At his lowest ebb, Yousef Masrahi couldn’t even bear to look at his running shoes. The thought of putting them on filled him with dread; the idea of ever being a professional athlete again seemed impossible.
It was in the early summer of 2016 when Masrahi’s world came crumbling down. Just weeks before he was due to compete at his second Olympic Games, the Saudi athlete was informed that a positive doping test had found prohibited substance EPO in his system. He was banned for four years.
The two-time World Athletics Championship finalist and reigning Asian champion over 400m had his sights set on competing with the world’s best in Rio de Janeiro. It appeared he was reaching the pinnacle of his career, but it swiftly became the nadir. Two years later, Masrahi was struggling. He had been abandoned by friends, shunned by many in the athletics community, and was a shadow of his former self.
“I remember one day my mum came to me and said: ‘where are you, where is my son?’ Masrahi recalls. “I was so low and she could see it. She was asking me to find myself again.”
That journey of re-discovery was not an easy one. Masrahi felt foolish at the manner of his positive test for EPO, a substance made infamous by shamed American cyclist Lance Armstrong. For years, Armstrong used injections to enhance his recovery and performance, as well as coercing team-mates to do the same.
Masrahi is adamant that he only received one such injection and that he did not understand what the doctor was administering. The Saudi athlete certainly knows how it sounds, and feels disappointed by his own naivety.
“I went to a doctor when I was training in the United States and he told me what he was doing was normal,” Masrahi recalls, shaking his head. “Now I understand everything about this but honestly I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong at the time.
“When the doping controller came to me, he asked me if I had taken anything illegal and I said, ‘no, of course not’. I showed him all the vitamins I was taking but then they said they found a problem with my sample and they were giving me a four-year ban. That was it.”
After years of honing his craft in the US and with the 2016 Games in sight, a deflated Masrahi returned to Saudi Arabia. But at the time he most needed support, many of those he cared about turned their backs.
“This was the worst moment in my life and I couldn’t believe how many people did not want to be by my side any more. Friendships, some very close ones, were broken. When I was champion, people were with me—laughing with me and having fun with me. When I was banned suddenly everyone was gone. It was upsetting. I was saying ‘excuse me, I’m the same Yousef, I haven’t changed’ but people didn’t listen. I was treated like s***.”
During his enforced hiatus from athletics, Masrahi maintained his fitness by swimming and working out at the gym, but he felt no urge to run. He had mentally reached the finish line of his career and it was time to think about what could come next. “I just felt like, ‘what is the point?’ I cannot compete so why should I run any more. For two years I did absolutely nothing.” That’s when Hamdan Al-Bishi called him.
An accomplished former 400m runner himself, Al-Bishi’s career briefly overlapped with Masrahi and the pair won relay gold together at the 2007 Asian Indoor Games in Macau. Al-Bishi told his former team-mate that when his ban finished, he would like to coach him.
“It took me eight weeks to convince him that he should at least start training again,” Al-Bishi recalls of his initial conversations with Masrahi. “He kept saying ‘no’ because
he was so hurt by his experience.” The four years of the ban were hard on him because when it happened, Yousef was one of the top Saudi potentials for Rio and the whole country was expecting him to be on the podium.
“Very quickly it became clear that some people had been around him just for his glory and then then when he really needed help from them, they let him suffer on his own,” says Al-Bishi.
Masrahi had major doubts about putting himself back in the spotlight and was particularly worried about the impact any future failures would have on his family. It would be the person whose opinion he valued most that eventually convinced him. “Honestly, I couldn’t really process that I would ever train again,” Masrahi says.
“When I was deciding whether or not to come back, I spoke with my mum and she said to me, ‘you will come back, and it will be okay’. I still wasn’t sure, but I said to her ‘okay, I’ll do it’.” He reached for his running shoes and a new dream began to take shape.
It was at high school in his home city of Jazan, close to the Yemeni border, where Masrahi’s athletics aspirations first emerged. As a teenager, he initially favoured the longer distance of 5,000m before switching to 1,500m and 800m, and eventually settling on 400m at the suggestion of former Saudi Olympic Committee president Prince Nawaf bin Faisal Al Saud.
