Sifan Hassan: “My curiosity wins over my fear”

London Marathon-bound distance runner talks about the psychology behind her multiple medal-winning challenges, the “beauty” of doing difficult things and the lessons the new generation of athletes need to learn

Sifan Hassan is human, after all. Just a couple of days before this interview had taken place last month, the woman who created history by winning Olympic 5000m and 10,000m bronze and then marathon gold in Paris had gone for a short run.

After a long break and an autumn spent slowing down, catching up with old friends and family, “wasting a lot of time and just feeling a bit lazy”, the 31-year-old was getting back to work. It was an inauspicious start. 

“I ran 5km and it hurt,” she says. “The pain in my legs when I started running… it hurt a lot.”

A wide grin, and a hearty chuckle are never far away when Hassan is concerned, however. The pleasure she experienced during 2024 from that medal haul clearly outweighs the pain. “I still have a big smile whenever I think about it.” 

And rightly so. Hassan became the first athlete since Emile Zatopek in 1952 to win medals in those three events at a single Games, a feat that had followed hot on the heels of her completing the 5000m/10,000m double and winning 1500m bronze at the Tokyo Olympics three years previously. 

The woman who has run a total of four marathons so far has suggested that her next big goal will be to tackle that same number of 26.2-mile efforts within the space of a single year and, given the eye-wateringly difficult nature of these challenges, the very fact that she gives herself such enormous workloads would suggest an innate fearlessness and unshakeable confidence. The reality is rather different. 

Hassan has spent much of her life feeling the fear and doing it anyway. It was the case in 2008 when the then 15-year-old moved as a refugee from her native Ethiopia to the Netherlands, the country for which she now competes with such distinction. It was the case, too, when she moved to America in 2017 to work with the now disgraced coach Alberto Salazar at the now defunct Nike Oregon Project (Tim Rowberry became her lead coach after Salazar’s ban). These were huge leaps to make but they have been life changing.

Sifan Hassan and Tim Rowberry (GSC)

“When I came to the Netherlands and then decided to go to America, these were the hardest moments, but also beautiful things happened to me because of the challenge,” she says. “I…