Dutch runner adds Olympic marathon gold medal to her unprecedented list of global titles.
Women’s marathon gold medalist Sifan Hassan, of the Netherlands, waves on the podium during the 2024 Summer Olympics closing ceremony at the Stade de France, Sunday, Aug. 11, 2024, in Saint-Denis, France. At end of a day in which she confirmed her status of the greatest female distance runner ever by winning the Olympic Games marathon, Hassan, the quiet, soft-spoken Dutch runner, sent a message around the world without saying a word.
Hassan sprinted away from Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa in the final 200 meters to knock 12 seconds off Ethiopian Tiki Gelana’s 12-year-old Olympic record and claim her third career gold medal, the sixth medal of her career. She’s made a World Championship final at 800 meters, set the world record at 10,000 meters and won Olympic gold medals at three different distances.
She broke the world mile record in July 2019, running 4:12.33, and held it for another four years. Later that summer she won the 1,500 and 10,000 at the World Championships in Qatar, the only athlete, male or female, to win both races in a single Olympic Games or Worlds. For Paris, Hassan turned her attention to what many in the sport were calling “the Zatopek,” sweeping the Olympic 5,000, 10,000 and marathon gold medals as Czechoslovakia’s Emil Zatopek did at the 1952 Games in Helsinki. Hassan actually said she considered running the 1,500 in Paris was eventually talked out of it by her coach.
“The moment I started to feel good at 20 , I felt so good. Then I knew I wanted gold. But everybody else was fresh and all I was thinking was, ‘When are they going to break? They’re going to go hard, they’re going to go hard.’”
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