Alaa al-Dali was watching the protest in his full cycling gear when he was shot in the leg by an IDF sniper. He was standing beside his bike, 300m from the fence that separates Gaza from Israel. It was March 2018 and he was 21 years old.
He had already qualified to compete in the Asian Games later that summer and was on track to become the first ever Palestinian cyclist to compete at the Olympics. But the gunshot caused 22cm of devastation to Dali’s right leg and meant he’d have to get it amputated. No leg, no Asian Games, no Olympics. It was more than just his tibia that the sniper’s bullet tore through.
Six and a half years on, a small miracle will land next week. On Tuesday morning in Zurich, Dali will roll out for the time trial in the C2 category of the UCI World Paracycling Championship. Three days later, he’ll take his place in the field for the C2 road race. He won’t win but he will compete, in defiance of the odds, in defiance of everything. You don’t need to be on the podium to claim a victory.
“It will be the first time the Palestinian flag is flown on the international cycling stage,” says Karim Ali, co-founder alongside Dali of the Gaza Sunbirds Paracycling team. “It will be the first time any Palestinian has made it to a competition at this level. It’s an honour to be taking this step. It’s huge.
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“Alaa only got out of Gaza in April. His family is still there, including his two young kids. He has travelled to eight countries through the summer and qualified for these championships even though he has had no permanent place to stay. In the space of five months, he has done something that takes some teams and countries years to achieve.”
That he has got here at all is down, at least in part, to Mark Rohan. The Westmeath man, a double gold medallist in handcycling at the 2012 Paralympics, lives in Portugal now and coaches from his base in the Algarve. In Zurich next week, his stable comprises two Norwegian cyclists, one Icelander and one Portuguese, as well as Dali.
“It was very ordinary in how it came about,” says Rohan. “I read about the Gaza Sunbirds and basically sent them a message saying something along the lines of, ‘I don’t know how I can help but I’d like to.’ I’m coaching Alaa but it’s as much coaching his coach Hassan as anything.
“What they’ve done is amazing. They really had nothing. I mean, nothing. They were getting aid workers to smuggle bike parts into Gaza for them. People were taking bikes out of skips in Israel and trying to get them into Gaza so they could work on them and make them raceable. They didn’t even have cleats to fit into the pedals – they were wrapping some of the cyclists’ feet on to the pedals with duct tape. It’s been such a hard slog for them.”
It started with Dali getting shot that day. The Great March of Return was a nine-month-long protest by Gazans in 2018, where thousands turned up daily to demand the right to return to their ancestral lands from which they were displaced in 1948. Dali made a point of attending in his cycling gear – he was having major difficulties in securing the right to leave Gaza to compete in international competition. He has always assumed that made him a target for the IDF sniper.
The official UN report on the demonstrations found that the IDF deliberately shot at the legs of protesters and that 156 amputations took place as a result. Dali’s was one of them.
“I begged the doctor to try his best before amputating it because my dreams as an athlete are tied up with these legs,” he later told Al-Jazeera. “I spent eight days in the operating theatre. Every day I had a surgery on my leg. I felt so much pain and bullet fragments infected it all. I needed to make a choice – either the amputation or losing my life. After thinking a lot, I gave my consent to cut the leg. It was a very hard decision to make.”
Undeterred, Dali took a few months and decided to become a paracyclist. More than that, he decided that since the Gaza Strip had one of the highest concentrations of amputees on the planet, there had to be a way to pull together a paracycling team. A short film telling his story was shot and made in Arabic. The job of translating it into English landed on the desk of a 19-year-old student in London, a Cypriot Palestinian called Karim Ali.
“Translating is a pretty intimate experience,” Ali says. “You really have to listen to what the person is saying. What emotions are they feeling? What are the exact words or phrases that they use to describe their situation? I felt very close to Alla after translating his story. And as a result of that, I decided I wanted to help him. But I was super young and I didn’t know much about the world.”
That was how the Gaza Sunbirds were born. Over the next few years, with Ali in London and Dali in Gaza, they cobbled bits and pieces of gear together and got up and running. They were, from day one, a paracycling team rather than a cycling team. They were a place where amputees could come and learn to ride a bike. And, in time, to race a bike.
“Our mission for year one was just to show that it is possible to train somebody under war circumstances,” says Ali. “It wasn’t to achieve any numbers. It was to see if it’s possible to get bikes, to train any number of these guys consistently for any period of time. That was it. That was the whole objective. There was nothing else. It was like an early proof of concept – as in, is it even possible to cycle in Gaza?
“How difficult is it to ride a bike? Very difficult if you only have one leg.. Amputations in Gaza, they’re progressive conditions. People get one amputation, then another, then another, then another, then another. Then they get complications in their limbs because the prosthetics are never correct.
“So even if you have a good leg, how good does that leg stay when your entire body weight is on it? And if you’re prone to an crash and you get seen in the hospital or you get partial medical treatment for it, how can you continue to cycle on it? Maybe you can live a regular life with a slight leg injury, but then can you go and do professional sports?”
Bit by bit, they built it up. This time last year, the Gaza Sunbirds had 22 athletes, ranging in age from 12 to 50. They were getting a better supply of bikes and trained five times a week, up and down the Gaza Strip. The best of them, Dali included, were aiming to compete at the Paralympics in Paris, at the time just 10 months away.
Then October 7th happened.
Every day since, the world has watched Gaza be turned to rubble. The Israeli reaction to atrocities carried out by Hamas has made life on the strip intolerable. The death toll, as of this week, is 41,252 people, including 16,500 children. The UN says more than half of the homes in Gaza have been destroyed or damaged. More than 90 per cent of the population have been displaced since this phase of the war began.
In a particularly grim irony, cycling became the best way to get around Gaza. With fuel supplies cut off and 65 per cent of the road bombed to pieces, the Sunbirds went from being the most immobile people in Gaza to among the most mobile. With life as a sports team immediately suspended, Ali and Dali came up with the idea of morphing into a delivery service.
“Alaa said, ‘Why don’t I get some bread and cycle around bringing it to people?’” Ali says. “We made a video of it and put it out on the internet to see if we could raise money to help people. We set up a Just Giving page. The video was kind of weird but it worked. We’ve kept doing it ever since.”
All the while, Dali still wanted to try to get to the Paralympics. To do so, they would have to get him out of Gaza and into Europe where he could take part in some qualifying races. It took three months for him to make it across the border into Egypt, along with three other cyclists and two coaches.
Everything since has been life on the hoof. They got to Ostend in Belgium to take part in a World Cup race in May. Dali finished last in his category but at least they were on the map now. That night, however, the news came through that the Israelis had begun their assault on Rafah and closed the border crossing they had squeezed out through only weeks earlier. There was, literally, no going back.
Four of the group of six decided to apply for asylum in Belgium, there and then. But Dali and his coach ploughed on, to see if they could get a wild card into the Paralympics. They raced in Italy, Kazakhstan and Malaysia, all to show their hunger for a spot in Paris. But when it came down to it, the IPC didn’t grant him a spot. It was always going to be a long shot and this one didn’t hit.
But along the way, he qualified for Zurich. Having spent the past two months living in a church basement in Padova, Italy, they drove the six hours north on Wednesday. They don’t know what the future holds past next week. Maybe Dali keeps competing where he can, maybe he waits out the war and tries to get back to his family. Nobody really has a clue.
For now, all they know is that on Tuesday and Friday, he will take his place among the sleek machines of the world’s best paracyclists and start pedalling his one good leg.
Whatever the road in front of him holds, it can’t be harder than the one behind him.
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