I love stories about athletes with mercurial talent. I don’t always know why, but maybe it’s just the idea that there are super humans out there. In the same breath, I love Cinderella stories just as much. My friends often point that out about me, but more as an accusation than an observation or compliment. However, I have no shame and would proudly admit that I am a sucker for stories about athletes who overcame hardship or who weren’t the most gifted but worked hard to be counted amongst the greatest at what they do.
At a glance, Mo Farah’s is exactly the kind of fairytale that is up my alley but for all there is to enjoy in it, I can’t seem to appreciate it much at all.
Farah has won 4 Olympic gold medals and 6 World Championship titles. While that is quite remarkable on its own, his come up story is even more so. He was born in Somalia and spent part of his childhood as a refugee in Djibouti while war raged on in his home nation. His family eventually moved to Britain and initially he couldn’t speak a word of English. It was while at school in the UK that one of his teachers noticed that he had a talent for running…
Despite this obvious talent, Farah wasnt a world beater or indeed someone you’d take much notice of. As a junior, he was quite an average athlete, one who could compete at the highest level but not the kind to post leading times or win multiple titles. In fact, by the time he was 25, the only medal he had won was a silver at the 2006 European Championships.
Hollywood movies about rags-to-riches stories always have a montage where the leading character goes through a transformation. There’s always this inspiring music in the background while they work hard like Rocky Balboa punching slabs of beef in a meat locker in Rocky. It might well be that Farah went through something similar, perhaps with a little less drama and theatrics, and that might account for how he became a world class athlete after the age of 28.
I could also understand that a middle or long distance runner’s body would take longer to mature than a sprinter’s body, owing to the different muscle fibres that they’d be made up of. It makes sense that they experience their prime as athletes in their late twenties and thirties but that alone doesn’t explain Farah’s sudden rise. He wasn’t really on the radar or someone to look out for until he started working with Alberto Salazar in 2011. A year later, he was a double Olympic champion. It’s possible that Salazar is a phenomenal coach who was able to bring out the best in Farah but there will always be a cloud hanging over their relationship and that can’t be shaken off or dismissed.
This past week, Salazar was handed a 4 year ban from track and field for doping violations. Farah, predictably, has always denied taking performance enhancing drugs and says he had no knowledge of any wrongdoing on Salazar’s part. There have been questions asked of the two for a number of years and many rumours spread and the fact that Salazar oversaw the most successful period in Farah’s career only helped to further fuel the speculation.
In his latest vehement denial (in the link below) Farah says he has never failed a drugs test, which in itself is no longer a credible defence – see Lance Armstrong, bur Farah doesn’t mention that he had, infamously, missed 2 tests. He also claims he is receiving the same kind treatment from the media in the UK that Lewis Hamilton and Raheem Sterling get, which is to allege that there is a racist motive behind it.
There’s a saying in English about a guilty man protesting too much and it comes to mind in this case.
By evoking race, he takes the spotlight off himself and it seems like a deflection. I don’t think that is a credible defence either. He isn’t mistreated or referred to in negative terms for any reason under the sun like Sterling and if there were an objective measure, I would wager that he is a more beloved figure in Britain than Hamilton. I just don’t buy it.
I don’t know if Farah has or hasn’t doped and it would be nigh on impossible for him to prove his innocence beyond a shadow of a doubt. Even if he is not guilty, his meteoric rise under the watch of a coach caught in a doping scandal will always raise questions. And that is the problem.
Mawandinho 