Picking out the defining moment of Sifan Hassan’s career is an infuriating exercise. The challenge is not in finding a contender, of course – it’s in settling on the preeminent one. The charismatic distance runner with the monopolistic tendencies has achieved more titles, medals and records to date (she’s still only 32) than half a dozen elite athletes might hope to collectively flaunt in their dotage. Yet her progress has been anything but smooth and linear, often by design – and the result has been a carousel of compelling moments.
There was the tumbling fall in the final lap of the 1,500m at the Tokyo Olympics. Sure, it was a heat, but the way she rejoined the race and proceeded to reel in every single one of the field to take the most improbable of wins was redolent of a generational F1 driver in a controversially superior car. It somehow didn’t seem fair. A few hours later, showing scant signs of fatigue, the Dutchwoman was winning the first of her six Olympic medals.
Or what about another fall, this time within touching distance of the finish line in the World Championships in Budapest in 2023? Winding it up down the final straight in the 10,000m, she clipped a leg, slid painfully and had to watch as three athletes from the country of her birth – Gudaf Tsegay, Letesenbet Gidey and Ejgayehu Taye – claimed a podium clean sweep for Ethiopia. Gidey later won the Fair Play Award at the World Athletics Awards for going back to console Hassan. Many felt it should have gone to Hassan herself, who rather than throwing a Trumpian-grade wobbly and challenging the result, got to her feet and strolled resignedly across the line with blood oozing from a deep gash on her elbow but her trademark smile still in place.
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‘This is sport, these things happen,’ she later said. ‘I just had a bad moment.’
Others might point to Hassan’s debut marathon victory – indeed her debut marathon – in London in 2023. It was as chaotic as it was mesmerising. Up against arguably the strongest female line-up in history, led by then world record holder Brigid Kosgei and Olympic champion Peres Jepchirchir, Best Garmin deals Health & Injuries.
Hassan forgot to ask her physio to tape up an injured leg. She stopped twice to stretch. Later, she nearly missed a drinks station – veering across the road sharply and narrowly avoiding a collision with a support motorbike – then offered the poker-faced defending champion Yalemzerf Yehualaw a sup of her drink. She looked like a callow novice, which, in fairness, was no act. Steve Cram and Paula Radcliffe, providing the commentary, even seemed to suggest at one point that – bless her – it might be better if she threw in the towel. But that’s not really the Hassan way, and shortly afterwards she was racing down the Mall to a plausibility-stretching maiden win, which she backed up six months later on the streets of Chicago.
Last year threw up what, in time, may come to settle the defining moment conundrum once and for all: Hassan’s battling, courageous victory in the Paris Olympics marathon. The course was harder and hillier than any before it, with more elevation than the Boston and New York courses combined. Just 37 hours prior, Hassan had raced the energy-sapping 10,000m final, claiming bronze. And in Tigst Assefa she was facing an opponent who simply wasn’t going to countenance defeat.
It was to come down to a ferocious final sprint for glory, culminating in a ‘coming together’ (rarely has that genteel athletics euphemism seemed more laughable). Veteran Getty photographer was perfectly placed to capture the elbow-flailing, sinew-straining moment. His image of Assefa and Hassan – airborne, like thoroughbreds in full-flow, with a sea of camera phones closing in around them – rightfully won Photograph of the Year at the World Athletics Awards.
‘I’ve actually got that shot on my phone,’ Hassan tells me. ‘I just can’t bear to look at it.’ Like a straight-A*s A-Level student waking up in a sweat months after the exams, there’s still a visceral terror that the win may not, in fact, be real. Or perhaps that it will be wrenched away with another stumble or – as it nearly was – an obstruction appeal. ‘I’ve watched it [the final stages of the race] back so many times and, every time, I’m so scared. It panics me,’ she says. ‘Even when I passed her [Assefa], I wasn’t sure I had the victory. I was telling myself just relax and breathe, get across the line. But I was thinking “oh my god!”. I wanted it so much.’ The terror propelled her to an Olympic record as well as gold. The sweetest win of her career? ‘Yes, I think so.’
Chatting on a miserable winter morning, with rain lashing against the window of her agent’s office in the Netherlands, that balmy August day in Paris feels a long way off. The self-confessed ‘nomad’, who spends large chunks of her year in America and Ethiopia these days, is enjoying a brief moment of respite and reflection in northern Europe – and seems grateful for it.
