EINDHOVEN, The Netherlands: On a brilliantly sunny training session on Tuesday evening 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 make history at the Tokyo Olympics and make her one of the top medal contenders in Paris.
“We saw right away that she was a talented athlete. Even a blind horse could see that she would be a good runner,” said Ad Peeters, chairman of Eindhoven Atletiek's coaching staff.
But her first appearance came about purely by chance and under somewhat farcical circumstances, explained Peeters, also a middle-distance runner who competed with Hassan in the beginning.
She tagged along with a friend who was representing the club in a 1,000m race nearby – and decided to join.
“But 1,000 meters is two and a half laps of the track. They hadn't realized 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 that she was a talented athlete at that time, but she wasn't quite a runner yet,” he told AFP.
One of Hassan's favorite mottos, taken from the Koran, is “with difficulty will be easy”, and her formative years were anything but easy.
She was born in Adama, southeast of Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, and raised on a farm by her mother and grandmother. At the age of 15, she traveled to the Netherlands — she has never explained why.
She was first housed in a center for minor asylum seekers in Zuidlaren, in the north of the Netherlands. She told the daily De Volkskrant that she cried there every day.
“I was like a flower that didn't get any sun,” she said.
She eventually came to Eindhoven to attend a nursing course and met other Ethiopians, some of whom were members of the local athletics club.
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 himself has remembered training so hard “that my leg bled”, but Peeters tells a slightly different story.
“I actually don't think she was lazy, but it wasn't always easy to get her to practice on time,” he recalled with a laugh.
“She didn't yet have the discipline to train. But I also don't want to underestimate what it's like to be here as a young person, as a 17-year-old girl, to be alone, unsure of your future, says Peeters.
The club worked on her technique. She was clearly a “natural” runner, but “her legs and arms went all over the place,” the coach said.
But Peeters believes the club's main role in her success came as much off the court as on it – helping her navigate life as a lone teenage asylum seeker.
“We made sure she didn't do the wrong things, either in training or in her personal life. We kept her safe, picked her up by car to go to training, took her to competitions,” he said.
“We basically kept her in one piece.”
Progress came quickly, as did a Dutch passport. The Dutch athletics coaches recognized her talent and sent her to the elite Olympic training center in Papendal.
The rest is history: at the delayed Tokyo 2021 Olympics, she became the first athlete ever to win medals (two gold, one bronze) in the 1,500m, 5,000m and 10,000m.
In Paris, she attempts the even more difficult combination of 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon – the first big test coming in the 5,000m final on Monday.
Despite Hassan's success, her Eindhoven links have remained strong, Peeters said. The club helped her financially at the beginning of her career and she often returned to train.
Hassan remains a club member despite living and training in the US, and Peeters collects her fan mail.
Nothing stops training, he said, but admitted the club would gather around the bar to cheer on their famous alumnus in Paris.
“We don't stop our training for soccer, but we do for Sifo.”
