PARIS — Sifan Hassan capped off a huge week with gold in the women's marathon on Sunday, completing her remarkable hat-trick of medals in the 5,000 meters, 10,000 meters and marathon.
Another athlete who achieved this feat was the great Czech runner Emil Zátopek, who won three gold medals in Helsinki in 1952, when long-distance running was very different from today.
The Dutch athlete broke the Olympic record in the marathon with a time of 2:22:55.
Hassan came into the race having run 50 laps of the Stade de France track this week, winning bronze medals in the women's 5,000 and 10,000 metres, the latter just 36 hours before the 26-mile race.
The 31-year-old had spoken all week about her fear of the Olympics' longest race, even thinking about the race while competing on the track. “I'm really scared for the marathon,” she said Monday. She quoted Muhammad Ali in an Instagram post Saturday, saying, “If your dreams don't scare you, they're not big enough.”
However, she had little to fear and put in a brave performance that saw her push herself to the limit to stay with the leading group on the many steep hills of the Paris course.
Hassan took another step forward as the course flattened out and finished with a full-throttle sprint alongside Ethiopian Tigst Assefa and Kenyan Hellen Obiri. First, Obiri fell back, unable to keep up, then Hassan collided with Assefa as the Dutch athlete took a racing line through the twisty finish to become the Olympic champion.
This means that she has now won Olympic medals spanning from the 1,500 metres to the marathon in an impressive display of speed and endurance on the track. At Tokyo 2020, Hassan completed another hat-trick, winning bronze in the 1,500 metres as well as the 5,000 and 10,000 metres.
The Paris route was the same brutal course as the men's race on Saturday. It started in front of Paris's city hall, the Hotel de Ville, and took in landmarks such as the Palais Garnier opera house, Place Vendome, the Louvre museum, the Trocadero, the Eiffel Tower and the Palace of Versailles.
It all ended with Hassan racing down the picturesque home straight in the shadow of the Esplanade des Invalides.
