AFP, Doha :
Sifan Hassan said she is willing to undergo daily drug testing to prove she is a clean athlete after completing a stunning World Championship double.
Just days after her coach Alberto Salazar was handed a four-year ban for doping offences, the Ethiopian-born Dutch runner surged to her second gold medal of the championships in the 1,500 metres on Saturday.
Hassan’s blistering winning time of 3min 51.95sec was the sixth fastest in history, and sliced around seven seconds off the 16-year-old championship record.
It came at the end of a tumultuous week for the 26-year-old Hassan, whose joy at a brilliant 10,000m victory last Saturday lasted only a few days before Salazar, her coach at the controversial Nike Oregon Project, was banned.
Salazar’s downfall has cast a shadow over the entire Oregon Project training group, whose athletes have won three gold medals in Doha.
Hassan, however, hit back at the suggestion her performances should now be viewed with suspicion.
“If they want to test me they can test me every single day. Every single day,” Hassan declared to reporters at the end of an impassioned press conference.
“I believe in clean sport, I’m always clean, I will always be clean. I believe in the Oregon Project. I’ve seen Alberto. He’s worked really hard and that is what I know.”
Hassan joined the Oregon Project at the end of 2016.
US sprinting great Michael Johnson warned Hassan that she would have to live with suspicion.
“I understand her anger but that is a question she is going to have to get prepared for,” Johnson said on the BBC.
“She made the decision to go to the Oregon Project and at the time that she went Salazar was under investigation. I think a lot of people thought that investigation was going nowhere … maybe she thought, ‘Well it’s OK to go there, this is going nowhere’. But it did go somewhere.
“Any athlete in that organisation has to realise that it is going to be attached to them. They are going to have to answer those questions.”
