“Grabbed Me & Ran to the Hospital”: Olympic Medalist Makes Disturbing Confession Years Before Track & Field Career

In 2019, the 400mh were at their peak, with Warholm and Benjamin running historic sub-47 times and Samba still a strong contender. Despite the stacked field, a Brazilian teenager had a breakthrough season, lowering his PB and South American U20 record seven times. He capped it with a 48.28 for seventh at the World Championships in Doha, just 0.25 seconds off a bronze medal. The bronze would come, and that too in the Olympic Games – 2021 and 2024. The journey wasn’t easy.

Alison Dos Santos often wears caps or hats to protect the sensitive skin on his head from the sun. There are visible scars on his forehead, scalp, face, chest, and left arm. And in the RSG podcast streamed on August 28, he was asked about it. Answering the question, Alison Dos Santos shared that he was born in Sonabah, São Paulo, Brazil. Since his mother had to care for his special-needs sister, his grandmother raised him. By 10 months old, he was already walking, holding onto walls for support. One day, his grandmother was in the kitchen preparing fish with hot oil on the stove, next to the sink. What happened next was ghastly.

He pointed to his left, telling the direction of the living room, and said that he came from there. “And the oil was in stove already, and like she couldn’t see me because she was like on the sink, and then I just came walking and hit my hand in the pan, and the oil just turned all over me. My granddad just grabbed me and ran with me to the hospital because it would be easier than like call my mom to come with the car.” His grandfather took his clothes out and ran with him to the the hospital, which was 2000m away.

Justin Gatlin asked again to confirm that if they ran on foot, and Santos said, “Yeah. He just grabbed me and went to the hospital because, you know, to call my mom, waiting for the ambulance or the car to come would take ages. So, he just like thought that was would be like faster to run it. So, he just grabbed me, run to the hospital…” But the problems did not end there because that hospital could not treat him.

The Olympic medalist recalled, “My city couldn’t support that because like they weren’t ready for like this kind of burns.” 

They sent him to another city, where he stayed for about three to four months. His grandmother went with him, since she had also developed a problem with her hand. And you know what’s even sadder?

“My first birthday, like the one year was in the hospital, cuz I was there still trying like fighting for my life, cuz I was a baby. So, like, that was a big thing for me.“ But the impact of this accident was so much that it made him insecure, but then track and field changed him.

Track and field helped the Olympic medalist

“Looking back to when I was a kid, when I was 8-10 years old, I remember I was really insecure about myself because of my accident. Because when you are a kid, you don’t understand everything,” Alison Dos Santos said in an interview. Even in the Ready Set Go podcast, he said that when he reached high school, things started to become difficult. He felt comfortable in his own skin, which many don’t, but his classmates often made jokes about him.

The 2x Olympic bronze medalist confessed in the interview, “I was like, ‘Am I different? Can I fix this? What can I do to solve this problem?’ When I started to get older, I got more and more insecure. But when I started doing track and field, it helped me a whole lot. And it’s not just the sport, but the people in the sport that’s amazing. When I started to train over there, they just, like, embraced me.”

Dos Santos started athletics in 2013 at Pedro Badran State Technical School (ETEC) in his hometown of São Joaquim da Barra. A few years later, he was already wearing Brazil’s colors on the world stage.

At the World U18 Championships in Nairobi in 2017, he finished fifth in the 400m hurdles and then helped anchor Brazil to victory in the mixed 4x400m relay. The following year, at the World U20 Championships in Tampere, he surprised many by shaving 0.70 seconds off his personal best, taking the bronze medal with a time of 49.78.

Santos’ journey is an inspiration in itself. And probably, track and field impacts people in more ways than we can imagine…