British chief confident young talent will step up

British Athletics’ performance director Neil Black launched a passionate defence of Great Britain’s performance at the World Championships after they hit their target, despite Sir Mo Farah being the only individual to win medals.

Every relay squad reached the podium over the weekend, with the men’s 4x100 metres squad becoming world champions, as the hosts claimed six medals, two of them being Farah’s 10,000m gold and 5,000m silver.

It ensured they scraped their London medal target of six-to-eight but it was still met with criticism from former Olympic 400m champion Michael Johnson and Jessica Ennis-Hill’s former coach Toni Minichiello.

Black, though, will ignore any detractors and insisted he will plough on with the job.

He said: “People say and do what they do. I haven’t read or looked at anything – that’s my style and way of protecting myself.

“Say what you want, do what you want. We’ll carry on performing and that’s where the motivation comes from.

“Yes, of course you are nervous, you are apprehensive. And you are aware of people’s views. But we were massively confident – it was just a matter of how many relay medals we would win, how many close calls there would be in individual events.

“The relays have come up trumps, Mo came up trumps. A load of other people came so close. Next year and in 2019-2020 it will probably be a different combination but we all can see that there is a group of young people who have stepped up, gone so close and are ready to step up in the future.

“All logic would say to carry on with a similar approach. You apply a consistent progression to these athletes and every one of those guys who have finished in the top eight and finished fourth are capable over the next two or three years of actually stepping up.

“I understand that people will go, ‘who is going to replace Mo and Greg (Rutherford) and Jess?’ We are looking to replace them. We are looking to produce a team of athletes who are capable of performing at this level.

“I think you have seen the beginnings of those. We have three years to Tokyo. So, we are really generally very confident.”

Neil Black: will ignore detractors and continue with similar approach.