D-DAY FOR MO
Olympic champion has one last chance to achieve 10,000m qualifying time for Tokyo
DOUBTS over Britain’s most decorated athlete will be addressed across 25 laps in Manchester tonight but reservations about the quality of the wider team heading to Tokyo will linger a while longer.
With the notable exception of Katarina Johnson-Thompson, all of the obvious candidates for medals in Japan will be competing at the Olympic trials over the coming three days. The problem is that those candidates would not stretch very far across a standard track, even in this era of social distancing.
All of which heightens the intrigue around Sir Mo Farah, who for the better part of a decade was the team’s best guarantee of success. More recently he has started to resemble a man of 38 and by extension tonight is his final chance to achieve the 10,000m qualifying time for Tokyo.
In his prime the four-time Olympic champion could be expected to easily beat the time of 27min 28sec but such were his difficulties in his first attempt in Birmingham on June 5, there would be a sense of surprise if he now pulls it off in Manchester. His disclosure in Birmingham of a minor injury to his left ankle has injected severe doubts that he will take this second chance.
If he is fit, he needs to go 22sec quicker than he managed then but whispers about his training have been optimistic. He has been at an altitude camp in Font Romeu in the south of France and working alongside British team-mate Andrew Butchart. All indications are that he is running fast again, which sits well with testimony from prior to his ‘ankle niggle’ that he was developing excellent form.
He will need it if he is to qualify for a defence of his Olympic title but even if he does get there it is reasonable to query if he stands a chance of a medal. Which takes us back to the wider problem of a team that is expected to be very light on contenders in Tokyo. Trials will help determine the final selection, which will be announced by head coach Christian
Malcolm on Tuesday, but is hard to make a case for more than a handful of medal shots. Dina Asher-Smith is an excellent possibility in each of the 100m, 200m and the 4 x 100m relay, and Laura Muir is in the hunt for a podium finish in the 1500m. They will go through the motions of finalising their qualification tomorrow and Sunday respectively.
But who else? Johnson-Thompson, the heptathlon world champion, has not been seen since Sportsmail revealed she damaged her achilles at the end of 2020. She has been given a medical exemption to miss the trials, which does not allow for an optimistic projection of how she will get on if she reaches Japan.
Younger talent is coming through, including Jemma Reekie, who could become a fringe 800m threat at the Olympics, and other outside bets for Tokyo include Andy Pozzi, Holly Bradshaw, Cindy Sember and any of a cluster of exciting middle- distance runners. But assuming they all qualify this weekend, it would still be ambitious to expect them to carry Britain to seven medals — the minimum requirement from UK Sport at the most recent World Championships.