She’s ‘chilled’, to use a Hassanism, enthusiastic (when is she ever not?), scrupulously polite and, as I’m to find out over the subsequent hour or so, customarily loquacious. Hassan speaks fast and without a filter; she’s impulsive and charmingly digressional. She’d be a nightmare in team sports, I decide. But she’s an interviewer’s delight, consistently eschewing athletes, the guarded, content-free language a la mode.
I start by asking her about her 2024. She didn’t win the US Presidential election, or my daughter’s U10 school sports day sack race, but she seemed to claim pretty much every other gong going. A Zátopekian triumvirate of medals in Paris; World Athletics’ Athlete of the Year; World Athletics’ Out of Stadium Athlete of the Year; Dutch Athlete of the Year (for the third time); Champion for Peace of the Year, at the Peace and Sport Awards… The list is long and laden with alarmingly hefty trophies. An annus mirabilis, surely?
‘Well, it’s funny because the way I won in Paris changed the history of the year,’ she says. ‘It makes it look great but when I look back it was really up and down. I had the best year of my life, but also the hardest.’ At the heart of this was gnawing apprehension at that fatuously steep Paris marathon course. ‘The course really killed my brain. I was training so hard; going up, up, up. My coach was like “what are you doing, it’s not good” and I said “thanks, but I’m the one who has to run it”. And I ended up training so hard that I overtrained.’
Three weeks before the Games, this was medically confirmed. Hassan was crestfallen; a voracious reader and researcher, she knew that overtraining typically necessitates a six-week lay-off. Paris – so close to the Netherlands geographically that she had come to regard the upcoming Olympics as tantamount to a home Games – was to be a write-off. ‘My head went down. “I’m done for 2024,” I thought. Mentally my mind moved on to LA four years later, so convinced was I that I wouldn’t be able to perform.’
Perversely, this mental tuning out and the concomitant dissipation of intrinsic pressure, was to prove a blessing. She relaxed into her task, curtailed her training significantly, and then sped to 5,000m and 10,000m bronze, before her coruscating performance in the very last athletics event of the Games.
I’ve always suspected that Hassan’s happily haphazard demeanour belies a formidable clarity of thought and purpose in competition. Surely, given the results, it has to? ‘Ha,’ she laughs. ‘Not at all. I’m the most scared person on the start line. If you opened my head and had a look, it’s all fear. I’m like “Why am I here?”. “What am I doing?!”.’
‘Scared’ is a word Hassan uses a lot. It’s hard to reconcile with someone so relentlessly upbeat. It feels overly simplified to attribute this outlook to her tumultuous upbringing in which she left her native Ethiopia as a refugee, aged 15, and came to the Netherlands; she had no friends, family or appreciation of the cultural chasm she was crossing. But it’s incontestably true that her formative years have left an imprint, and perhaps equipped her with a mentality that she’s been able to leverage to devastating effect.
‘She's someone that has gone through a lot of things and because of that she's very empathic,’ says her Utah-based coach, Tim Rowberry. ‘She thinks about other people all the time. But because she's been through those hard times she's not afraid to directly chase after a challenge, or really go through those painful experiences and workouts to get there.’
Hassan was raised on a farm by her mother – a domineering presence by all accounts – and her grandmother in rural Kersa, east of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. She still has family in the country and visits regularly: to train, to hike, to chill, and to savour the peerless coffee. ‘It’s amazing in Ethiopia,’ she says. ‘Once you get out of the cities you see nothing, just countryside. Maybe a single farm or house every 10km. When I go to Ethiopia, I’m reminded how big the world is.’
I’m curious about her relationship with the country of her birth. Is she recognised? Revered? She says she thinks she’s probably more famous in the east African country than in the Netherlands (and in the Netherlands she’s one of the highest-profile athletes). ‘Even when I cover my face,’ she says, showing me with her hijab how she might do this, ‘they still know me!’
But it’s perhaps closer to veneration than love. ‘In the last three or four years I’ve become really famous – when you win the marathon and the 10K in Ethiopia, that happens,’ Hassan explains. ‘I’m on the TV a lot and on the radio they discuss how they [the Ethiopian athletes] are going to beat me. I know because I know the language!’ She finds this funny but the pull of two nationalities must be strange, at best – particularly when she’s competing in a sport graced by numerous athletes from her birth country. It would only be natural if part of her longed to compete, as Assefa and Tsegay do, in the green of Ethiopia.
