Hannah Borenstein

"My name is “Sintayehu” which means “Someone who saw a lot”... With age, I'm more proud of the meaning of my name. It means what I’ve seen a lot and it's true from an Ethiopian orphanage to a beautiful life, adoption and a beautiful family and then I decided to go to Florida, Mississippi, and now I ended up here (in Boulder) with the best team, living the best life."

Sinta Vissa is a member of the On Athletics Club and just opened up her season this past weekend at the Penn Relays.

Before turning pro last year, she was the 2022 NCAA 1500m champion and has now competed at two World Championships for Italy. She was last year’s Italian 1500m champion and then had the bad luck of drawing one of the fastest heats in Budapest but did not advance to the semifinals. She did run a 4:01.66 personal best, which also got her the Olympic standard for this year. She’s in a good position to be selected by the Italian Athletics Federation with some good performances this season.

What I like about Sinta is that her story goes way back to growing up in Ethiopia and then being adopted by an Italian family. She shares her whole story candidly on this podcast about what it was like finding herself in Ethiopia, Italy and then eventually the United States.

Recommended Read | 'Seeing is believing for Italy’s Vissa' by Hannah Borenstein for World Athletics

Host: Chris Chavez | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@chris_j_chavez on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Host: Sinta Vissa | ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@sintavissa on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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"At the end of those two months, I interviewed (two Ethiopian female runners) each of them for an hour and a half and hired a translator. What came out of those interviews was that this was a richly complicated and complex world that I knew very little about and I had barely scratched the surface. They were talking about the relationships with their family members because I had assumed – as a lot of people do – Ethiopia has this rich history of running, therefore, it must be such a prideful thing. It actually turned out that they all said that all their family members disapproved of what they were doing. There were all these things that came up that surprised me. As I later came to learn in anthropology in grad school, you should always follow and ask questions about the things that surprise you because those are the most interesting things."

Hannah Borenstein is a good friend of mine who I've had the pleasure of getting to know as a member of The Magic Boost program that I help direct. She is an anthropologist and fellow at the University of Chicago. She's currently working on a book project focusing on women distance runners in Ethiopia. Beyond her academic work, she's also a freelance writer covering race, sports, gender, politics and labor across a variety of publications. She most recently published a story for World Athletics on Sinta Vissa, the Italian middle distance runner who was born in Ethiopia and now runs for the On Athletics Club. I've wanted to get her on the show for a while because she's passionate about telling the stories of Ethiopian athletes and has been a major resource for me in helping me understand some of the contexts around the athletes, their lives and when politics can intersect with it all.

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