by Mo Farah
‘You owe me an Arsenal kit,’ I said.
That race was the start of a big rivalry between Malcolm and me. He was a phenomenal runner, and a great rival. Sometimes I’d beat him; sometimes he’d beat me. Despite this, we were really good mates and often competed against each other in the English Schools Championships. We’d go on to represent England together. Malcolm’s dad used to come along to the races. He’d drive Malcolm around in this comedy van. Whenever we raced, I’d take the mick out of Malcolm’s Geordie accent. He gave as good as he got, did Malcolm, calling us southern softies for wearing gloves in the winter and so on.
In 1997, the year I won the cross country at Newark, I also competed at Chepstow for England and won the Home Countries International Cross Country title. Wearing that England kit was a special moment for me. I was filled with pride. I was starting to assert my ability on bigger stages now. Things were starting to happen for me. The following summer Alan drove me up to Sheffield for the English Schools Track & Field Championships held at the Don Valley Stadium – the championships I’d been forced to miss the previous year because of injury. I was scheduled to run in the 1500 metres. Alan felt that I lacked a bit of speed, and before the race he told me I’d do well to get a medal.
‘If the pace is silly, don’t go with it,’ he said. ‘It’ll be too quick. You know how to run a good 1500 race, Mo. Don’t worry about what anyone else is doing out there. Run your own race.’
I don’t know why, but I had this feeling that I could hold my own out there against the other kids. As a runner, you have to believe in yourself. Sure, there’s a fine line between self-belief and arrogance, but no one who didn’t believe in themself ever won a gold medal in athletics. You see it time and again on the circuit: someone posting crazy fast times in training, but when it comes to a big competition, for whatever reason, they fail to make the podium. I had this absolute belief in what I was capable of. The way I saw it, I already had the English Schools Cross Country title and the Home Countries title in the bag. I had nothing to lose at the Track & Field Championships. I went out there ready to give it my best shot.
Malcolm was competing in the same race. As ever, we were both desperate to finish above the other. At the start, Malcolm took off like a bullet. BOOM! In next to no time he’d established a huge lead over me – 50 metres, easily. Maybe more. He was going for it, big time. With 500 metres to go, Malcolm was pushing hard and still out in front. In the corner of my eye I saw Alan screaming at me from the sidelines, yelling for me to pick up the pace. All right, then. I started winding up. With just over a hundred metres left, I pulled level with Malcolm. Now we both went for the sprint finish. It was a question of who had more strength left in their legs, who could kick on harder. Who could dig deeper. We were both going flat out, giving it absolutely everything. I could feel the muscles in my legs burning.
Suddenly, Malcolm was out of sight. I risked a quick glance over my shoulder and saw him trailing behind me. I had that little bit more in the tank than he did on the home straight. I made it across the line for a time of 4.06.41. Malcolm had run me very, very close, but I felt sheer joy at winning a third title in a row. That year, I was the only athlete from Middlesex to win a gold medal at the English Schools Track & Field Championships.
I first met Tania in 1997 when she was eleven and I was fourteen. New kids from school who had athletic talent were always coming along to Feltham Arena, and Tania was one of the faces I started seeing regularly both in school and at the club. I already knew her well by the time she started running for Hounslow, since we’d hung out at school and we both knew lots of the same people. By this time I was training with the distance runners; Tania was more into the sprint and hurdles events. We’d get chatting by the side of the tracks between events. She was smart, funny, warm. We just clicked from the beginning and soon became really good friends, hanging out socially. Tania lived just round the corner from my house. Occasionally I’d go round to her place for a cup of tea with her mum, Nadia, her dad, Bob, and her older brother, Colin Nell. Nadia had an interesting background. She’d been born in Saudi Arabia, was half-Yemeni and half-Palestinian and had mixed Arab heritage. Nadia spoke Arabic; she could even recognize one or two Somali words since the languages were somewhat close. Sometimes Tania would plait my hair, back in the days when I actually had some. On one occasion she happened to be riding her bicycle up and down the street, recognized my front door and randomly decided to pop in and say hello. I answered the door. We didn’t talk for long. Five or ten minutes tops. As soon as I closed the door, Aunt Kinsi was on my case.
‘Why is that girl knocking for you?’ she demanded.
‘We’re just good friends,’ I said to my highly sceptical auntie. ‘It’s the truth. She goes to the same running club as me, that’s all.’
I’m not sure my aunt believed me. But back then, Tania and me were just good friends. It took a while for things to develop between us.
I thought about Hassan all the time. Although he lived thousands of miles away, I felt very strongly that he was a part of me, and I was a part of him. It was a powerful thing, that connection. Sometimes I would find myself wishing that we all lived in one house, one big happy family, but life isn’t always like that. And for me, there was no point dwelling on it. The situation was what it was. I knew that Hassan would always be there for me, and I’d always be there for him, and that one day soon we’d see each other again. That was good enough for me. It had to be.
