In the most dramatic and competitive Olympic marathon maybe ever, Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands officially became an athlete for the ages.
With a surge in the final 250 meters, Hassan withstood a shove from Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia and pulled off one of the most remarkable trebles in distance running history.
In the span of a week, she won bronze medals in the 5,000 and 10,000 on the track and then sprinted to the gold medal in the marathon Sunday morning, less than 36 hours after capturing that bronze in the 10,000 on a warm, golden morning in the French capital.
That push from Assefa? It only seemed to drive Hassan harder as she sprinted away from the world record holder in a desperate blaze for the finish in front of Invalides. She collapsed to the ground after she broke the tape, overcome with dizziness, then rose and told herself she was the Olympic marathon champion and started pumping her arms over and over as the roars rose from bleachers in the vast plaza.
“I have no words for it,” Hassan said.
For nearly 13 miles she regretted running the two other races. Each step was a struggle. Had she not raced on the track, she thought, she would have felt so much stronger. The lead pack pushed ahead and she lipped off it for a bit, falling four seconds behind. She thought they were going away.
“I thought they were going to break me,” she said.
But they never did.
The great cliche of marathon racing — “great” because it’s so true — is that “20 miles is halfway.” In so many races, the first 80 percent of the marathon is basically transportation, and then the real racing begins, and the energy required to race in those final 10 kilometers, is about equal to what a fit distance runner has expended just to get to that point.
Or that’s what it feels like anyway, even though 10 kilometers, or 6.2 miles, is probably the most basic of training runs, the sort of distance the fastest long-distance runners in the world can cover in their sleep.
And that’s what shook out Sunday on the streets of Paris and its western outskirts. At 20 miles, this marathon became a competition between a collection of marathon running royalty.
Sharon Lokedi, Peres Jepchirchir and Hellen Obiri of Kenya; Assefa of Ethiopia and her teammate Amane Shankule; and right in the middle of them, Sifan Hassan. Those runners hold spots, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 11 in the world rankings. The wild card was Yuka Suzuki of Japan.
Jepchirchir would fall off first, unable to keep up with the push toward the Eiffel Tower. Then Suzuki fell back.
Medalists Tigst Assefa, Sifan Hassan and Hellen Obiri celebrate in front of Les Invalides. Hassan capped a distance-running treble with a gold medal. (Joris Verwijst / BSR Agency / Getty Images)
With a little more than four miles to go, it was a race among five of the best for three spots on the podium. 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 was doing what she always does, hanging back, so patient, so good at driving everyone else mad because she knows that they know that she knows she is faster than any of them down the stretch, capable of winning on any given day at any distance between one mile and 26.2.
She waited and waited until the last moment she could, and then provided it, forcing the world’s top-ranked marathoner to try to shove her off course, a last desperate hopeless move to stop the inevitable.
Hassan won in an Olympic record 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 collecting her third distance medal of the Paris Games, she accomplished something no one woman had ever done and no man had accomplished since Emil Zátopek, the Czech distance master, won the gold medal in the 5,000, 10,000 and the marathon at the Helsinki Olympics in 1952.
That was so many eras of sport and running ago. The distance running boom was still two decades away. Marathoning was a niche activity, widely considered a foolhardy and potentially lethal endeavor, rather than the mass movement it is today. The only major marathons of note took place at the Olympics every four years and in Boston each April.
For Hassan, though, it isn’t an Olympics if she isn’t going after an absurd treble. In Tokyo three years ago, she won the 5,000 and the 10,000 and took the bronze in the 1,500. That in itself was a huge accomplishment since runners capable of winning the 10,000 rarely have the speed to compete at the highest level in the metric mile. Hassan proved that wrong in a matter of days.
Then she started doing marathons, winning London and Chicago, two 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 just weeks before, is faster.
With that success, Hassan began making marathon training her priority. But knowing she would still qualify for the Olympics in the two other distance events, she started thinking that competing in all three races and reaching the podium in every one might be possible. Days ago she allowed, only half-jokingly, that she probably needed to have her brain examined.
“Everyone thought she was crazy,” Hassan’s Dutch teammate, Anne Luijten, said 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 the two. It’s amazing she still performed in the (5,000) and (10,000) even though her heart was in the marathon.”
Sifan Hassan and Tigst Assefa make contact down the final stretch of Sunday’s marathon. Hassan shook it off and moved past Assefa to take gold. (Michael Steele / Getty Images)
Hassan owes her success in part to making herself something of a guinea pig when it comes to sports science and training methods. Instead of training her body to work hardest when it is tired, Hassan sometimes sets workouts around the amount of cortisol in her system.
Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. The more cortisol in the system, the more stress she is under, and the harder time she is having recovering from her previous training session. Hassan tries to push herself most when her body is feeling up to it rather than overloading herself with stress.
Other runners Sunday had to lift their jaws off the pavement when they learned what Hassan had managed.
“She won?” asked Dakotah Lindwurm, the American marathoner who finished 12th, unable to believe the results given that Hassan had raced to another podium Friday night. “Ohhhh, myyyy, God! My legs are trashed I don’t know how she is running on tired legs.”
Lindwurm, a largely unknown runner from the upper Midwest who has produced her best results in Minnesota’s Grandma’s Marathon, took the lead briefly just past the halfway mark. She looked around and saw the speed and quality that was trailing her and knew it wasn’t going to last for long, especially given that the lead pack had run the first half in a rather conservative one hour, 13 minutes and would have plenty of gas in the tank in the second half.
As the race wore on, the Kenyans and the Ethiopians worked together and took turns trying to put some pain into Hassan’s legs. Surely those legs had to be weary, didn’t they, at least wearier than theirs were, right? This was one of the greatest collections of female distance runners ever to race together in the final miles of the most important marathon in the world.
“I was so excited to race with them,” said Obiri, who teamed up with Lokedi to try to push the pace and push Hassan back before the end. “We tried.”
Lokedi said Hassan was simply “awesome.”
“At 41 kilometers (25 miles) when she was there, I was like, ‘Oh, she’s here,” and I just knew she was going to be in the medal position.”
By then, Hassan had been telling herself for five miles to stay calm, to not race with these women over the course of the final miles. Stay behind them, hang on, and make it a sprint to the finish.
“I was telling myself, ‘Calm down, just run the last 100 meters,’” she said.
She had to run a little more than that. In the final quarter mile, Assefa made one final attempt to run away from Hassan. She dug in and ran for the last twisting stretch with everything she had, but Hassan’s legs were starting to fire, and as she came up on Assefa, there was only one lever left to pull.
Road racing, especially marathons, rarely comes down to positioning in the final stretches the way a track race does, with leaders veering and jostling to try and block one another from getting past. Roads aren’t claustrophobic the way tracks are.
This was a different sort of battle though, and as Hassan began that final spring, Assefa’s neck pivoted in a moment of panic to glimpse the force of what was coming by. In an instant, she was slamming her shoulder elbow into Hassan. 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 solidified as the GOAT (greatest of all time) now, if she wasn’t already.”
GO DEEPER
Tola wins Olympic marathon for Ethiopia
(Top photo of Sifan Hassan celebrating Sunday’s win in the marathon: Jorist Verwijst / BSR Agency / Getty Images)