Masrahi’s potential was spotted by US-based athlete management agency HSInternational, which persuaded him to move to the States; in 2011 he began to train under the tutelage of renowned coach John Smith. “I was so happy with him,” Masrahi recalls. “He impacted every part of my training and made me study more and understand running technique. He made me stronger and faster, and changed how I felt about myself.”
While working with Smith, Masrahi regularly came into contact with his coach’s most famous protégé, three-time 100m world champion, Olympic gold medallist and former world record holder, Maurice Greene. “He would always give me some words of encouragement,” Masrahi says of Greene. “Telling me how he knew I could run even faster and that someday I would be a champion. It meant a lot coming from him.”
Greene’s words were prescient and Masrahi claimed his first major individual title in the 400m at the 2011 Asian Athletics Championships in Kobe, Japan, adding another gold medal at the 2011 Pan Arab Games in Doha. The Saudi sprinter’s results saw him qualify for the 2012 Olympic Games in London, where he reached the semi-finals.
“It was an amazing experience for me in London,” Masrahi says. “To compete in the Olympics is what every athlete dreams of. I was very sad that I couldn’t get to the final but that made me push even harder. The next year at the 2013 World Athletics Championships I thought about what happened in London and knew that I had to make it to the final, which I did. It gave me this stronger belief that I could compete with the very best.”
Masrahi finally ran the landmark lap of his career in 2014 when he won gold in the 400m at the Asian Games—the continent’s equivalent of the Olympics—in Incheon, South Korea. His time of 44.46 seconds remains an Asian Record a decade later.
On his return to Saudi Arabia, Masrahi made headlines both for his performance on the track and for being awarded a new car by Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Bin Abdulaziz Alsaud in recognition of his gold medal. The Kia remains in his family, though it is now driven by his younger brother. “After my first Asian Games in Guangzhou I said in an interview, ‘you will see me take the 400m gold medal in 2014’,” Masrahi reflects. “I knew I had it in me and I trained so hard for it. All I ever wanted was gold medals in Asia and to be competitive in the world events.”
Yousef Masrahi thought long and hard about his return to athletics. The sport had given him everything, but it had also left him broken. The lows he experienced during his four-year ban were extreme, but the possibility of one final high-point was ultimately what convinced him to get back on the track.
Prospective coach Al-Bishi had waited patiently for Masrahi to come around to the idea and after finally getting the green light, they began to plot a new path to the top. “I came to Riyadh and the first day we met up for training I said to Hamdan, ‘if I’m coming back, I want to win the Asian Games’. He agreed and had belief that I could do it. We kept on working hard, even though it was incredibly tough. I felt so tired some days and I just didn’t want to train; he kept me going.”
Al-Bishi remembers those early days well, recalling that Masrahi was like a coiled spring after so long out—putting everything into his sessions. “There were just three things that I demanded from him: consistency, discipline and commitment. I said without these he was going nowhere,” Al-Bishi says. “Most importantly, I just asked him to enjoy training again. As a show of his new commitment Masrahi moved from his home to Riyadh and went through the process all again, making sure to do things perfectly. “When we started seeing results and he began to trust himself again, he started to believe,” says Al-Bishi.
Despite it all Masrahi still felt ostracised from the Saudi athletics establishment, with many having doubts about his ability to compete after such a lengthy absence.
A silver medal at the Islamic Solidarity Games in Turkey in 2022 helped assuage some of those concerns but he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was considered damaged goods.
“I don’t think he understood how long-lasting the consequences of the ban would be,” Al-Bishi says. “The way he was treated shocked him, and it taught him a valuable lesson: to depend on himself. The ban changed him a lot. Since then, Yousef has been quieter, more introspective.”
After watching his new charge win Islamic Solidarity Games silver, Al-Bishi bumped into a familiar face: John Smith. Like Masrahi, Al-Bishi had also trained in the States by Smith and a meeting with his former mentor provided valuable reassurance. “John said to me he thought I was a very good coach and that Yousef and I could do something special together,” Al-Bishi recalls. “He told me to trust myself and not listen to the doubters.”
