Sifan Hassan wins women’s marathon gold, completes incredible Olympic hat-trick

After the most spectacular and competitive Olympic marathon of all time, Dutchwoman Sifan Hassan has officially become an unforgettable athlete.

With momentum in the final 250 metres, Hassan held off a surge from Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa and completed one of the most remarkable hat-tricks in distance running history.

In the space of a week, she won bronze medals in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters on the track, then sprinted to marathon gold on Sunday morning, less than 36 hours after winning that bronze in the 10,000 meters on a warm, golden morning in the French capital.

That push from Assefa? It only added to Hassan’s motivation as she pulled away from the world record holder in a desperate sprint to the finish in front of Les Invalides. She collapsed to the ground after breaking the tape, feeling dizzy, then got back up, thinking she was the Olympic marathon champion, and began pumping her arms again and again as roars rose from the stands in the vast square.

“I have no words to describe it,” Hassan said.

For nearly 13 miles, she regretted running the other two races. Every step was a struggle. If she hadn’t run on the track, she thought, she would have felt much stronger. The lead group pushed forward and she let go for a moment, finding herself four seconds behind. She thought they were going to run away.

“I thought they were going to break me,” she said.

But they never did.

The great cliché about marathons—“great” because it’s so true—is that “20 miles is halfway.” In many races, the first 80 percent of the marathon is essentially transportation, then the real running begins, and the energy required to run those last 10 miles is about equal to what a fit distance runner expended to get there.

Or at least that’s what it feels like, even though 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, is probably the most basic training run, the kind of distance the world’s fastest distance runners can run in their sleep.

And that’s exactly what happened Sunday in the streets of Paris and its western suburbs. This 32-kilometer 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 in the middle of them, Sifan Hassan. These riders occupy places 1, 2, 3, 4 and 11 in the world rankings. The wild card was Japan’s Yuka Suzuki.

Jepchirchir fell first, unable to keep up with the push toward the Eiffel Tower. Then Suzuki stepped back.

Medallists Tigst Assefa, Sifan Hassan and Hellen Obiri celebrate their victory in front of Les Invalides. Hassan capped his hat-trick in the long-distance race with a gold medal. (Joris Verwijst/BSR Agency/Getty Images)

With just over four miles to go, five of the top female runners battled for three places on the podium. Two Kenyans, two Ethiopians and a Dutch runner who came to the Netherlands as a refugee from Ethiopia at the age of 15.

Hassan was doing what she always does, she hung back, she was so patient, so good at driving everyone crazy because she knows they know she knows she’s faster than any of them down the stretch, capable of winning any day at any distance between a mile and 26.2.

She waited and waited until the last moment she could, and then she did it, forcing the world’s best marathoner to try to push her out of the way, a last desperate, hopeless gesture to stop the inevitable.

Hassan took the Olympic record with a time of 2:22.55, three seconds ahead of Assefa and 15 seconds faster than Obiri, who took the bronze medal. In doing so, and winning her third long-distance medal at the Paris Games, she accomplished something no woman had ever done and no man had accomplished since Emil Zátopek, the Czech distance master, won gold in the 5,000, 10,000 and marathon at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952.

It was a long time ago, and sports and running had not yet become mainstream. Marathons were a niche activity, widely regarded as reckless and potentially deadly, rather than the mass movement they are today. The only major marathons of note were held at the Olympics every four years and in Boston every April.

For Hassan, it’s not an Olympics if she’s not aiming for an absurd triple. In Tokyo three years ago, she won the 5,000m and 10,000m and took bronze in the 1,500m. That in itself was a huge feat, because runners who can win the 10,000m rarely have the speed to compete at the highest level in the metric mile. Hassan proved otherwise in a matter of days.

She then began running marathons, winning London and Chicago, both flat and fast courses. In Chicago last October, she ran 2:13.44, the second-fastest time ever by a woman. Only Assefa’s world record of 2:11.53 in Berlin, set a few weeks earlier, is faster.

With that success, Hassan began to make marathon training a priority. But knowing she would still qualify for the Olympics in the other two distance events, she began to think it was possible to compete in all three races and reach the podium each time. A few days ago, she admitted, half-jokingly, that she probably needed to have her brain checked.

“Everyone thought she was crazy,” said Anne Luijten, Hassan’s Dutch teammate, in the finish area Sunday morning after finishing 50th, more than 10 minutes behind Hassan. Knowing Hassan as she does, Luijten said she didn’t think she was crazy at all. “There was no way she was just going to do both. It’s incredible that she still managed to do the 5,000 and the 10,000 when her heart was in the marathon.”

Sifan Hassan and Tigst Assefa come together in the final stretch of Sunday’s marathon. Hassan held his own and passed Assefa to win gold. (Michael Steele/Getty Images)

Hassan owes part of her success to the fact that she has made herself a guinea pig when it comes to sports science and training methods. Instead of training her body to work harder when it is tired, Hassan sometimes plans her workouts based on the amount of cortisol in her system.

Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. The more cortisol in the body, the more stressed she is and the harder it is for her to recover from her previous workout. Hassan tries to push herself when her body feels able to rather than overloading herself with stress.

Other runners must have picked their jaws up from the sidewalk on Sunday when they learned what Hassan had achieved.

“Did she win?” asked Dakotah Lindwurm, the American marathon runner who finished 12th, unable to believe the result as Hassan had climbed onto another podium Friday night. “Ohhhh, my God! My legs are ruined, I don’t know how she runs with tired legs.”

Lindwurm, a little-known runner from the Midwest who had her best results at Grandma’s Marathon in Minnesota, briefly took the lead just after the halfway mark. She looked around and saw the speed and quality of the race behind her and knew it wouldn’t last long, especially since the lead group had covered the first half in a fairly conservative time of one hour and 13 minutes and would have plenty of gas in the tank in the second half.

As the race wore on, the Kenyans and Ethiopians worked together, taking turns trying to make Hassan suffer. Those legs must have been tired, right? At least more tired than theirs, right? This was one of the largest groups of female distance runners ever to come together in the final miles of the world’s biggest marathon.

“I was so excited to race with them,” said Obiri, who teamed up with Lokedi to try to accelerate and push Hassan off before the end. “We tried.”

Lokedi said Hassan was simply “awesome.”

“At 25 miles, when she was there, I thought, ‘Oh, she’s there,’ and I just knew she was going to be in medal position.”

By then, Hassan had been telling himself for five miles to stay calm, not to run with these women in the final miles. Stay behind them, hang on and sprint to the finish.

“I was like, ‘Calm down, just run the last 100 meters,'” she said.

She had to run a little more than that. In the last quarter mile, Assefa made one last attempt to escape Hassan. She dug in and ran through the last winding stretch with all her might, but Hassan’s legs were starting to warm up, and as she closed in on Assefa, there was only one lever left to pull.

Road races, especially marathons, are rarely about positioning in the final stretches as they are on the track, with leaders jostling to try to block each other. Roads are not as claustrophobic as tracks.

But this was a different kind of fight, and as Hassan made that final leap, Assefa’s neck swiveled in a moment of panic to catch a glimpse of the force of what was coming. In an instant, she struck Hassan from her shoulder to her elbow. It was like 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) now, if she isn’t already.”

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(Top photo of Sifan Hassan celebrating his marathon victory on Sunday: Jorist Verwijst/BSR Agency/Getty Images)