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On a sunny Tuesday evening at the Eindhoven Track Club training ground, young hopefuls were training, 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, set out on a journey that would see her make history at the Tokyo Olympics and become a medal contender in Paris.
“We saw right away that she was a talented athlete.
Even a blind horse could see that she would be a good racehorse,” said Ad Peeters, chairman of the PSV Eindhoven coaching staff.
But her debut came by accident and in slightly hilarious circumstances, explained Peters, who competed with Hassan as a middle-distance runner in his early years.
She joined a friend who was competing in a nearby 1,000-meter race representing her club — and decided to join in on the fun.
“But 1,000 meters is two and a half laps of the track. They don’t realize that, so they actually try to finish the race at the starting line,” Petters, 58, said with a laugh.
“That’s how we met her. We saw right away that she was a talented athlete, but she wasn’t really a runner yet,” Peters told AFP.One of Hassan’s favorite sayings is from the Quran, “With hardship comes gain,” and her growing up years were far from easy.
She was born in Adama, southeast of the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa, and was raised on a farm by her mother and grandmother.
At 15, she left home for the Netherlands—but she never explained why.
She was initially placed in a centre for underage asylum seekers in the northern Dutch city of Zuidlaren.
She revealed to the People’s Daily that she cried there every day.
“I’m like a flower without sunlight,” she said.
She eventually arrived in Eindhoven to attend a nursing course and met other Ethiopians, some of whom were members of the local track and field club.
“Keeping it whole” — It took her some time to “break the nerves,” as Petters put it, describing her as a “shy girl” in the shadow of some of the more senior Ethiopian runners.
Hassan himself recalled that the training was so hard that “my legs were bleeding,” but Peters tells a slightly different story.
“I don’t actually think she’s lazy, but it wasn’t always easy to get her to training on time,” he recalled with a laugh.
“She doesn’t have the discipline to train yet. But I also don’t want to underestimate the feelings of a young person here, a 17-year-old girl, alone, feeling uncertain about the future,” Petters said.
The club trained her on her technique. She was apparently a “natural” runner, but “her legs and arms were all over the place,” the coach said.
But Peters believes the club’s main role in her success came both on the track itself and outside of it – helping her navigate life as a lonely teenage asylum seeker.
“We make sure she doesn’t do anything wrong, whether it’s in training or in her personal life. We keep her safe, drive her to training, take her to games,” he said.
“We basically kept her intact.” Progress was rapid, and so was her Dutch passport. Dutch track and field coaches recognized her talent and sent her to the elite Olympic training center in Papendahl.
The rest is history: at the postponed 2021 Tokyo Olympics, she became the first athlete ever to win medals in the 1,500m, 5,000m and 10,000m events (two golds, one bronze). But Petters says her ties to PSV remain strong.
The club helped her financially in the early stages of her career and she returned regularly for training.
Although Hassan lived and trained in the United States, she remained a member of the club, and Petters collected her fan mail.
Although the Dutch team was competing in the European Championships at the time, Petters supervised hundreds of athletes, from young children to pensioners, in training.
He said nothing would stop training but admitted the club would gather around the bar to cheer on their famous alumni in Paris.
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