Sifan Hassan couldn’t stop laughing at herself.
“What have I done? What is wrong with me?” she said of the inner monologue that had echoed in her head through the 26.2 punishing miles of the Olympic women’s marathon on Sunday.
Hassan had already logged three Olympic races, and two bronze medals from them. She ran the first heat in the 5,000 meters on Aug. 2, the final of the 5,000 on Monday and the 10,000 final on Friday night. Then, only 37 hours later, she propelled herself across the starting line in the marathon, the most demanding race of them all, and ended up crossing the finish line first.
An Ethiopian-born runner who competes for the Netherlands, Hassan, 31, had described her Olympic schedule — which initially was supposed to also include the 1,500 — as one driven by curiosity. She wanted to know if she could do all three events, requiring close to 40 miles of Olympic racing. The goal, she emphasized, was not necessarily to win medals in each race: Instead, it was simply to complete all three.
No athlete had taken medals in all three events at the same Olympic Games since 1952, when Emil Zatopek won three golds for what was then Czechoslovakia. In the age of specialization in elite running, though, Hassan’s decision to even try all three races was unusually bold. To claim a medal in all three was, seemingly, unthinkable. Until she did it.
As the words spilled out of her after the marathon, Hassan was still wrestling with the intense physical challenge she had set for herself, of whether testing her physical limits had really been the wisest idea after all.
“Every single moment I regretted that I ran the five and 10,000,” she said.
During the race, she said, she kept thinking of her competitors in the marathon’s lead group — Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia, Hellen Obiri of Kenya, Sharon Lokedi of Kenya and Amane Beriso Shankule of Ethiopia among them — and their fresh, rested legs. “When are they going to break me?” she wondered.
The gold was decided in the final two turns, when Hasan let out a ferocious kick that has made her such a feared competitor on the track. She won on a course purposefully made difficult with an Olympic-record time of 2 hours 22 minutes 55 seconds.
“I’m an Olympic champion,” she said. “How is that possible?”
Unlike most Olympic athletes, Hassan refuses to specialize.
At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, she raised eyebrows when she entered the 1,500, the 5,000 and the 10,000, signing up for a total of 24,500 meters of racing in six starts over nine days. There, too, she won medals in each event. There, too, she responded to reporters’ questions with one of her own: “Am I a crazy person?”
Most athletes focus on one or two events, often races that demand similar types of training. Conventional thinking is such that more focused training can lead to more success at the highest levels. But Hassan finds “huge satisfaction in doing something that’s really hard and unconventional,” her coach, Tim Rowberry, said last week.
He described their relationship as one filled with mutual respect and a side of healthy debate. “She always questions everything,” he said. After she won her marathon debut in stunning fashion, in London in 2023, Hassan started getting more curious.
She and Rowberry watched a documentary about Zatopek shortly after that race. When the Paris Olympics schedule came out, Rowberry said they looked at one another with the same thought: Maybe she could pull off the same feat, too.
That decision has pushed the pair to explore different types of training and racing. Hassan has spent much of the past year racing on tired legs — without having had substantial breaks before major races — to replicate the kind of exhaustion she would feel at the Olympic marathon.
She was steadfast in her goals once she arrived Paris. She was frequently asked if her plans would pivot. Was she really still going to do the marathon? Was she nervous about it?
She spoke in no uncertain terms. “I’m freaking scared of the marathon!” she said, “If you are asking if I’m nervous, I’m nervous! I’m really nervous!”
After each race, Hassan went back to what she said when she announced her three-event ambitions. “I’m not going to make myself crazy over golds,” she said. She already had two from Tokyo, she said, and she was grateful for those. Paris would be an experiment.
Rowberry said he and Hassan even joked to the Dutch federation about entering her in the 4×400 relay.
“She’s obviously not ready for that,” he said, before adding, in a serious tone, “I think she’s someone that wants to find out if she’s capable of anything.”
He paused.
“Is there a limit on how many events you can do?” he wondered. “I don’t even know.”
Read More: With Marathon Gold, Sifan Hassan Tests the Limits of Endurance
