Olympic Spirit

We felt this video showed a great example of resilience and Olympic spirit.  It shows Sifan Hassan, a Dutch athlete who came to the Netherlands as a refugee from Ethiopia when she was fifteen and here we see the final lap of the 1,500m qualifying heat, in which she fell over, stood up and finally won the race. The stress is on determination, courage, will power, the pleasure of running, which are said to be more important than gold medals. This video will be studied here at A2 / A2+ level for reading comprehension. There is no voiceover, just onscreen text in English.

The film was made during the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, which took place in 2021 because of the Covid pandemic. As the Paris Olympics are getting closer every day, your students will probably have a lot to say about sport in general and what they expect the Olympics will be like. This is a good opportunity to expand their vocabulary and get them to compare ideas.

Vocabulary and grammar

• sports
• introducing opinions (as for me, in my opinion, I think, I agree / don’t agree…)
• like, hate, prefer, would like to
• personality-related vocabulary
• nationalities: Dutch, Ethiopian
• athletics terms: final, heat, lap, qualify, qualifying
• superlatives
• present perfect + for / since

Pronunciation

stress in compound words (basketball, football, skateboarding,…)