Farah: Please get behind me
Treble gold winner urges critics to back off after 10k triumph
First came the drama, excitement, and admiration as he demonstrated his unrelenting ability to win yet another major championship race.
then, as the discussion began over where he ranks among Britain’s greatest Olympians, Mo Farah had to address the doubts that remain.
No conversation with the first Briton to win three Olympic track and field gold medals is complete without an uncomfortable mixture of questions that drift between the sheer spectacle of his performances and the associations that raise suspicion and undermine his credibility. On this occasion it was actually Farah who brought it up first.
He urges us to believe. indeed during an interview here at the Olympic Village yesterday he said he hoped his heroics in recovering from an early fall to win a riveting 10,000m final would be enough to get people on side. ‘i hope you guys can get behind me now,’ he said.
He was charm personified, smiling broadly when the subject turned to his chance to become only the second man in history, after Lasse Viren, to win golds in the 5,000m and 10,000m in consecutive Olympic Games. He had to be told that Viren (below) was a Finnish runner from the 1970s but he liked the comparison, particularly when he was told of how Viren had also had to recover from a fall to win the first of his four. ‘to be fair i didn’t know who steve Cram was when i first met him,’ said Farah. But no sooner had Farah finished a race that saw his trademark sprint finish to see off Paul tanui, to win his eighth straight global final, than he was facing questions in the media area about his coach Alberto salazar — who remains under investigation by the Us Anti-Doping Agency — and Jama Aden, the somalian coach of a number of Ethiopian athletes who was recently arrested in a spanish police raid that found performanceenhancing drugs in a hotel room. to the salazar questions Farah has a stock response. He believes in clean sport and he has been open enough to publish his own blood data. But he lets himself down with his vain attempts to dismiss questions about Aden by claiming the former middledistance runner was a random stranger who asked him for a selfie at the track one day. ‘Because of who i am people ask for photos,’ he said. ‘i can’t just say no to everyone.’
there are actually numerous photographs of Farah with Aden, even ones of them sitting down to dinner together. And after his arrest UK Athletics had to admit that they had enlisted Aden’s help to put on sessions when Farah and other British athletes were on training camps in Ethiopia. When Farah was pressed on that point yesterday, a UKA official interrupted to stop him answering the question.
Farah said he was emotional after his victory on saturday night because of the scrutiny he has been under since a number of former employees and athletes from the salazar-run Nike Oregon Project told the BBC last year that unethical practices were being employed.
‘it’s been hard,’ said Farah. ‘You guys certainly haven’t taken it easy on me. Nailing me for everything i do. it’s been really tough. i put my blood profiles out there so you could see there isn’t anything there.
‘the media has to react (to the allegations) and you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. that’s why you’re good at your job. But i wish that other countries operated the same way we do (and placed their athletes under such scrutiny).’
Has it damaged his popularity in the eyes of the public? Well, he never thinks he will be among the top three in the BBC sports Personality of the Year. ‘i won’t be in the top three,’ he predicted even if he does win a second gold here, although he fears that owes as much to being a somalian immigrant. the mood lightened, of course, when the discussion switched back to his performance. to the fact that the Kenyan strategy of starting relatively slower only to make the second half extremely quick with the last mile covered in a fraction over four minutes. ‘it hurt me,’ he concedes.
While the fact that he is now 33, and can no longer recover as quickly as he once did, will make ‘a double here much harder than it was in London’. He said he was nursing cuts and grazes after a fall that was inadvertently caused by his training partner, Galen rupp. ‘As i went down i was thinking: “No, no, this can’t be happening”,’ he said. ‘the heart was beating madly. in that split second i thought four years of hard work had gone.
‘i didn’t panic. i knew there were plenty of laps remaining. And i just worked. When they put the hammer down i worked. it’s all down to hard work. i could have easily sat back. But i didn’t want to sit back, i wanted to tell myself i’d at least tried.’