Still topping my list of things to do in a spare moment at the Olympics – and wish me luck on that – is to knock into the museum of the Monnaie de Paris on the left bank of the Seine.
Here among the exhibition d’Or, d’argent, de bronze, une histoire de la médaille Olympique are the record five athletics gold medals won at the same Games.
They belonged to Paavo Nurmi, also known as The Phantom Finn and one of my original running heroes, and have been returned to Paris a century after he won them at the 1924 Olympics.
At 27, Nurmi was already the planet’s pre-eminent distance runner and at the absolute peak of his powers. After winning three gold medals in Antwerp in 1920, he set himself the target of winning five more in Paris, including an unprecedented 1,500m-5,000m double on the track.
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Part of his challenge was those finals were scheduled to start just 55 minutes apart. Entirely undaunted, Nurmi won the 1,500m first, running three seconds inside the Olympic record, before promptly adding a second gold in the 5,000m, beating his revered team-mate Ville Ritola.
Nurmi added three more gold medals, in the 3,000m team race and in the cross-country team and individual races. Although they are now discontinued events, no man or woman has won more athletics gold medals in the same Games in the 100 years since.
“Nurmi was enigmatic, sphinx-like, a god in a cloud,” wrote the Australian Ron Clarke in his book The Lonely Breed, considered by many as the greatest runner never to win a gold medal on any stage.
“He was stern and silent, with uncompromising self-discipline and white-hot ambition, bearing the closest possible resemblance in athletics to Napoleon Bonaparte.”
Two athletes will look to repeat his 1,500m-5,000m double a century later, Norway’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen in the men’s events, and Kenya’s Faith Kipyegon in the women’s events. Only unlike Nurmi, they won’t need to race twice within 55 minutes.
No woman has ever won the same individual track event three times at the Olympics, and Kipyegon will also set herself that task in Paris in the 1,500m, having already triumphed in Rio and Tokyo.
Sifan Hassan, the Dutch runner already known for her multiple gold medal attempts, has set herself a different challenge. She is looking to become the first woman in Olympic history to win the 5000m, 10,000m and marathon triple at the same Games.
The only other person to pull that off was the Czech legend Emil Zatopek, also known as The Human Locomotive, at the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki.
“I remember in 2018, after I ran the 800m in 1:56 and then that year I ran 65:00 in the half marathon,” Hassan said this week, “and somebody told me, ‘You’re going to be like Zátopek.’ I was like, ‘Who is that?’
“I started searching and it was really inspiring and so amazing. I became a big fan of him. Even I watched his movie . . . I remember I was very stressed for Tokyo and wanted to make myself better watching everything. I never really thought I would become like him.”
Three years ago in Tokyo, Hassan attempted to win gold in the 1500m, 5000m and 10,000m, and fell just short – finishing with a bronze in the 1500m. She’s a long way to run in Paris yet. The 5,000m heats and final come first, the 10,000m a straight final next Friday, before the marathon takes place two days later, the last athletics event on the morning of Sunday. She could write the best closing headline in Paris if she can somehow pull that off. C’est impossible, non?
Other athletes in Paris have already achieved what many considered impossible, and none more impressively than French swimmer Leon Marchand. He won a pair of individual gold medals on Wednesday night, less than two hours apart, in the same session. The last time any other swimmer did that was in 1976.
Marchand started out by almost lifting the roof off the Paris La Défense Arena when winning the 200m butterfly, chasing down world record holder and defending champion Kristof Milak from Hungary, before adding the 200m breaststroke. Not even Michael Phelps could win two individual gold medals in the same session.
When I had the pleasure of interviewing Paul O’Donovan in Cork last November, he didn’t even know he had the chance to become the first Irish athlete to win a medal in three different Olympics. His gold medal success in the rowing lightweight doubles with Fintan McCarthy on Friday, adding to the gold medals they won in Tokyo, and the silver Paul won with his brother Gary in Rio, makes him unique in Irish sport. And each of those medals will feel precious in their own different way.
A century on from our first participation as an independent State at the 1924 Olympics in Paris, only six Irish athletes have won medals in athletics, and seven between them. Two gold for Dr Pat O’Callaghan in the hammer (1928 and 1932), gold for Bob Tisdall in the 400m hurdles (1932), gold for Ronnie Delany in the 1,500m (1956), silver for John Treacy in the marathon (1984) and for Sonia O’Sullivan in the 5,000m (2000), and bronze for Rob Heffernan in the 50km walk (2012).
That’s how rare and precious those medals they are. Within that same century, only three of those Irish athletics medals were won on the Olympic track – not that they’re won any easier on the field and definitely not the road.
It’s into that sort of esteemed Irish history that Rhasidat Adeleke will seek to go next week, when she races the 400m inside the Stade de France, unwavering in her belief that at age 21 she’s ready to mix it with the best one-lap runners in the world.
That’s also why Adeleke couldn’t entertain any slight element of doubt that she could win a medal in her individual event, and so might be better off trying first in the mixed relay. All in, or nothing at all.
It’s certainly not impossible, but it will be something very rare and special if she does achieve it in her first Olympics. Every Olympic medal is precious in its own different way, no matter the quantity that are won, or indeed the quality of its colour.
And for any athlete, no matter how many more they go on to win, it’s likely none will feel more precious than the first one. At least until they manage to win a second, or a third.
