Naturally, Sifan Hassan was named Dutch sportswoman of the year last month. It was the third time that the now 32-year-old athlete was awarded the honorary title of NOC-NSF, but it was the first time that she had achieved such a feat that was previously considered impossible. At the Olympic Games in Paris she won medals in three distances, both on the track and on the road. After winning bronze in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters, she also won the race that started it all according to ancient Olympic myths: the marathon, with an unprecedented final sprint on the Esplanade des Invalides. It not only earned her the Dutch election at the end of 2024, but also the even more significant title of best athlete in the world from the World Athletics Federation. Hassan was the first Dutch athlete to receive this honor.
The combination of running on the track and on the road is not very common. When asked about her motivation for not choosing between apparently incompatible disciplines, she needed few words at the NOC-NSF gala. She likes “special things,” she said. “I’m just curious.” Hassan almost seemed to apologize for that curiosity, which perhaps says more about the time than about the speaker. As she often charmingly stumbles over her own flow of words, she came up with a similar explanation for her limitlessness immediately after the finish in Paris. She was really “not special,” she said, and also regularly had anxious moments. “It’s just that very often people don’t dare to try something. I dare.”
In one of the few candid interviews she has given, Hassan suggested in 2022 that she needs adversity to perform well. She has always said little about the years before she ended up in the Netherlands as an unaccompanied minor asylum seeker – only that it was “dangerous” for her as a teenager in Ethiopia. Perhaps her “mental strength” is great because of the things she has been through, she said NRC. “That I can decide: okay, now I don’t feel anything at all.” According to her, today’s young people are pampered too much. They don’t have to make decisions and therefore don’t dare to do so anymore, she recently philosophized in an article another interview about her extraordinary achievements.
Hassan is a world citizen who was born in Ethiopia, started running in Friesland, now lives in the United States and fortunately plays for the Netherlands. The genuine happiness she showed after the 42.195 kilometers in Paris turned out to be so contagious that fellow rider Dick Schoof, in daily life Prime Minister of a cabinet that still has to be convinced of the usefulness and necessity of receiving refugees, cheered her on the spot. the poor fell. And while in France, relatives of ‘shadow prime minister’ Geert Wilders grumbled about the headscarf that Hassan did not wear in the match but did wear at the medal ceremony, the PVV leader herself praised her “unparalleled performance” on X. The fact that she wore that headscarf, she later said, was to show that Muslim women are strong women with their own will. She feels like a “role model”.
Curiosity is more than challenging yourself or putting aside physical pain. The curiosity that Sifan Hassan shows is an attitude to life that people in defeatist times could follow as an example. Her optimism, her self-will and remarkable ability to connect can still come in handy in this new year: everything is possible for those who believe in it – and especially who dare to fail.