‘I arrived in the Netherlands so young, before I had an identity,’ she replies. ‘If I’d come after [the age of] 25, 26 then my heart would be there. But I don’t wish to compete for Ethiopia because I was here [in the Netherlands]. I love the Dutch – because I came so young I have the same mentality as them; when I go back to Ethiopia, I’m too direct. My family are always saying: “You can’t say that!” But I’m so grateful that I come from there and then also spent lots of time in the Netherlands and also the US because it means I have a totally different mentality. I could not buy the mentality I have for a million, or even a billion dollars.’
Hassan has never really spoken about the reasons for her departure in 2008, but she has touched on the associated anguish. She was first housed in a centre for underaged asylum-seekers in Zuidlaren, in the north of the Netherlands. It was alien and oppressive. She cried every day, she once told Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, describing herself as like ‘a flower that got no sun’.
Yet through some similarly displaced compatriots she found running, and Eindhoven athletics club. The club remembers ‘Sifo’ as a young lady with drifting attention, an ungainly running action and limitless potential. In 2011, aged 18, she won the Eindhoven half-marathon, her first big victory. Two years later, she took gold in the European Athletics U23 Cross-Country championships, and has been competing in Dutch orange ever since. Her big-stage breakthrough came at the 2015 World Championships in Beijing, where she won bronze in the 1,500m.
Hassan’s versatility is her hallmark. She’s an omnivorous Olympian, competing in the 800m, 1,500m, 5,000m, 10,000m and the marathon. Her three golds and three bronzes are augmented by a further sextet of World Championship medals, including double gold in 2019 in Doha in the seldom combined 1,500m and 10,000m. She is the custodian, at last count, of no less than 13 European records. She’s been ranked in the world’s top two in pretty much every event at which she’s competed. And the 18.93km she ran in one hour on the track at the Memorial van Damme event in Brussels in September 2020 remains the world record.
In a sport in which the elite expend vast reserves trying to exert absolute control over themselves, their environment and their narrow specialism, she does precisely the opposite: chopping and changing distances and combinations with abandon, long before anything even loosely resembling complacency can get a foothold. It’s almost as if, denied a comfort zone from an early age, she’s only comfortable outside of one.
‘When I win, I say “what now?” I lose motivation,’ she says. ‘I had a very tough mother in Ethiopia but she let me try everything. “Do this, do this – figure it out yourself”. Of course, I’d be scared to try it but it meant I had to work it out. I believe we have to be uncomfortable in life. If a person is sick and doesn’t take paracetamol, they will figure out how to get better somehow. Stress is bad, but sometimes stress is good, as it forces the brain to figure out a way. What I’ve realised is, when I’m uncomfortable, that makes me better.’
This willingness to experiment – and not to let fear or failure derail her – is a key part of the cult of Hassan. Her honesty and charisma does the rest. Surely no other elite sportsman or woman has such relatable self-talk, nor is as willing to share it? Who hasn’t lined up for a 26-miler, looked around at their intimidatingly poised fellow runners, and thought – as Hassan remarked to the 50-odd journalists in the press conference before the London Marathon in 2023 – ‘why the hell did I decide to do the marathon?!’
At such events, she holds the room like a seasoned entertainer: sometimes in a brightly patterned hijab; at other times, a bucket hat or backwards cap. Gratitude is a central tenet of her Muslim faith and she radiates it. There’s a childlike ingenuousness to her, yet she’s no pushover. When it comes to her principals, she’s forthright and often bold.
The maroon hijab, worn with a disarming smile on the podium for the marathon in Paris, perhaps fits into that category. It was the most elegant of two fingers to the French authorities who, abiding by the country’s strict laïcité secularism laws, had prevented their own athletes from wearing this or any other religious garment during the Olympics. The gesture – provocative without being antagonistic – won Hassan almost universal admiration. ‘Sifan Hassan getting her gold medal wearing a hijab in front of the people who banned its use in sports in France. ART AND POETRY,’ wrote one social media user.
When I ask if it was intended as a statement, she looks thoughtful. ‘The world has really very negative views of Muslim women,’ she eventually replies. ‘”They are not strong”, “they are not beautiful”, “they have no life”, “they only wear a hijab because man told them”. It’s always “man, man, man, man”. And it so pisses me off.
‘Not everything is about man. I have my religion. I believe because of me, and I wear a hijab because I want to. Some women prefer to wear a hijab just as some other women prefer to wear miniskirts or do this or do that. They cover themselves because they are happy in their own religion. I want to show people: Sifan is running, she’s winning, she has confidence – and she also has religion.’
