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“She needs to stop. Somebody needs to give her some advice to step off and stop trying to run on.”
Watching the BBC’s broadcast of this year’s London Marathon, it was hard to disagree with Paula Radcliffe’s blunt assessment of what looked to be an ill-fated marathon debut for Sifan Hassan, the 30-year-old Dutch national and track star. (Born in Ethiopia, Hassan came to the Netherlands as an asylum seeker while she was still a teenager.) Radcliffe was providing commentary for a race she herself had won three times during her illustrious career.
Hassan was clearly having a rough time, even though it was still the first half of the race. A quad injury she’d sustained toward the end of her training cycle seemed to be flaring up at an inopportune moment. Grimacing and grabbing her left hip, Hassan stopped to stretch not once but twice. She was immediately dropped by a lead pack that included reigning Olympic champion Peres Jepchirchir. As a rule of thumb, losing contact with the leaders this early in an elite marathon means that your chances of winning are effectively zero. Even Radcliffe, a notorious grinder in her day, seemed convinced that Hassan would be better off taking a DNF.
But Hassan kept going. As she later explained, she decided that extending her first marathon experience just a bit longer would put her in better stead the next time she attempted something this insane.
“When I reached 20 kilometers, I was like, ‘Let me get one or two more kilometers,’ ” Hassan says.
She got more than that. Against all reasonable expectation, Hassan rallied and regained the stride that has made her a consistent favorite in World Championship and Olympic competition. Meanwhile, the pace was slowing at the front. With a few miles to go, Hassan caught the lead pack, which had been whittled down to four runners, among them Jepchirchir. Hassan was still there when the leaders took the final turn onto the Mall with less than 200 meters to go.
This was bad news for everyone else—Hassan is the ultimate closer, a woman with one of the most notorious kicks in professional running. In London, it wasn’t even close. As soon as she opened up her stride she was gone. Her winning time was 2:18:33—not bad for a novice marathoner. (Currently, the American record for the women’s marathon is 2:18:29.) But Hassan’s finish was less significant than the way she’d managed to bounce back from disaster. It was one of the more improbable comebacks in the history of professional marathoning. Even Hassan sounded incredulous. After the race, when reporters asked her to pinpoint the moment when she thought she could actually win it, Hassan answered: “When I crossed the line.”
It was absurd that Hassan had decided to run the London Marathon in the first place. Less than two years after winning gold at the Tokyo Olympics in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, and bronze in the 1,500, she was at the peak of one of the more decorated careers in track. This year she once again committed to racing all three distance events at the World Championships in Budapest, Hungary. In an era of hyper-specialization, when races are won by mere hundredths of a second and athletes are fine-tuned for maximum efficiency at specific distances, this kind of versatility flies in the face of all wisdom. But normal standards don’t seem to apply to Hassan. In fact, she is probably the only professional runner competing today who is capable of throwing down a world-class performance in every event from the 800 meters to the marathon. Later this year, in October, she set a course record in Chicago, running the second-fastest women’s marathon time ever.
“I think I am just a curious person,” Hassan says about her promiscuous approach to racing. “If I were only focused on one thing, I would get bored and stop running.”