Rio 2016: Mo Farah fears the 'get Mo' brigade as he prepares for his biggest challenge yet

A trio of Ethiopian runners will target Farah in the hope of beating him, but despite the ongoing questions surrounding Farah's off-track relationships, Saturday night's race will not be one to miss

Ian Herbert
Rio de Janeiro
Friday 19 August 2016 17:09 BST
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Mo Farah faces the biggest challenge of his career in the 5,000m at the Rio Olympics
Mo Farah faces the biggest challenge of his career in the 5,000m at the Rio Olympics

A warm night is expected on the east side of Rio de Janeiro on Saturday night but Mo Farah anticipates the heat being on in him other ways.

He feels he has a gang lying in wait in the stadium better known to Rio’s cairocas as the Estadio Olimpico Joao Havelange, after the one-time ruler of Brazilian football who died this week. It is an Ethiopian gang; the triumvirate of Hagos Gebrhiwet, Dejen Gebremeskel and Muktar Edris, whom Farah feels will be as coordinated in their attempts to outpace him as a Tour de France cycling team, replete with domestique.

He senses that this group will be issued with the express instructions to set a pace which forces him into fatigue, allowing one of their number to go for the kill on the last straight when Farah usually has that legendary last kick to drive him home. Saturday night is the one those Africans have earmarked to find him out. Gebrhiwet and Gebremeskel have both skipped the 10,000m to concentrate their efforts on Farah.

They have youth in their legs, too. Gebrhiwet is 22 and Gebremeskel 26, while Farah is 33 now. We could be witnessing little less than a 5,000m sprint on Saturday night. Such is the challenge of becoming the second man after Finland's Lasse Viren (1972/76) to retain both the 10,000m and 5,000m titles.

A consequence of this intense scramble to ‘Get Mo' has been athletes inadvertently clipping his heels or running across him. It’s happened twice in the past seven days. The Olympic Stadium track will be full of perils. On such slender threads do hopes of a double gold hang.

Few are more self-aware than Farah when he competes. He has been the watchman of the pack in each of his last two races, lifting his head from the onward slog to fix a look left and right and steer a course. But the tangles have worried him. The way he articulated how he felt after his first gold last Saturday demonstrated it. “No, no, this can't be happening. The heart beating madly. In that split second I thought four years had gone. And it wasn't in my control…"

In the circumstances, he is displaying extraordinary equanimity. He looks a winner-in-waiting. To witness him and his broad grin in the player/athlete mixed zone is to understand that the collective mission to deter him does not seem to make the blindness psychological difference.

Neither do the obstinate questions about the company he keeps. The questions will persist until such a time as he severs his relationship with Alberto Salazar or Salazar provides a convincing answer to the findings unearthed by BBC Panorama journalist Mark Daley: that Farah’s coach promoted testosterone-fuelled cheating for a 16-year-old.

Farah characterised it on Saturday night as a motivated witch hunt. “You've made it hard for me, nailing me for everything I do.” He said it “gets me angry and frustrates me” but it certainly doesn’t look that way. Bluntly, he seems to lack any appreciation of how it looks to the outside world when he trains with Salazar and consorts with Jama Aden, the coach who hit the headlines when EPO was found at the Spanish hotel he and his athletes were staying at in June.

British Athletics maintain his entitlement to these relationships, though everyone would feel more comfortable if he could just move on. The knighthood which will follow these Games for him won’t sit as well for many as it will for the other British Olympians who will be so decorated.

When it was put to Farah last Saturday that he had been pictured before a meal at Aden’s house, it would have been comforting to hear him say that he had been to no such place. He simply said that it was not his fault if people asked him for photographs. The uncomfortable question was left drifting on the breeze.

Mo Farah has so far won three Olympic golds

Steve Magness, the University of Texas coach who contributed to the BBC's Panorama documentary on Alberto Salazar and worked with Salazar and Farah, tweeted this week that Aden has told him that his friendship and training relationship with Farah goes back at least five years. British Athletics says Aden only holds the stopwatch for Farah.

Hassan Mead of the US collides with Farah during the 5,000m semi-final

Gold will not erase the questions about his professional relationships. It will only create the opportunities to ask more. But it will also elevate Farah to a new level of accomplishment. For Saturday night at least, it will be him, the Ethiopians, the track and nothing else - a race you will not take your eyes off.

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