‘If I don’t believe in Islam I’m not going to stay Muslim,’ she adds. ‘I win. I can support myself. I have a name. Nobody is pushing me. And I want people to see other Muslim women doing their own thing, showing they are beautiful, they are confident, they are strong, they are smart – and they choose to believe in Islam.’
In the wake of Paris, Hassan has teamed up with the Qatar Foundation – a Doha-based non-profit – to help develop sporting talent among Qatari girls. Exercise, nutrition and overall wellbeing are the priorities, with after-school and community-based initiatives combined with the nurturing of future stars.
It’s a subject close to her heart and one that transcends religious boundaries. ‘As women, we are far better than we sometimes think we are,’ she says. ‘We just create a fence over our head and we think this’ – she marks out a level with her hand – ‘is the max. We have to figure that out.’
So what does 2025 hold in store for her? First up, a return to the scene of that maiden marathon triumph and a hugely significant race for her. ‘It feels so special to come back to the London Marathon,’ she says. ‘This is where I ran my very first marathon and began my journey in this incredible distance. London is also where I learned to be patient, to trust myself and to keep pushing even when it feels impossible. It is a place where I grew – not just as an athlete, but as a person.’
She’ll be hoping for considerably less drama on the streets of London this time around. Or perhaps not. ‘It doesn’t matter what happens – I just want to enjoy it,’ she says. ‘Last time, I didn’t really see anything – I was so scared [of the distance], so focused on myself and constantly calculating whether or not I was going to finish. I was worried that people thought I was no good, or that I’d make a mistake – and that it was a silly thing to do.’
Ominously for those hoping to unseat her, her ebullience will this time around be paired with both confidence and experience. ‘I’m excited about running in London and have so much more confidence than I did two years ago,’ she says. With the graceful GOAT, Eliud Kipchoge, also competing in the capital for the first time in five years, it’s shaping up to be the most memorable race in years.
Beyond that, Hassan has spoken of her ambition to do four major marathons in a calendar year. And don’t bet on there being any less experimentation in the coming months and years. In this fearless heterodoxy, coach Rowberry is somewhere between passenger and curator. ‘I think our partnership works so well because my mindset is almost as crazy as hers,’ he says. A former 800m runner at Utah Valley University, he met the Dutchwoman on the Nike Oregon Project in 2018 and within a year found himself sole coach to arguably the hottest property in world athletics.
‘We get along really well,’ says Rowberry. ‘When I first met her I was actually pacing her in a 1K time trial, and I helped her get her personal best. So we are close enough in age [Rowberry is 37] that I’ve run with Sifan a lot and I still train with her sometimes. It's getting harder and harder to keep up though!’
Rowberry says he’s always trying to find inventive new ways of keeping Hassan engaged in training. This included, in their most recent altitude camp, some hurdle sprints. Should Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone be concerned, I ask? He laughs. ‘I can promise that Sydney has nothing to worry about. It didn't look so great.’
Whichever route the pair decide upon, there’s plenty still to come, he believes. ‘If you were to ask me what Sifan’s strongest event is, I really would like her to get back to the 3K. I think that she could do some crazy things in the 3K if we had time. And after her recent performances in the marathon I feel like she has a lot of growth in that, too.’
‘I don’t think you’ve seen the best of her,’ he continues. ‘Her and I both believe that she can break her PB in every event – and that includes the 800m. I think that she could do some crazy things in whichever direction she decides to go and as long as I'm her coach she's going to be choosing very unusual combinations and really different distances.’
Which throws up some tantalising prospects for the Los Angeles Games in just over three years’ time. The 100m? The triple jump? Hassan humours me with a response. ‘Not the 100m because the other athletes would have finished while I’m still on the start line thinking, “Why am I here?!” and “How am I going to race?!”’ she says with a chuckle. ‘Also I’m a terrible starter.’
The smarter money is on a unique, possibly unprecedented combination of some of the six events she’s already tackled in her three Olympics to date. She has ‘the Zátopek’ – gold in the 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon, immortalised by the great Emil Zátopek in Helsinki in 1952 – across two Games. Could she manage this in a single Olympiad? Or even go one better for an unmatchable quadruple? If anyone has the talent to achieve it, and indeed the audacity to attempt it, it’s surely Hassan.
‘So much depends on how the Olympic programme [of heats and finals for the different events] comes together,’ she responds. ‘But I can tell you this – whatever I go for, I want it to be uncomfortable.’
