Hassan donates Paris Olympic marathon singlet and bib to MOWA

Women’s World Athlete of the Year Sifan Hassan, who next Sunday (27) returns to London where she won her career marathon debut in 2023, has generously donated her victorious Paris 2024 Olympic Games marathon singlet and name bib to the Museum of World Athletics (MOWA).

On Sunday 11 August, Hassan claimed the final athletics gold medal of the Paris 2024 Games, winning the women’s marathon in an Olympic record of 2:22:55 to complete an impressive medal treble.

The Dutchwoman, who had already bagged 5000m and 10,000m bronze medals in Paris, held off Ethiopia’s Tigist Assefa in a frantic sprint finish to win by three seconds, the closest ever winning margin in a women’s Olympic marathon.

Comparisons with legends

“During the World Athletics Awards weekend in Monaco, I had the chance to visit the World Athletics offices and see the amazing memories from the 1948 Olympics that belonged to Fanny Blankers-Koen,” said Hassan. “It was so inspiring to see her history up close in the Museum of World Athletics.

“I am so happy that my Paris 2024 marathon-winning singlet will now be part of the museum, and I feel honoured that it will be included alongside the Netherlands items Fanny wore at the London Games.

“I’m excited to know that my singlet will be on display in Tokyo later this year during the World Athletics Championships. I hope it will inspire young girls everywhere to believe in themselves, start playing sports, and chase their dreams – even if they seem impossible."

World Athletics President Sebastian Coe commented: “With an extraordinary range which has seen Hassan win global golds from 1500m to the marathon, she is unquestionably already one of the sports greats.

“Hassan’s three medals in Paris reminded the world of another flying Dutchwoman, Fanny Blankers-Koen, whose four golds in 1948 made her the icon of those Games.

“Hassan has, across two Olympics, amassed six medals. Three of those – her titles at 5000m, 10,000m and marathon – are a triple which is unmatched in the history of women’s sport and conjures up comparisons with the legendary Emil Zatopek.

“World Athletics is extremely proud to accept Hassan’s generous donation of her marathon-winning singlet from the Paris Olympic Games, a dramatic race which she won in impressively determined style.”

Running into the sunlight

Hassan has become accustomed to overcoming challenges, so it was perhaps no great surprise that she found the strength to conquer the mighty one that presented itself on the streets of Paris on the final day of the 2024 Olympic Games.

The challenge of tackling the most difficult Olympic women’s marathon course – with its prolonged rise of 428m at 15km and its 13.5% gradient at 29km – was not an insurmountable one for a woman of Hassan’s considerable mettle, even if she was tackling it with legs that were far from as fresh as those of her rivals.

Just 37 hours earlier, she had finished third in the 10,000m final in the Stade de France. Six days previously, she had also earned the bronze medal in the 5000m final.

With 20km of racing already in her legs, could a runner of even Hassan’s formidable calibre possibly become the first woman to emulate Emil Zatopek by winning an Olympic medal at the same Games in the 5000m, 10,000m and marathon?

She had, of course, completed a historic hat-trick of her own at the delayed Tokyo Olympics in 2021, adding 1500m bronze to golds from the 5000m and 10,000m. This time, however, after accomplishing another medal double at 5000m and 10,000m, had to contend with the gruelling 26.2-mile course from Hotel de Ville to Les Invalides and the challenge of Tigist Assefa, the fastest female marathon runner in history at the time.

‘Why did I do that? What is wrong with me?’

Throughout the race, Hassan was rueing her decision to contest the track races, rather than save herself for the marathon, at which her 2:13:44 European record in Chicago the previous October put her second on the world all-time list, behind Assefa’s 2:11:53 in Berlin in the same year.

“I was regretting that I had run the 5000m and the 10,000m,” she later confided. “I was telling myself, ‘If I hadn’t done that, I would feel great today’.

“It was so hard. Every step of the way I was thinking, ‘Why did I do that? What is wrong with me?’”

Hassan had been wracked by similar self-doubt on her marathon debut in London in April 2023, twice stopping to stretch her injured hip, and looking set for a DNF, before making up a 28-second deficit and securing a sensational sprint finish victory.

In Paris she was dropped by the lead pack on the huge incline at 29km but fought her way back into contention. With 250m to go, the marathon came down to a sprint battle between the big two.

In a snapshot brilliantly captured by Michael Steele in the World Athletics Photograph of the Year, at the final bend leading to the finishing straight at Les Invalides, the two women clashed shoulder-to-shoulder, elbow-to-elbow, as they fought for the inside line.

It was a fittingly dramatic denouement to the Paris 2024 athletics programme. Both women were blessed with the speed of sub-two-minute 800m performers – the distance at which they made their Olympic bows in Rio in 2016.

But it was Hassan who not just held her ground in the physical clash of the titans but who proceeded to surge clear, drawing upon the basic speed that took her to the world indoor 1500m title in Portland in 2016 and to the world outdoor crown at the same distance in Doha in 2019. The flying Dutchwoman surged clear to win by three seconds.

Her time, 2:22:55, an Olympic record, had a neat historical echo. Zatopek’s winning time in Helsinki in 1952, also an Olympic record, was 2:23:03.

A female breakthrough

And so, at the end of a route inspired by la marche de femmes, the mass march on Versailles by the women of Paris in the French Revolution, Hassan had a place in athletics posterity alongside the Czech legend with the French first name.

“I was scared of this race,” Hassan reflected in the aftermath, struggling to come to terms with her achievement. “I thought they would break me. When I finished, I was thinking, ‘I am the Olympic champion. How is this possible?’”

At the age of 31, Hassan had won a third Olympic gold medal, one shy of Fanny Blankers Koen’s ground-breaking tally from the London Games of 1948. Track and field’s original Flying Dutchwoman was honoured as the Female Athlete of the 20th Century by the IAAF. Hassan was named the Women’s World Athlete of the Year by World Athletics.

Simon Turnbull for World Athletics Heritage