Sifan Hassan collected her second medal of the Paris Olympics, another bronze, this time in the women’s 10,000-meter final.
That might sound like a disappointment for the Dutch runner, since she won this race three years ago in Tokyo, along with a gold medal in the 5,000 at those Games.
It wasn’t, especially considering Hassan has a marathon to run Sunday morning, when she will attempt to become the first person to medal in the 5,000, the 10,000 and the marathon since Emil Zátopek, the great Czech runner, swept those three events in 1952 in Helsinki.
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“Amazing,” Hassan said of Friday night’s race. “I’m happy that it’s done so I can recover for the marathon.”
Because, you know, of course what you do when you have a marathon in less than two days is run an Olympic 10,000-meter race.
Hassan, the 31-year-old distance savant who immigrated to the Netherlands from Ethiopia when she was 15, came in third place in the 5,000 on Monday night. Perhaps a disappointment, considering she won the race in Tokyo.
But Hassan is in a different sort of competition in these Olympics. She is challenging herself and Olympic history as much as the rest of the field, and she doesn’t even know why she is doing what she is doing.
“I need to have my brain tested,” she said half-seriously after earning her bronze medal in the 5,000.
Hassan ran in her signature style for a championship race Monday night, which Beatrice Chebet of Kenya, the world record holder at the distance, won in a tactical 30:43.35, a time that was nearly two minutes off her world record. She held off Nadia BattoCletti of Italy down the stretch and won by a tenth of a second.
Hassan was less than a second behind them after hanging out near last place for the first three miles. With 11 laps to go, she moved into the middle, climbed into 10th or 13th place, depending on the moment for the next several laps, as the pace began to slow and the field readied for the kick.
This was playing right into Hassan’s legs and feet, which were sticking right on the rail running the minimum distance on each lap.
With 600 meters to go, she tried to make a move to the outside but it wasn’t there, then tried to go back inside, then went outside again for the madness of the final 200 meters, when she sprinted past all but two runners to nab her second medal of this most exhausting of Olympic campaigns.
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And she did it at a distance she said she didn’t really care about, since she is so focused on Sunday’s marathon, the race she focused her training on in recent months.
Now about that training.
Hassan owes her success in part to making herself something of a guinea pig when it comes to sports science and training methods. In recent years, instead of following a strict training regimen, she has, at times, determined her daily training only after measuring the amount of cortisol in her system.
Cortisol is known as the stress hormone. The more cortisol in the system, the more stress she is under and the harder time she is having recovering from her previous training session. Instead of powering through a difficult workout when her body is under stress, Hassan has tried to push herself most when her body is feeling up to it.
The strategy is somewhat counterintuitive since endurance training is supposed to be all about getting the body working hard when it is tired. Hassan likely does plenty of that, but apparently not at a cost of her overall health.
It won her the London Marathon last year in her debut at the distance, when she out-kicked the field after stopping to stretch in the middle of the course. It worked three years ago in Tokyo, when she completed a different sort of treble, winning the bronze in the 1,500 to go along with her two gold medals in the longest races on the track.
This time she needed some cooperation from the competition, which took the race out slow, allowing Hassan not to overtax herself with her biggest hill still ahead of her. She didn’t want to use all her energy reserves before the marathon, especially with the temperature expected to be close to 90 degrees.
“My biggest goal is to complete the three distances,” she said. “I’m grateful we didn’t go so fast.”
Required reading
- Sifan Hassan begins Olympic treble attempt with bronze in 5,000m, Faith Kipyegon reinstated for silver
- U.S. women win gold in 4×100 relay as Sha’Carri Richardson pulls away in anchor leg
- U.S. men doomed by botched baton pass in 4×100 relay, extending medal drought to 20 years
(Photo: Adam Pretty / Getty Images)
Matthew Futterman is an award-winning veteran sports journalist and the author of two books, “Running to the Edge: A Band of Misfits and the Guru Who Unlocked the Secrets of Speed” and “Players: How Sports Became a Business.”Before coming to The Athletic in 2023, he worked for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Star-Ledger of New Jersey and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He is currently writing a book about tennis, "The Cruelest Game: Agony, Ecstasy and Near Death Experiences on the Pro Tennis Tour," to be published by Doubleday in 2026. Follow Matthew on Twitter @mattfutterman
