Now Mo must decide if he can stay with his mentor...
WATCH a video of the 2007 World Championship 5,000 metres final and it looks much like a scene in East London five years later. Mo Farah leads at the bell, only on this occasion five other athletes sprint past him and the Briton finishes sixth. The progress he subsequently made owes much to hard wo rk and maturity but also to the guidance of Alberto Salazar, the former American distance runner and one-time marathon world record holder who coached Farah and Galen Rupp to a most unexpected onetwo in the Olympic 10,000m final in London. Farah, we knew, could win. What nobody anticipated was a silver medal for the American amid all that African class.
Farah moved to Oregon to train with Rupp in 2011, enabling Salazar to transform him into an athlete who has dominated distance running for the last three years.
Salazar described Farah as ‘pitifully weak’ when he first began coaching him. ‘ He didn’t remotely have the speed and strength to grip a field by the throat over the latter stages of a race and win the way he did in London and the world championships in Moscow,’ he said, that 2007 race in Osaka rather proving the point.
Now, however, Farah is essentially being forced to defend that progression against the explosive allegations being made against his mentor and his training partner. Allegations that come from inside the Nike-financed training camp in Oregon.
Farah denies any wrongdoing, insisting in a statement that from his experience his coach and the Nike-Oregon project abide by the rules of the World Anti- Doping Agency. Last night, ahead of the screening of the BBC Panorama programme, Salazar and Rupp denied allegations, among them the amazing claim that the American athlete had been using testosterone since he was 16.
But leading doping officials shown the BBC’s evidence have said Farah needs to ask himself if he can continue to associate himself with Salazar, and that seems an increasingly pertinent question given Salazar’s past and the apparent attitudes of Nike towards doping. Salazar was coaching Mary Decker-Slaney when she tested positive for testosterone, and only recently Nike caused a stir by signing serial doper Justin Gatlin.
These are very damaging claims, if proven. If Farah wants to remain untainted by association, at the very least he might now need to be more wary of the company he keeps.