WORLD’S END
GB team’s five-medal haul is the worst since 2005
WHILE Lord Coe was scratching around yesterday for ways to sell these World Championships as a roaring success, the folk leading the British team m found themselves unable e to spin the same yarn.
In the end, with this Doha a venture now over, it came down n to how you interpret low numbers. - The IAAF have tried to pass off their crowd figures by claiming this bizarre trip to the desert will win new hearts and minds. But Neil Black’s team had less flexibility — a missed target is a missed target.
They were set a goal of seven to nine medals by UK Sport, as s revealed by Sportsmail in February, and when the music stopped last night they were on five. In n other words, their worst haul since 2005.
The women’s 4x400m relay team finished fourth on the final evening, having initially won an appeal against Jamaica over a changeover infringement to take bronze, only to lose a counterappeal. Later, the corresponding men’s quartet botched a switch between Toby Harries and Rabah Yousif, meaning they didn’t finish the final.
It will put severe pressure on Black, UK Athletics’ performance director, at a time when he is already facing serious questions over the 2015 review that cleared Mo Farah to keep working with Alberto Salazar.
That will be his biggest challenge in conversations with the new CEO and chairman at UKA — Zara Hyde Peters and Chris Clark respectively.
Black said: ‘There’s a lot to feel really good about. But the reality is the medal tally is not that which we would have wanted.
‘It could be better, it should be better. We’ll obviously be talking with UK Sport. Our relationship with UK Sport is really positive.
‘What have we learnt, what are we going to do about it, how do we convert the nearlies into medals?’
The highs of the Championships from a British perspective are easy to spot — Dina Asher-Smith stole the show, while Katarina Johnson-Thompson pulled off an incredible result in taking the heptathlon title. When set against the fact there was only one individual medallist at London 2017 — Farah — that is progress.
But just as Black pointed to the relays that bailed him out in London — four medals in two days — here they managed only two, with silvers in the men’s and women’s 4x100m.
In the post-mortem, it ought to be of concern that so many of the athletes touted to step up from London 2017 failed to do so. In the aftermath of that home event, Black made a play of the 19 finishes between fourth and eighth place and what it signified in terms of potential medallists. Of them, only Asher-Smith stepped up and, more worryingly, the number of finishers between four and eight in Doha dropped to 11.
There were good performances that didn’t yield podiums — Adam Gemili, Holly Bradshaw, Callum Hawkins, Jake Wightman and Laura Muir among them.
But athletes seen as fringe contenders such as Andrew Pozzi, Lynsey Sharp, Morgan Lake and two of the relay teams fell well short.
As a whole you can ask hard questions of where this team stands, with £27million funding for the Olympic cycle and Tokyo 2020 only nine months away.
The IAAF international governing body have been saved to an extent by strong crowds in the final few days. But that does not excuse the shambolic sight of empty victory laps for both 100m champions in the early days, nor does it quantify what proportion of the inflated crowds were bussed-in spectators on freebies.
Despite the further farce of the marathon runners dropping like flies after midnight in a dangerous climate for distance running, Coe was defiant yesterday.
‘It is pretty clear to us that on athlete performance this is the best World Championships that we have ever had,’ he said. Clutching at straws, really. The mistake should not be repeated.