletes reeled with disappointment even as the International Olympic Committee said there was a slim chance that they may yet be able to compete in the Olympics.

"Provided that the Iraqi government stops interfering, the suspension on the Iraqi Olympic committee could be lifted," an IOC spokeswoman in Geneva told AFP on condition of anonymity.

But the comments brought little cheer to the athletes.

"There is a small hope, but we are not expecting much," Hamzah Hussein, 32, one of two Iraqi Olympic rowers who had hoped to be heading to China, told AFP in Baghdad.

"I was so depressed after I got the news that we would be deprived from participating in the Olympic Games in Beijing 2008. It seems that we are paying the price for the current conflict in the Iraqi sport scene."

Hussein's teammate Haidar Nozad, 25, was similarly dejected.

"I had been training continuously with my friend for more than 70 days to be ready for this great and universal event," said Nozad. Suddenly, we find ourselves outside the walls of the Olympics, it is a painful and sad decision."

"I was training very hard to win and get medal in Beijing and hoist the Iraqi flag, but now my dreams had broken," said Swara Mohammed Berbal, a 26-year-old weightlifter training in the northern city of Irbil.

The IOC in a letter dated July 23 confirmed the prohibition of seven Iraqi Olympic athletes after first imposing the ban on the war-ravaged country's sporting officials for political interference in June after the Iraqi government replaced its national Olympic panel with members not recognized by the IOC.  The government claimed the old panel was corrupt and lacked legitimacy because it was missing too many members — including four members of the committee, including its chief, who were kidnapped two years ago. Their fates remain unknown.

Iraq has one medal — a bronze in weightlifting in 1960 — since its first appearance at the Summer Olympics in 1948.Sarhang Abdul-Khalq, a member of the Olympic committee in Iraq's semiautonomous Kurdish region, said the "government has cut off the head of sports in Iraq."

Associated Press writers Saad Abdul Kadir in Baghdad, Graham Dunbar in Evian-Les-Bains, France, and Yahya Barzanji in Irbil, Iraq, contributed to this report.