Sir Mo Farah seems to have reached the end of the road. His mind has been telling him for two years that he still has it, but his legs and lungs refuse to push the same fib, and so he’s just about done.
He’ll have a go at the London Marathon on Sunday morning, and if whispers are right, he reckons he can get around in two hours and six, but it will be his last dance at that kind of distance. In that sort of elite company, too.
From there the journey to retirement will be a short one. It’s likely he will have a couple of other races, he says, but they will be smaller events over less ground in shallower fields.
It can be a poignant thing when time and age take down a champion, which is why I went to see Farah the other day. We often talk in sport about the two deaths of an athlete, and to listen to him in his media discussions was to hear a guy on the back end of the same hiding they all get eventually.
‘As you get older, you can’t do what you did,’ he told us, and he’s a month into his forties now. ‘Your body won’t let you. It’s frustrating. Why can’t I? It’s been an emotional couple of years.’
Sir Mo Farah poses with his ‘Mobot’ outside of Buckingham Palace on Thursday
The 40-year-old has enjoyed a legendary career including winning Olympic gold in 2012
And here’s the thing with that – reality doesn’t always bite in sport. More often it nibbles and it chews away, one little piece at a time. It’s the persistent hip and foot injuries. It’s not recovering as quickly. It’s the slow ebbing of confidence. It’s the softening of the kick that won 10 straight global titles and four Olympic gold medals. It’s failing to get to Tokyo via anonymous tracks in Manchester and Birmingham. It’s losing to a club runner in London.
Nibbles can hurt more than bites, and Farah appears tired of the slog. It can be sad, but it is also the cycle of sport, which is probably why the London Marathon organisers sat him on a stage a couple of seats away from Britain’s bright new hope of distance running, Emile Cairess.
He’s got a lot about him, Cairess, a 25-year-old who already holds the European record for 10 miles, and maybe we’ll be talking in the next day or two about the passing of torches.
Of course, there are only mugs in those games of prediction, because not many athletes feature in the same breath as Farah when ranked by achievements. Certainly no one in this country and few others from anywhere else, ever, and that is how good he was. They will roar him from Greenwich Park to the Mall on Sunday.
But we know the ‘but’ is coming, because it is arguably the biggest ‘but’ in British sport. It is a ‘but’ you can see unaided from outer space. By now, most folk know how that ‘but’ looks: Mo, you shined like no other, but what about the darker stuff?
Five years later inside the same London Stadium he took World Championship success
What about Alberto Salazar, the coach who made you a world beater, and is now banned for doping violations and sexual misconduct? What about Jama Aden, a coach who fled to Qatar to escape the Spanish police after being busted with all manner of banned substances? What about the lies you told about your association with him? What about the L-carnitine injections and the wonky records kept by Dr Rob Chakraverty? What about the way your story on all that changed when you spoke to investigators? What about the missed tests and the doorbell?
Riath Al-Samarrai writes for Mail Sport
We can say it again, for old time’s sake, that there is no suggestion of wrongdoing by Farah, and that he has never failed a drugs test. He hasn’t, and it should also be said he has generally fronted up to those questions from me and others in various countries ahead of various meets around the world.
But, at the very least, what a spectacular and unfortunate sequence of failures in the choosing of his buddies. And how he has paid for it, with all the clouds that have stalked him over the past few years. All the caveats he has had to carry. All the innuendo he has drawn in a sport that long ago forfeited the right to blind faith on doping topics.
Without any of that baggage, who is to know what his legacy would look like? For my money, four Olympic gold medals in the grind of distance running would ordinarily make him the most accomplished of our sporting knights. Instead, he is merely the most complicated, but he says he has no regrets. Or rather he did this week. In others, he has wrestled with it, so possibly that is just another chapter that needs to straighten itself out.
For many of us, the Farah tale has been extremely conflicting. I remember watching him on television when he won his 10,000m gold on Super Saturday at London 2012 and that was an immensely uplifting moment. Not only for the quality of the race, and that magnificent kick away from the Africans and Galen Rupp in the final lap of 25, but via the deeper messaging, too, about an inclusive country. It can sound a little contrived when sport is positioned in those terms, but Farah’s win chimed deeply with me for one reason and another. It was marvellous, important, personal to millions in millions of different ways.
But his career has come with unfortunate associations to former coach Alberto Salazar
I would also say he was responsible for the best sporting atmosphere I have known. In that same stadium five years on, when he won his last major gold medal at the 2017 world championships, it generated just about the loudest noise I’ve heard. By then, though, Farah was a different story because the storm had rolled in.
I was thinking about all of that when he was up on that media stage on Thursday. Farah and a third athlete, the veteran Chris Thompson, were asked what advice they might have for Cairess.
Farah had a little think and told him to not take anything for granted, and it was an answer rooted in the pain of knowing he once ran like the wind and now he knows he cannot. It was touching in its way.
But maybe there was a better response, starting with the importance of taking care when picking your mates.
Lukaku ruling bang out of order
Italy’s Sports Court Of Appeal has just set a very strong clubhouse lead in the battle for the dumbest act of administration in this sporting year.
On Friday they rejected an appeal from Inter Milan against a second booking received by Romelu Lukaku in their Coppa Italia semi-final against Juventus.
Romelu Lukaku gestures towards Juventus fans with his finger to his lips after scoring
His offence? He scored a stoppage-time penalty, stood in front of the Juve fans and held his finger to his lips. Provocative, by the letter of the law. But the context?
Lukaku says they pelted him with racial abuse. Given the mountains of precedent in Italian football, I feel extremely comfortable in believing him. Less so in trusting the competency of Italy’s Sport Court of Appeal. I’d feel more comfortable riding in one of Elon Musk’s rockets.
Benn has no grasp on reality
With considerable aggression, Conor Benn says there has been no meaningful news this week.
Not quite true – he has been charged by UK Anti-Doping and he is now provisionally suspended.
Let’s hope he is more alert next time he gets in the ring, whenever that might be.
For all the latest Sports News Click Here