Mum had gone back to Somalia by this point and located Hassan. They were living near Hargeisa and I would talk to them from time to time. Mum would go to the shop in a neighbouring village to wait for my call. On one occasion I told her I’d ring a few days later, but something came up and I wasn’t able to contact her. I later found out that Mum had arrived at the shop early that morning and stayed there all day waiting for my call. She’s like that, my mum. If someone tells her something, she expects it to happen. If someone tells her they’re going to meet her at such-and-such a place at such-and-such a time and they don’t show for three days, she’ll still be waiting for them three days later. She doesn’t have time for people who don’t stick to their word. Once she decides on something, that’s it. There’s no going back. I was only able to speak to Mum by phone over the next several years until I was finally reunited with my family in 2003. I’d tell her to bring Hassan so I could talk to him. But it was hard.
I threw all my energy into training, going extra hard in the runs. In sessions at the club I’d be on the case with Alex, asking him for news on the next race, what events I’d be competing in, what club we were up against.
‘I want you to do 3000 metres in the next young athletes’ league meeting,’ Alex would tell me. ‘Judging by the standards that we’ve seen, you should win it quite easily.’
My next question was, ‘What’s the record?’
Before long I was way ahead of the other kids in Alex’s group, beating them far too easily. I was ready for the next step. I can’t recall exactly when it happened, but after one session I asked Alex if, whilst maintaining our regular Thursday sessions together, I could start training on Tuesdays with the older age group of runners coached by Conrad Milton.
‘Sure,’ Alex said. ‘Why not?’
Conrad had run for Great Britain as a junior. After his running career was ended early by knee troubles, he turned to coaching. He was smartly dressed, well-spoken – a thinker. Conrad coached Hayley Yelling, the British runner who was a three-time champion at 5000 and 10,000 metres in the Nationals. In addition to Hayley, he also coached a steeplechase athlete called Benedict Whitby. Benedict was a few years older than me, although I can’t talk about him too much – these days he’s a policeman with City of London! Benedict was that extra level above me at the time. He had a kit contract with Nike and everything.
We used to go on fartlek runs together, Benedict and me. We’d meet up with ten or twelve other guys from the club and do a route through Feltham, the twe
lve of us running at a fast pace along the slip road leading to Heathrow Airport’s Terminal Four. We’d be pushing hard, with the constant roar of planes overhead. Then, at the big roundabout in front of the terminal building, we’d hook a left and head back towards Feltham.
But for me, the runner I looked up to the most was Sam Haughian.
Sam was three years older than me. He was a class apart, pure and simple. He had a reputation as one of the brightest prospects in British endurance running at the time. In 1997 Sam had won the Inter Counties Championship. The following year he added the English Schools Cross Country senior title.
One time Sam had competed in an Italian 5 kilometre race packed with Kenyans – the Rome Golden Gala, I think it was. He finished in 13:25.56, his previous best being 13:38.52, which was a huge improvement in one fell swoop. With two laps to go, Sam was out of it. His legs were gone. In a tough race like that he could easily have drifted out of it. However he regrouped and with a 2:04 last 800m was able to improve his PB by 13 seconds. That was Sam. He was a really tough runner. He had records coming out of his ears, including the biggest winning margin in English Schools, and he ran in five World Cross Countries. He got salmonella poisoning the day before the 1998 World Cross Country Championships in Morocco. The doctors told him not to run, but Sam went against their wishes. He was in fourteenth position going into the last 400 metres, the highest-placed European in the field, when he blacked out. The smallest winning margin Sam had in any big domestic race was usually over a minute.
Without a doubt, Sam was one of the best cross country runners in Britain.
While I was with the juniors, I’d watch Conrad training Hayley, Benedict and Sam at the club. I took a special interest in them because all three were running for Great Britain. They were talented athletes who were clearly going places. I’d look at them and think, ‘That’s where I want to be.’ Sometimes I would race against these guys in the league. Sam always beat me. Benedict too, although I did beat him once as a junior.
Training with the guys in Conrad’s group gave me an instant lift. All of a sudden, instead of breezing through races, I was having to chase older, more developed runners like Benedict and Sam, having to push very hard to keep up with them. I really had to up my game. Conrad would point out aspects of my running that I needed to work on, such as my bad habit of reaching (leaning forward) when I drew near the finish line. A lot of athletes do this. You see it on TV all the time, especially in the sprint events. But if you lean too early, you change your running gait and start losing pace.
If there was one runner at the club that I wanted to be like, it was Sam Haughian. I already knew his younger brother, Tim. He was a couple of years younger than me but we immediately hit it off and became good mates. I guess athletics must run in the Haughian family genes because Tim was also an outstanding running prospect. Tim and Sam were similar runners. They even shared the same running style. I had a few things in common with Sam too. Neither of us was exactly star students. We both liked to push ourselves on the track. Now we were training together, I made rapid progress, learning a lot not just from Sam, but from Benedict and Hayley too. I was getting faster, stronger, leaner. I wanted to do more. After several months of splitting the sessions, I told Alex, ‘I want to move over to Conrad’s group completely.’
There were no hard feelings on Alex’s part. He was more than happy for me to make the move. It’s the job of junior coaches to train their athletes until they’re ready for the next step, and it was obvious to both of us that I was too good for my age group, and I stood to gain a lot more by training with the older guys being coached by Conrad.
