From ‘shy’ Ethiopian refugee to double Dutch Olympic champion: Sifan Hassan’s road to Paris

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

Her first appearance came about as pure chance and in slightly farcical circumstances when she and a friend tagged along with Peeters at a 1,000m race.

“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,” Peeters, 58, said of the comical incident.

“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,” Peeters told AFP.