It was a timely boost for both Al-Bishi and Masrahi, who turned their attention to winning gold at the 2022 Asian Games which, thanks to Covid-induced delay, was held in October 2023 in Hangzhou, China.
Nine years after he first tasted continental gold in the men’s 400m, and just few weeks shy of his 36th birthday, Masrahi made it to the start line in Hangzhou. He had missed four years of his career and two Olympics, but his persistence had put him back among the contenders.
“There are two type of athletes: ones who train hard, but you cannot trust them in the race, those who train smart but always turn up on race day. Yousef is the latter,” Al-Bishi explains. “There are a lot of talented athletes but the ones who get to the very top are those who are focused when it comes to the pressure of the race; they are not afraid to compete with other champions.” Unafraid and unencumbered by his past transgressions, Masrahi triumphed again—beating Japan’s Kentaro Sato and Bahrain’s Yusuf Ali Abbas to be crowned Asian champion for the second time.
“When it came to the final few metres I could see the other guys were really strong and I said to myself, ‘this is your moment Yousef, just move a little bit’,” the Saudi sprinter recalls. “I thought about my mum, about my family, and I did it.”
He looked across at the television screen and back to the track and found it difficult to process what he was seeing. The 35-year-old from Saudi Arabia had indeed won the 400m final; he was a champion again.
Masrahi is visibly moved as he describes crossing the finish line in Hangzhou. For him, it was a moment of pure, unadulterated, redemption.
“I thought a lot about what had happened. I stopped for four years and it seemed my career was over. I definitely thought my career was over. I wasn’t thinking about running again. Then Hamdan came. After the race he said to me, ‘this gold has come from you, from deep inside you’. I think my time off gave me more hunger at this moment. It made me learn to fight and to think like a champion.”
A second individual Asian Games gold was not just a miraculous milestone for Masrahi. It was a ticket to the 2024 Olympics in Paris, where he hopes to find his final athletics absolution this summer.
“I know people will still say I’m too old, but I will do everything in my power to be ready for Paris,” Masrahi says. “I have the memory of the 2013 World Championship final; of the 2015 World Championship final; of the semi-final of the Olympic Games in London. I want another night like this. This will be my last Olympics and I am going to do my best and go out on a high. For me, my dream is to get to the final.”
The 36-year-old has his sights set on emulating the achievement of legendary Saudi athlete Hadi Souan Al-Somayli, who won the Kingdom’s first Olympic silver in 2000, finishing runner-up in the 400m hurdles in Sydney 24 years ago. For Masrahi, Al-Somayli is a figure comparable to Usain Bolt in terms of inspiration.
“There is Usain Bolt and then there is Hadi. He is the best of all the Saudi athletes and I can still remember when I was younger he asked me if ‘wanted to be a champion some day?’ I said ‘yes’ and he told me that I needed to focus everything on athletics, be clear in my goals and make sacrifices. I am still thankful for that conversations as it stuck with me all throughout my career. We are all very proud of him in Saudi Arabia.”
While not impossible, winning a medal in Paris would require Masrahi to engineer an extraordinary upset. The 400m field is stacked with talent, with reigning Olympic champion Steven Gardiner, plus Antonio Watson and Michael Norman—world champions in 2023 and 2022, respectively—are the favourites.
“We will try to get him into the Olympic final,” Al-Bishi says. “We are honest, we know that winning medals is tough but the final we believe is possible. Yousef is gifted, talented and he knows what he wants. I think I can put him in winning positions so it is my duty to get him ready, then it is his duty to do it on the track.”
Whatever happens in Paris, it seems likely that the Games will mark the end of Masrahi’s tumultuous career in athletics—though he hopes to follow Al-Bishi into coaching and help forge a new generation of Saudi Olympic hopefuls.
“I will miss track and field when I am retired because I love it like a family member or a friend,” Masrahi explains. “But I am sure it will still be part of my life. I thank Allah, because he made me an athlete, and he helped me see the world, to learn respect for other people. And I also thank Allah for my mother because she was the one who was always there. She was the one that saw what I went through and she never stopped believing in me. I simply wouldn’t be here now if it wasn’t for her.”