I told Farah to be a racer and start winning, says Stewart
Track legend describes mentoring Mo as his protege prepares to take on best of a new breed of Scots
AN STEWART recites the first words of advice he gave Mo Farah as if the conversation had occurred only yesterday.
The former Olympic bronze medalist, who famously outsprinted his fellow Scot Ian McCafferty and Kenyan legend Kip Keino to Commonwealth 5,000 metres gold in Edinburgh in 1970, is the Scot who secretly masterminded Farah’s rise to world domination.
Head of Endurance at UK Athletics until 2014, a job description hiding his primary focus to facilitate Farah’s bid to be the best in the world, Stewart inherited an athlete who had failed to reach the 2008 Olympic final in Beijing and turned him into a double world and Olympic gold medalist.
For Stewart, it all began with telling Farah to forget about being a runner and concentrating upon turning himself into a racer. “When Mo Farah said to me ‘can you help?’ back in 2008, I said ‘the first thing you have to do is win a race, you’ve never won anything!’” said Stewart, brought up in Handsworth, a Birmingham council estate, but intensely proud of his competitive record for Scotland.
“I told him he might not like me saying it but he was knocked out of the Olympics in 2008 and you’ve never won anything, so I told him the first thing was to win the European Indoors in 2009,” he added.
“So we set that up and that’s what he did and then in 2010 we went to the European outdoors and won the 5k and the 10k and so it went on and on. There’s a big difference between a racer and a runner. I helped turn him into a racer and I would always rather have a racer than a runner.
“I wasn’t a great runner but I was a very good racer and I think that’s where you have a go.
“That’s why it annoys me now when I hear Paula Radcliffe and Crammy [Steve Cram] saying, ‘Now Mo needs a world record’. I think: ‘Actually, no he doesn’t’. The worst thing he could do is start chasing world records and by the way Paula, I bet you would change your marathon world record for what Mo Farah’s got any day of the week, so don’t even go there. You can concentrate on world records any time but in a race it has to be about that Olympic final, on August the 8th, at 4pm or whenever, and you’d better get it right because the next one is in four years’ time.”
Now, though, those same words of advice apply equally to the new generation of Scottish distance runners who are chasing at Farah’s heels. Dunblane’s Andrew Butchart, for example, who has two ‘A’ standards in Olympic qualification in the 5,000m behind him and just needs to augment them with a top-two finish in the Olympic trials later this month.
He will take on Farah over 3,000m at the Diamond League event in Stewart’s home town of Birmingham tomorrow and Stewart reckons the legends of the sport are there to be brought crashing to earth. “Andrew has done well and it’s good to get that experience,” said Stewart. “He shouldn’t be frightened of him. Take him on. It’s a race!”
Stewart, who works these days as a consultant to the Great Run company, was speaking at the launch of the Stirling Marathon, an event which will come on stream for the first time next May. He feels the depth of talent in Scottish distance running is the greatest it has been since his own heyday in the 1970s. While it is typical of the forthright, headstrong Stewart that he regards his Olympic bronze medal in Munich in 1972 as a failure, he wouldn’t rule out this current crop sealing their emergence with a gold medal or two.
“We have got a great bunch of young kids coming through and it’s fantastic,” said Stewart. “It’s easy for people to say, ‘oh, yeah, in the good old days and all that’ but they weren’t that good because we never won the Olympics, we all failed in finals. You don’t win a bronze or a silver medal, you lose a gold, let’s be honest. But I think this group could do better – hopefully – and I think that’s fantastic.
“Young Callum [Hawkins, the marathon runner] is 23 and I was 23 in Munich. I only came out with a bronze and I was pissed off about it but you never know. The great thing with these Hawkins lads [Callum and Derek] as I was just saying to them is that this Olympic marathon will be right where they are [in terms of times] and if they run those times, there will be no pacemakers, everybody is going to be watching everybody, and it will be won and lost in the last three or four miles, so don’t think it will be a 2hrs 03mins because it won’t be.
“Don’t anyone knock our kids and tell me that we have to beat Kenya etc because, let me tell you, our kids are as good as anybody. It’s just about getting the coaching and the environment right and obviously here they are doing that.”