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Dutch running great Sifan Hassan completed a memorable Paris Olympics by winning marathon gold and his coach Tim Rowberry has now explained how Eliud Kipchoge had a hand in her success.
Sifan Hassan is a rare breed of athlete and her tenacity and resilience was on show at the Paris 2024 Olympics where she featured in three events and medaled in all of them.
Even more astonishing, she was set to run four events at the Olympics before she pulled out of the 1,500m just before the Games, leaving her to contest the 5,000m, 10,000m and marathon.
Hassan clinched bronze in both 5,000m and 10,000m, the two races won by Kenya’s Beatrice Chebet, before she put the icing on the cake with a gold in marathon, running effortlessly as if she had not even been involved in two energy-sapping races just days before.
Preparing for such a task requires a good strategy while the runner must also ensure they are up to speed and according to her coach Tim Rowberry, Hassan had no doubts which event she wanted to badly succeed in, going by her preparations.
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17:21 - 16.11.2024
'She pays for all of our training costs' - Coach Tim Rowberry reveals Sifan Hassan's generous side
Sifan Hassan's coach Tim Rowberry revealed that he operates independently, relying on Sifan Hassan for funding and covering training costs.
“Her main focus was on the marathon, above all else. When she had bias in training, it was her telling me she was worried about her marathon training,” Rowberry told Letsrun.
“[Her training] was much more marathon-specific…The philosophy, we kind of learned that in the previous year. I was combining the long runs of marathons with the extreme training on the track side of the 5k, 10k, 1500 even.
“If I were to explain the balance, it was a really extreme approach where you do those long runs for marathon but then the speed workouts don’t feel like they’re as related to the marathon. It’s really on the extreme side of doing what you would typically do when you’re training for the 1500, 5k, 10k.”
However, it was not easy and they had to lean on the knowledge and experience of some who had been in similar situations before.
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09:45 - 16.11.2024
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Olympic champion Sifan Hassan has faced skepticism following her impressive records on the track, skepticism her coach says is unwarranted.
Rowberry says two-time Olympics champion Eliud Kipchoge became of great help and this was made easy by the fact that they are both in the same stable, Global Sports Communications, whose headquarters is in the Dutch city of Nijmegen.
“She would do marathon-distance [long runs]. Not all the time. When we first were trying to figure out marathon training, we literally just asked [Eliud] Kipchoge and other athletes because they were in the same [agency, Global Sports Communication],” added Rowberry.
“We would ask, what are these guys doing? And people are surprisingly helpful. They just would tell us, you have to do runs that are at least marathon distance and over, occasionally. That doesn’t happen all the time, obviously, but it’d be more like 30k and 35k sometimes and occasionally we’d go up to marathon distance…We wouldn’t try to push that more than once a month, doing those really, really long runs, otherwise it just wouldn’t work with the rest of training.”
Hassan clocked 2:22:55 to win gold ahead of Ethiopia’s Tigist Assefa (2:22:58), managed silver, while Kenya’s Hellen Obiri (2:23:10) edged out compatriot Hellen Lokedi (2:23:14) by four seconds to complete the podium and it looks Kipchoge played a part in denying his country gold, albeit unknowingly.
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11:32 - 12.11.2024
Why Faith Kipyegon wants track rivals Gudaf Tsegay, Sifan Hassan & Co to visit Kenya
Olympics champion Faith Kipyegon is looking to encourage her track rivals to help put Kenya on the map by visiting the country.
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