Black is taking long, hard look at his future after Salazar ban

NEIL BLACK is considering his position as performance director of British Athletics in the wake of the four-year doping ban handed out to Alberto Salazar.

Black had close ties with Salazar as the coach of Mo Farah between 2011 and 2017, with the American also acting as a consultant for Britain’s wider endurance running programme.

He had previously described Salazar as a “genius” and “brilliant”, but admitted he would be considering that stance and potentially his position in leading the British team to next year’s Olympics following the punishment given to the 61-year-old by the United Anti-Doping Agency last week.

When asked if he expected to be in charge in Tokyo, Black said: “I’ll be going back, I’ll be personally reviewing the thoughts that I had, the decisions I’ve made, the things that I’ve said.

“Having done that t h o r o u g h l y, patiently, sensibly, I’ll come to my own decision and that will run in discussions with Chris Clark [UK Athletics’ new chairman] and the board.

“I’m certainly not ready to make any decisions. I’ll play back the decisions I made and, once I’ve had a chance to really look through that, I’ll have a view but, at this point, I haven’t had the chance. We will go through it in detail and that’s the point I will begin to think about my understanding to it, the implications and how I feel about it.”

Despite saying he was pondering his role going forward, following a championships in which Britain fell short of their UK Sport target of seven-to-10 medals with just five in Doha, Black (right) said he still wanted to “be the person leading the team through to Tokyo 2020” in an ideal world.

Black is expected to travel to Chicago this week, where Farah competes in the marathon, and he reiterated his stance that he believes the Brit, as the athlete himself has continually claimed, did nothing wrong under Salazar.

“Nothing at all has changed in terms of my belief regarding Mo Farah,” said Black. “I think it is important to repeat that British Athletics and the medical and support teams were always the people who were on top of and managing and directing the care of Mo Farah, so we have no concerns. I am very, very sure that no British athletes have been involved in any of these processes.”

For a championships that had promised so much and occasionally delivered for the British team, it ended with a baton on the floor and the men’s 4x400metre relay squad failing to make it across the finish line.

Medallists from two years ago, their runners no longer quite had the leg speed, even if they had managed to complete the four laps of the track.

And, with that result and their female counterparts being denied bronze in a post-race yo-yo of disqualifications and appeals, the British team had missed out on their target range in Doha, part of British Athletics’ criteria for receiving £27million in this Olympic cycle. Coming up two short of the minimum expectation, it was the worst medal count from a British team since they picked up three in Helsinki in 2005 and raises the question of what they might achieve at Tokyo next summer.

The void left by Farah and Jessica Ennis-Hill, who between them had won 60 per cent of all Britain’s gold medals at the World Athletics Championships, has been party filled, but there’s plenty of work to do before Tokyo.