One day after training Benedict mentioned that he knew the sports marketing manager at Nike, a guy called Dave Scott. Benedict offered to put in a good word with Dave Scott on my behalf, see if he could sort out a deal for me. ‘Great,’ I thought. ‘Free kit!’ Two weeks later I arrived at the arena and Benedict presented me with this big bag of training kit from Nike: T-shirts, shorts, tracksuits, socks. Tucked away in the bag was a signed letter from Dave Scott, congratulating me on my success so far and wishing me all the best for the future. At the end of training I lugged the bag onto the bus. A few stops down the line, the bus pulled over next to a police car.
I wondered what was going on. Then I saw a police officer thumping his fist on the automatic doors and ordering the driver to open them. As the officer climbed aboard the bus he turned to me and nodded at the bag.
‘Have you got a receipt for all that?’ he asked.
I felt every pair of eyes on the bus swing towards me. The skinny black kid with the giant bag of Nike kit. The police officer explained that they’d received a call from someone reporting a theft. Someone must have seen me lugging this enormous bag of Nike kit on the bus, figured I was handling stolen goods and dialled for the police.
I looked up at the police officer and shook my head. Of course I had no receipt. I told him that I was a distance runner for Hounslow Athletics Club, that the clothes were a special gift from Nike. This was all true, but Hounslow had a reputation. Kids used to nick stuff from the shops all the time. It was easier to believe I’d nicked this stuff than been given it by Nike. For a brief while I feared I might get dragged off the bus and hauled down to the local police station. Then I remembered the signed letter from Dave Scott. I’d stashed it somewhere in the bottom of the bag. In a flash I dug out the letter and showed it to the police officer. He read it through once. Then a second time. At last he handed the letter back to me. I was off the hook. Close call.
All my hard work in training paid off in early 1998 when, on the back of winning the English Schools Cross Country in Newark, I got a letter in the post informing me that I’d been selected to compete for England Schools in the International School Sports Federation (ISF) World Schools Championship Cross Country in Latvia in early May. I was only fourteen years old when I was informed that I’d been selected, and it was an early recognition of my talent. I hurried to school the next day, over the moon with the prospect of travelling abroad to compete. I found Alan in his office and breathlessly showed him the letter. As he read it, straight away I could tell that something was wrong.
‘This is all well and good,’ he said. ‘But what travel documents have you got?’
‘Travel documents?’ I repeated.
Since moving to England, I had never needed to travel abroad. I had the right to remain in the UK, to work and study here. But I didn’t have a passport or any other travel documents authorizing me to travel. The truth was that unless I could get my paperwork sorted and fast, I wouldn’t be going anywhere. Alan agreed to help me fix it.
Early the next morning, before school, we drove up to the Home Office public enquiry building in Croydon. Alan thought if we made my case in person, we’d stand a better chance of getting my travel documents in time for the trip. Latvia was only three weeks away. I had just turned fifteen.
The response of the staff at the Home Office was pretty short and sharp. They basically told Alan, ‘There’s no way you’re going to get this young man’s application processed in three weeks.’ I thought that was the end of it. I wouldn’t be going to Latvia after all. I was disappointed, although I try not to let things like this get to me too much. ‘There’ll be other opportunities to race abroad,’ I told myself. ‘Don’t worry.’ People who know me well often say that I don’t show much reaction to things. For sure, I don’t celebrate too wildly and I don’t beat myself up too badly when I lose. There’s a day or two of pain or joy after a race, and then it’s back to work. Before we left, Alan told the staff at the Home Office that he at least wanted to begin the process so that I wouldn’t have to miss out on events like Latvia in the future.
‘How long will this take to process?’ Alan asked them.
‘Don’t know,’ came the reply. ‘Could be a couple of months. Could be much longer.’
I’d picked a bad time to apply. They explained to us that the Home Office systems were being
computerized and the staff were having to work their way through a huge backlog of applications. Any new applications, they said, were going to take a lot longer to process than normal. We filled out the paperwork anyway so that the trip wasn’t a complete waste. Then we jumped into the car and headed back to Hounslow in time for the start of school. I wouldn’t be going to Latvia. I tried to put the disappointment of missing out on the World Schools Cross Country Championships behind me and concentrate on my running.
Then, in mid-January of 1999 I got another letter in the post.
I opened it up. Read it. Went piling into Alan’s office as soon as I got to school.
‘I’m going to Florida!’ I shouted.
Alan gave me a funny look. ‘Pardon?’
Bubbling with excitement, I showed him the letter I’d received in the post. ‘It says right here, look!’ I replied, excitedly tapping a finger against the letter. My English had steadily improved, partly thanks to the time I had spent around the athletics club, talking to people there, picking things up through conversation. ‘I’ve been picked for the British Olympic Futures camp in Florida!’
The letter said that I’d been identified as an athlete of great potential. Thanks to National Lottery funding, I (and a group of other young British athletes) had been awarded a place on a two-week, all-expenses-paid training camp at Disney’s Wide World of Sports Complex in Florida. The date of departure was set for 22 March 1999, the day before I turned sixteen. This was an incredible birthday present. But before I got too carried away, Alan raised a hand.