Dutch runner Sifan Hassan wins Olympic women’s marathon : NPR

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PARIS — Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands simply made Olympic historical past.

With a tough, late kick, Hassan received the ladies’s marathon in an Olympic file time of two hours, 22 minutes and 55 seconds. Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa got here in second, three seconds later. And Kenya’s Hellen Obiri took bronze, coming in at 2:23:10.

“Once I completed, the entire second was a launch,” Hassan mentioned after the race. “It’s unbelievable. I’ve by no means skilled something like that. Even the opposite marathons I’ve run weren’t near this.”

Throughout Sunday’s race, Hassan moved previous Assefa on the within, buying and selling elbows together with her with about 200 meters left to go. Assefa tried to rally, however finally couldn’t meet up with her.

The gold-medal efficiency caps a shocking Olympics for Hassan, who had already received two bronze medals on the monitor on the Stade De France, in every of the ladies’s 5,000 and 10,000 meter races. She final raced within the 10,000 meters on Friday, which means she had simply 35 hours to recuperate forward of her marathon efficiency.

Hassan, 31, is the primary athlete to medal in all three distance occasions at a single Olympics since 1952. All instructed, she ran greater than 62 kilometers, or 38 miles, on the Paris Olympics.

“The second I began to really feel good at 20 kilometers, I felt so good,” she mentioned. “Then I knew I wished gold. However all people else was contemporary, and all I used to be considering was, ‘When are they going to interrupt? They’re going to go exhausting.’”

Within the males’s race, held on Saturday, Ethiopia’s Tamirat Tola received the gold medal in an Olympic file time of two hours, six minutes and 26 seconds. Belgium’s Bashir Abdi completed 21 seconds behind him, and Kenya’s Benson Kipruto took third.