The Athletics World Championships in Oregon, US, is seething with fiery performances, unexpected results and the absolute supremacy of Jamaica’s women sprinters.
Sifan Hassan finished fourth in the in the 10,000m at the Athletics World Championships this year. She had made headlines after winning 10,000m and 5000m gold and 1500m bronze in the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games. (Getty Images)
India’s singular hope for a medal at the championships, Neeraj Chopra, will be in competition even as this column goes to print. We witnessed the hopeful beginnings of another athletics star-in-the-making from India, Murali Shreeshankar, who became the first Indian man to compete in the finals of the long jump at the worlds. That he finished seventh at the worlds is a big leap in his career.
But all my attention has been on the track. On “Mommy Rocket” Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce, soaring to her fifth world title in the 100m at 35. On Jake Wightman, as he pulled off arguably the biggest upset in a championship of upsets. He dramatically swept past Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigsten to win the 1500m. As Wightman collapsed in a pool of tears, the camera swept to the stadium commentator, former marathoner Geoff Wightman, who said “I’ve got to tell you why the camera is on me…that’s my son! I coach him. And he’s the world champion!”
It has also been on Sifan Hassan, the reigning world and Olympic champion, who lit up Tokyo with her triple whammy of 10,000m and 5000m gold and 1500m bronze, but finished fourth in the 10,000m in Oregon.
What happened to Hassan, my personal hero? “I did too much last year, both mental and physical, so I crashed,” said the Dutch runner of Ethiopian origin, chatting to reporters after the race. “For two years, 2020, 2021, I worked with crazy motivation, I was in amazing shape. Then I gave myself a two-month break after Tokyo. But when I returned to training, I found I had no motivation, I was completely out.”
The break extended into a much longer one, until Hassan returned to action in May. “It was so hard physically, mentally, I got an infection, I hurt my foot, I was struggling to even finish 5000m, so this was a great race for me!”
That reminded me of a conversation I had with elite distance running coach Hugo Van Den Broek, a Dutchman who, along with his Olympian wife, run a training centre in Iten, Kenya, the epicentre of distance running in the world. (Iten is to distance running what Brazil is to football.) What gives Hassan the ability to compete in three exhausting events in a single tournament?
“Physically she is no different from the top 20 runners in the world in her category,” Broek said. “But when she was at our training centre before the Olympics, I realised that mentally there is something in her that just makes her tougher, more driven, than anyone else I have seen.”
Broek and I spoke about the “three pillars” of training for middle- and long-distance running, but also about why 2021 was a breakthrough year on the track, with incredible races (remember Karsten Warholm and the 400m Hurdles at Tokyo?) and the precipitous tumbling of previous records. In June last year Hassan shaved nearly 12 seconds off the previous 10,000m world record, only to see Gidey lower it further two days later.
One reason, Broek pointed out, was the incredible and often controversial advances in shoe technology. But another reason, peculiar only to the last two years, was the pandemic-enforced break on competitions. In a normal season, Broek explained, athletes balance their training and competition cycles, tapering off hard training at least two weeks before a race. Most elite athletes target 7-8 competitions a year, which means they do the tapering that many times too.
“That comes at a cost to the progress you can make from training,” Broek said. “Because of Covid, what athletes had in 2020 was nine or more months of nothing but training—no tapering, no traveling—so they could keep on progressing. And that’s what allowed them to come up with such amazing performances at the end of the period.”
Here’s to Hassan, Wightman, and the rest raising the bar to superhuman levels and making this one of the greatest eras in track history.
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