Sifan Hassan: from ‘shy’ refugee to Olympic champion

On a gloriously sunny Tuesday night training session at the Eindhoven athletics club, young hopefuls are put through their paces, dreaming of emulating their most famous member – double Olympic champion Sifan Hassan.

It was on these tracks more than a decade ago that Hassan, a young asylum-seeker from Ethiopia, embarked on a journey that would lead to history at the Tokyo Olympics and make her a top medal contender in Paris.

“We immediately saw she was a talented athlete. Even a blind horse could see she would be a good runner,” said Ad Peeters, president of the Eindhoven Atletiek coaching team.

But her first appearance came about as pure chance and in slightly farcical circumstances, explained Peeters, also a middle-distance runner who competed with Hassan in the early days.

She tagged along with a friend representing the club at a 1 000m race nearby – and decided to join in.

“But 1 000 metres is two and a half laps of the track. They hadn’t realised that, so they actually tried to finish at the starting line,” laughed Peeters, 58.

“So that’s how we got to know her. We could already see she was a talented athlete at that time, but she wasn’t really a runner then yet,” he told AFP.

One of Hassan’s favourite mottos, taken from the Koran, is “with hardship will be ease”, and her formative years were anything but easy.

Born in Adama, southeast of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, she was raised on a farm by her mother and grandmother. Aged 15, she left for the Netherlands – she has never explained why.

She was first housed in a centre for underaged asylum-seekers in Zuidlaren, in the northern Netherlands. She told De Volkskrant daily she cried there every day.

“I was like a flower that got no sun,” she said.

She finally arrived at Eindhoven to do a nursing course and fell in with other Ethiopians, some of whom were members of the local athletics club.

‘IN ONE PIECE’

She took some time to “de-ice”, as Peeters puts it, describing her as a “shy girl” in the shadow of some of the more established Ethiopian runners.

Hassan herself has recalled training so hard “that my leg was bleeding” but Peeters tells a slightly different story.

“I actually don’t think she was lazy, but it was not always easy to get her to training on time,” he remembered with a chuckle. – SuperSport