Sifan Hassan Wins Olympic Marathon, Testing Limits of Endurance

Sifan Hassan couldn’t stop laughing at herself.

“What have I done? What is wrong with me?” she said of the inner monologue that had echoed in her head through the 26.2 punishing miles of the Olympic women’s marathon on Sunday.

Hassan had already logged three Olympic races, and two bronze medals from them. She ran the first heat in the 5,000 meters on Aug. 2, the final of the 5,000 on Monday and the 10,000 final on Friday night. Then, only 37 hours later, she propelled herself across the starting line in the marathon, the most demanding race of them all, and ended up crossing the finish line first.

An Ethiopian-born runner who competes for the Netherlands, Hassan, 31, had described her Olympic schedule — which initially was supposed to also include the 1,500 — as one driven by curiosity. She wanted to know if she could do all three events, requiring close to 40 miles of Olympic racing. The goal, she emphasized, was not necessarily to win medals in each race: Instead, it was simply to complete all three.

No athlete had taken medals in all three events at the same Olympic Games since 1952, when Emil Zatopek won three golds for what was then Czechoslovakia. In the age of specialization in elite running, though, Hassan’s decision to even try all three races was unusually bold. To claim a medal in all three was, seemingly, unthinkable. Until she did it.

As the words spilled out of her after the marathon, Hassan was still wrestling with the intense physical challenge she had set for herself, of whether testing her physical limits had really been the wisest idea after all.

“Every single moment I regretted that I ran the five and 10,000,” she said.

During the race, she said, she kept thinking of her competitors in the marathon’s lead group — Tigst Assefa of Ethiopia, Hellen Obiri of Kenya, Sharon Lokedi of Kenya and Amane Beriso Shankule of Ethiopia among them — and their fresh, rested legs. “When are they going to break me?” she wondered.