During perhaps the most dramatic and competitive Olympic marathon ever, Sifan Hassan from the Netherlands officially became an athlete for the ages.
With a sprint in the final 250 meters, Hassan held off a push from Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa to complete one of the most remarkable triple victories in the history of long-distance running.
Within a week she won bronze medals in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters on the track and then sprinted to the gold medal in the marathon on Sunday morning, less than 36 hours after winning bronze in the 10,000 meters on a warm, golden morning in the French capital.
That push from Assefa? It only seemed to make Hassan run harder as she sprinted away from the world record holder in a desperate attempt to reach the finish line before Invalides. She collapsed to the ground after breaking the tape, overcome by dizziness, stood up and told herself she was the Olympic marathon champion and began to move her arms over and over again as the roar rose from the stands in the vast square.
“I have no words for it,” said Hassan.
For nearly 13 miles, she regretted the other two races. Every step was a struggle. If she hadn’t been racing on the track, she thought, she would have felt so much stronger. The lead group was moving forward and she just barely edged out of it, dropping her four seconds behind. She thought they were pulling away.
“I thought they were going to break me,” she said.
But they never did.
The great cliché of marathon racing — “great” because it’s so true — is that “20 miles is the halfway point.” In so many races, the first 80 percent of the marathon is essentially transportation, and then the real race begins, and the energy it takes to race that last 10 kilometers is about the same as what a fit long-distance runner expended to get to that point.
Or at least that’s how it feels, even though 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, is probably the most basic training run, the distance the fastest distance runners in the world can cover in their sleep.
And that is what was heard on the streets of Paris and its western suburbs on Sunday. At 20 miles, this marathon became a competition between a collection of marathon kings.
Sharon Lokedi, Peres Jepchirchir and Hellen Obiri from Kenya; Assefa from Ethiopia and her teammate Amane Shankule; and right in the middle Sifan Hassan. These riders are ranked 1, 2, 3, 4 and 11 in the world rankings. The wildcard was Yuka Suzuki from Japan.
Jepchirchir would fall first, unable to keep up with the advance to the Eiffel Tower. Then Suzuki fell back.
Medal winners Tigst Assefa, Sifan Hassan and Hellen Obiri celebrate for Les Invalides. Hassan crowned a triple distance run with a gold medal. (Joris Verwijst / BSR Agency / Getty Images)
With just over four miles to go, it was a race between five of the best for three podium spots. Two Kenyans, two Ethiopians and a Dutch runner who came to the Netherlands as a refugee from Ethiopia when she was 15 years old.
Hassan did what she always does: she kept to herself, she was so patient and she was so good at driving others crazy, because she knew that they knew that she knew that she was faster than anyone else at the last minute, that she could win on any given day, any distance between one mile and 26.2 miles.
She waited and waited until the last moment she could, and then she did it, forcing the best marathon runner in the world to push her off course in a last-ditch, desperate attempt to stop the inevitable.
Hassan won in an Olympic record time of 2:22.55, three seconds faster than Assefa and 15 seconds faster than Obiri, who took the bronze medal. This earned her third medal in the distance at the Paris Games, a feat neither by a woman nor by a man since Czech distance runner Emil Zátopek won gold in the 5,000, 10,000 and marathon at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics.
That was so many eras of sport and running ago. The long-distance running boom was still two decades away. Marathon running was a niche activity, widely regarded as a reckless and potentially deadly endeavor, rather than the mass movement it is today. The only major marathons were at the Olympic Games every four years and in Boston in April.
For Hassan, however, it’s not the Olympics if she’s not looking for an absurd triple victory. Three years ago in Tokyo, she won the 5,000 and 10,000 meters and took bronze in the 1,500 meters. That in itself was a huge achievement, because runners who can win the 10,000 meters rarely have the speed to compete at the highest level in the metric mile. Hassan proved that in a matter of days.
She then started running marathons, winning London and Chicago, both flat, fast courses. In Chicago last October she ran 2:13.44, the second-fastest time ever by a woman. Only Assefa’s world record time of 2:11.53 in Berlin, set a few weeks earlier, is faster.
With that success, Hassan began to make marathon training her priority. But knowing that she would still qualify for the Olympics in the other two distance events, she began to think that it might be possible to compete in all three races and reach the podium in each one. Days ago, she half-jokingly admitted that she should probably have her brain tested.
“Everyone thought she was crazy,” Hassan’s Dutch teammate Anne Luijten said Sunday morning at the finish after finishing 50th, more than 10 minutes behind Hassan. Luijten, knowing Hassan, said she didn’t think she was crazy at all. “There was no way she was going to do just the two. It’s amazing that she did it on the (5,000) and (10,000), even though her heart was in the marathon.”
Sifan Hassan and Tigst Assefa collide in the final stretch of Sunday’s marathon. Hassan shook it off and passed Assefa to take gold. (Michael Steele/Getty Images)
Hassan credits her success in part to making herself a guinea pig when it comes to sports science and training methods. Instead of training her body to work hardest when it’s tired, Hassan sometimes schedules workouts based on the amount of cortisol in her system.
Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. The more cortisol in the system, the more stress she experiences and the harder it is for her to recover from her previous training session. Hassan tries to push herself the most when her body feels capable of it, rather than overloading herself with stress.
Other runners were amazed on Sunday when they heard what Hassan had achieved.
“Did she win?” asked Dakotah Lindwurm, the American marathoner who finished 12th, unable to believe the results as Hassan had raced back to the podium on Friday night. “Ohhhh, myyyy, God! My legs are sore. I don’t know how she can run on tired legs.”
Lindwurm, a largely unknown runner from the upper Midwest who has had her best results at Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota, briefly took the lead just past the halfway point. She looked around and saw the speed and quality of those following her and knew it wouldn’t last long, especially since the lead group had run the first half in a fairly conservative time of one hour and 13 minutes and still had plenty of fuel left in the tank for the second half.
As the race progressed, the Kenyans and Ethiopians worked together, taking turns trying to put some pain into Hassan’s legs. Those legs had to be tired, right? Certainly more tired than theirs, right? This was one of the best collections of female runners ever to join together in the final miles of the world’s most important marathon.
“I was so excited to race with them,” said Obiri, who worked with Lokedi to try to push the pace and push Hassan back before the end. “We tried.”
Lokedi said Hassan was simply “amazing”.
“When she ran 41 kilometers (25 miles) I thought, ‘Oh, she’s here,’ and I just knew she was going to be on the medal table.”
Hassan had been telling herself for five miles to stay calm, not to race these women in the final miles, to stay behind them, to hold on, and to make it a sprint to the finish.
“I said to myself, ‘Calm down, just run the last 100 meters,’” she said.
She had to run a little more. In the last quarter mile, Assefa made a final attempt to run away from Hassan. She pushed through and ran the last twisting stretch with everything she had, but Hassan’s legs started firing and as she approached Assefa, there was only one lever left to pull.
Road racing, especially marathons, rarely comes down to positioning in the final stretch like track racing does, with leaders weaving and pushing to try and block each other. Roads aren’t claustrophobic like tracks are.
This was a different kind of fight, though, and when Hassan began that final spring, Assefa’s neck twisted in a moment of panic to see the force of what was passing by. In a flash, she slammed her shoulder elbow into Hassan. It was as if she were trying to hold back the ocean.
“She’s a generational talent,” Emily Sisson, the American who finished 23rd, said of Hassan. “She’s going to be cemented as the GOAT (greatest of all time), if she wasn’t already.”
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(Top photo of Sifan Hassan celebrating Sunday’s marathon victory: Jorist Verwijst/BSR Agency/Getty Images)
