OLYMPIC HERO LOOKS LIKE A MAN WHO IS HIDING SOMETHING...
IT is with some irony that the lustre of Sir Mo Farah’s legacy might now depend on the same kind of iffy memory that got him into this mess in the first place.
Will those followers whose devotion survived undented in the past five years continue to forget the inconvenient details in the same way that he seems able to forget, say, receiving an injection?
Or that he is rather more familiar than he tended to acknowledge with Jama Aden, a man wanted in Spain on doping charges?
Which is not to say he has done what folk whisper about. There is no suggestion of wrongdoing, as we say. But it is getting ever more justifiable to ask hard questions of Farah and to delve into what he says to see if it stacks up.
He resents it, of course. Witness how he took a tough line of questioning from Sportsmail and others at the Chicago Marathon in October, in the wake of Alberto Salazar’s ban, and see how he turned it into an accusation of an agenda and hinted at a racial element. He has since clarified those comments — and so he should.
What that instance highlighted was the trend of Farah talking himself into difficulty, a pattern that has been increasingly noticeable since Panorama first aired allegations about his former coach in 2015. None of those earlier flashes were quite like this latest one, though. And few, you suspect, have the same potential for harm.
That is because this is about more than his associations. This is about Farah and how well we can trust what he says. To get further into that, simply read the transcript of his 2015 USADA interview in the Panorama programme, read the certainty of his answers about L-carnitine and then note the sharpest of U-turns just minutes later, after a conversation with UKA head of endurance Barry Fudge.
What did they talk about? UKA haven’t answered that question from Sportsmail yet. The issue with all of this — quite aside from why Dr Rob Chakraverty didn’t properly record an injection that we now know was the subject of numerous communications by UKA staff — is that Farah, in his interview, made himself look like a man with something to hide.
Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he just didn’t remember what he had been injected with, as he said. Maybe he didn’t understand the questions, as his lawyers said. Maybe it was all just a very nerve-inducing setting and, goodness, who wouldn’t feel jittery in an interview lasting nearly five hours?
At this juncture, you have to rewind a couple of days to an interview he gave to The Times. He went over past comments about Jama Aden, a coach from Somalia who is in serious muck about his arrest in 2016. Spanish police raids at several premises found EPO and syringes.
Anyway, Farah famously described Aden in 2016 as a fan wanting a selfie. Over time, that has been unpicked and then at the weekend, Farah said this: ‘When I got asked and I said in that press conference (at the Rio Olympics) “Yeah, I know him but I don’t know him”, that’s not the reality. The reality is he’s a Somalian and I’m from a Somalian background and I’ve known Jama for many years.’
Again, associations are not guilt. But likewise, declarations that are ‘not the reality’ are a desperately bad look.
Interestingly, Farah and his coach Gary Lough insisted to The Times that the interview was not damage control ahead of Panorama. In the context of how it played out, we can probably agree on that.