Mark Kiszla: Colorado Springs native Layla Almasri runs at Olympics with tears of pride, pain for Palestine (2024)

SAINT-DENIS, France• Tears for Palestine were shed on the Olympic track.

“I started to cry,” said Layla Almasri, looking me in the eye on a Friday evening when she ran every step of her 800-meter race carrying the weight of 75 years of unending death and unspeakable atrocities for the Palestinian people.

She wept for joy and cried in pain.

But they were all tears from Colorado, with love for the Palestinian people.

Almasri is a 25-year-old woman, born and raised in Colorado Springs, running at the Summer Games for Palestine, thanks to a program designed to give underrepresented countries a chance to compete on the world’s biggest athletic stage.

Truth be told, she finished a distant last among nine competitors in her preliminary heat, more than 12 seconds behind medal-contender Jemma Reekie, who crossed the line in 2 minutes flat.

“I was fan-girling,” admitted Almasri, awestruck by the roar of 80,000 fans in Stade de France. “I had the best view in the house, watching that race, from right on the track.”

But wearing the flag of the Palestinian territories next to her heart, Almasri ran with purpose far greater than the pursuit of gold, silver or bronze.

“I was doing it for Palestine,” Almasri said. “And I felt I could do no wrong, because I was running for my people.”

She ran in honor of her father and mother, who immigrated to the United States from Nablus, located 30 miles north of Jesusalem on the West Bank. Nablus is a city of 130,000 known as jabal al-nar (fire on the mountain) for its centuries-long history of cultural and political defiance against everyone from the Christian crusaders to the current Israeli government.

Almasri, a proud alum of Pine Creek High School and the University of Colorado Colorado Springs, fought back tears for Majed Abu Maraheel, the first Olympic athlete to represent the Palestinian people at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, who died from kidney failure in June when he couldn’t leave Gaza for treatment. She grieved for soccer great and coach of the Palestinian Olympic team Hani Al-Masdar, dead from shrapnel from the Israel-Hamas war only months before this competition in France.

But most of all, Almasri ran with a broken heart for the thousands of mothers and children killed by the violence that covers her family’s homeland in blood. The photos of death on her laptop haunt her.

“It’s really difficult to see. Mothers with my mother’s face ... Children who look like me when I was a kid,” Almasri said.

“It’s heartbreaking. It feels like I was hit with a lightning strike of luck to be able to live somewhere I don’t have to face the things they’re facing.”

She was taught from birth both to love her heritage and hate oppression, lessons from a father who was the youngest of 12 children in Nablus and a mother raised with eight siblings in the same Palestinian city that has been surrounded by checkpoints and under the watchful eye of the Israelis for 75 years.

“I’ve been going to protests since I was a kid,” Almasri told me. “Being Palestinian is in my heart and my blood.”

When visiting Nablus for the first time in 2022, she was overcome with a sense of deja vu, immediately feeling at home. “Going there with my head held high was really empowering,” Almasri said.

Encouraged by the coaching staff at UCCS, she raced in the Palestinian territories, attracting the attention of its Olympic committee, who first gave Almasri the chance to compete while wearing the green, black and red singlet of the Palestinian territories in 2023. She quickly has established national records in distances from 800 to 5,000 meters.

“For my homeland,” Almasri said.

She has as pro-Palestinian protesters shut down streets in Denver last fall, and wept with gratitude for the support, because Almasri outspokenly advocates for America to stop sending weapons of war to Israel, hoping to end brutal bombings she describes as senseless. After 75 years of oppression, she believes her people deserve overdue peace and freedom.

“It has been an issue put aside by the world for too long,” said Almasri, who has lost an uncle and cousin to violence in years past. “But now no one can deny the issue.”

It did not matter if she finished last in the biggest race of her life, because the Olympics have allowed Almasri to be a diplomat for the plight of all Palestinians.

“Don’t know if there’s a pedometer that has tracked all the miles on my legs, but it’s a ton,” Almasri said. “And to think those miles could turn into something like this? To be on the Olympic stage? Having a voice? It’s something I never could’ve dreamed of. … And it’s super, super humbling.”

Modern technology allows Olympians to instantly send a video postcard to loved ones after finishing competition with communication to any corner of the world on a monitor provided by organizers of the games.

So, seconds after crossing the finish line of the 800 meters, a woman who grew up in Colorado never imagining a kid like her could ever compete in the Olympics saw the faces of a father and mother that made this impossible dream come true by immigrating from Palestine to the United States.

The love and the sacrifice of her parents filled the video monitor, leaving a proud daughter, with Palestinian and Coloradan roots, overwhelmed with gratitude.

“And that was,” Almasri said, “when I started to cry.”