by Mo Farah
Two weeks after the cancer returned, Adnan died. At the time of his passing, he had £500 in a savings account and Adnan had told his dad that he wanted the money to go towards providing water for children in Africa. Our Foundation had zero donations, having literally only just been set up – we were still finding our feet. Adnan’s dad found out about the Foundation and provided us with our very first donation – £500 donated from Adnan. It was a very moving gesture. With that money we were able to build our first project: a well that provided water to more than 500 people in a remote Somali village. The cost of the project came to a shade over £500. We named the well after Adnan.
As the end of 2011 approached, I began to prepare for the following season. I knew that if I could steer clear of injury, I was capable of reproducing the form I’d enjoyed that year and hitting the same heights. I had already gone on an unbelievable journey: from enrolling at Feltham and barely speaking a word of English, to life at St Mary’s and living with the Kenyans in Teddington, learning from each of my coaches and travelling the world. I’d pushed myself to the limit in training camps from Australia to Colorado, from Kenya to Ethiopia and France. I’d made tremendous sacrifices over the years and put in a lot of hard work. In that one moment in Daegu, when I had crossed the line in first place, everything had come together and it had all paid off. At last I could say, ‘I’m a world champion now.’ And saying that would never get old.
The next year, my journey would take an even more amazing twist, at the 2012 Olympic Games in London.
14
THIS IS IT
ON 6 July 2005 I was behind the wheel of my car, driving up to a race scheduled to take place in Manchester that weekend, listening to the radio and chilling to some tunes. Then the news came on: ‘The International Olympic Committee has announced that the 2012 Olympic Games will be held in London.’ I was like, ‘Amazing! We’ve got the Olympics!’ People were celebrating wildly in Trafalgar Square. Tony Blair was calling it a great day for the whole country. But it wasn’t like I was thinking, ‘I’ll be competing then.’ As an athlete, you only look as far ahead as your next race or your next training session. Of course it was my ambition to compete for my country in the Olympics, but it’s dangerous to look into the future, so I didn’t really give it much thought at the time. It was seven years off – way too far ahead to even think about.
At the end of 2011 I headed out to my usual training camp in Iten. I had a different feeling as I began training there: this year, the Olympics were happening. In seven months’ time I’d be competing in front of my home crowd in the biggest sporting event in the world. The reality of it began to sink in. And I had an even greater motivation to succeed when I discovered that Tania was pregnant.
I learned about the pregnancy a few days before I was due to fly from Iten to Glasgow, towards the end of January. Owing to the eleven-hour time difference between Kenya and the US West Coast, we don’t get many chances to talk while I’m in the camp. As soon as Tania wakes up in the morning she’ll call me – just before I’m about to hit the sack. Then as soon as I wake up I’ll call Tania, which is just before she goes to bed too. First thing in the morning, last thing at night. We were chatting away on Skype one night (my time) when Tania told me the good news. I was over the moon. Having said that, those first few months were hard for both of us. I was having to train in Kenya, Tania was suffering from morning sickness to the point where she could barely get out of bed and Rhianna was getting home from school, fixing herself some food and almost looking after herself. There was no other family in Portland to help out. I wanted to be there for Tania, but all my effort had to be poured into getting ready for the Olympics. The Games only come around every four years. This might be my last shot at Olympic gold. I had to throw everything into my training.
At first, we didn’t know we were having twins. Quite early on in the pregnancy there had been some complications and Tania worried that she might be miscarrying, so she went to the doctors and had a special early scan, which showed up not one healthy embryo, but two. Tania brought a copy of the scan with her when she and Rhianna came to stay with me for a week in Albuquerque at the end of February. Learning that I was going to be a father to twins filled me with indescribable happiness. As a twin myself, being a father to twins was really special. We broke the news to Rhianna in Albuquerque as well. She was thrilled – now she’d have two little sisters to play with.
By this time Tania was ten weeks pregnant but we still hadn’t told anyone else the news. Tania didn’t emerge from the hotel room the whole time she was in New Mexico – her morning sickness was that severe. Everyone at the camp was growing concerned. People asked me if Tania was okay. I tried to play it down. The secret broke when Rhianna happened to be playing outside with Paula Radcliffe’s daughter, Isla. Paula and her husband Gary were staying in the room next to ours at the hotel and Rhianna got on well with Isla. While the two girls were playing, Paula asked Rhianna about her mum, how she was feeling.
‘Mum’s okay,’ Rhianna replied innocently. ‘She’s sick. I can’t tell you why, though, because it’s supposed to be a secret. But I can tell you in three weeks!’
It didn’t take much for Paula to piece together the puzzle from there. Of course, when we announced the news, everyone was so happy for us.
On 28 January I competed in my first race after Kenya, running the indoor 1500 metres at the Aviva International Match at the Kelvin Hall International Sports Arena in Glasgow. Going into that race, my biggest rival was Augustine Choge, the Kenyan who had won the Commonwealth Games in 2006 with a 1500 metres PB of 3:29, four seconds faster than my time. It was a tough race and it came down to the last couple of laps, but I held off Choge to win, with the crowd raising the decibels on the last lap to hint at the sort of noise volume and level of support I could expect in London in the summer. For me, winning was good but it was more important to beat a quality performer like Choge, who has a good record at the shorter distances and on paper was better than me at the 1500 metres. I’d had a long stint training at high altitude that winter and beating Choge in that race helped me to gauge my fitness and figure out exactly what sort of shape I was in, where my training needed to be. It was the ideal start to what would be the biggest year of my career.
Seven days later I competed in a mile race in Boston. Although I wasn’t expected to win, as the mile isn’t my specialist event, observers still predicted that I would finish quite high up. Things went wrong for me on the first lap. Someone clipped my heel 150 metres into the race. I took a big tumble, went head over heels and did a roly-poly on the track. Undeterred, I immediately shot to my feet and carried on running. But my fall had cost me dearly. By now the pack had surged ahead and I was almost a second behind the rest of the guys. I put my foot down and managed to claw my way back to the lead pack, staying with them throughout the race, but catching them had taken a lot out of me: I was having to work harder than everyone else on the track. I came home in fourth place. Not good. Still, had I not fallen I’m confident that I would’ve won that race. It was my first defeat of the year.
One defeat quickly followed another. On 18 February I competed in a 2 mile indoor race in Birmingham. Everyone expected me to breeze the 3000 metres. Instead I finished second behind Eliud Kipchoge. At one point it looked as if I might even finish in third. I dug deep and just about scraped home in second. Four of us crossed the finish line within about three-hundredths of a second of each other, so it was a close-run thing. But I had to work very, very hard in that race. Harder than I should have done. At that point it was starting to look like my form wasn’t perhaps where it should have been, or where I’d hoped for it to be after training in Kenya. That being said, typically I’ll ease off training a week before a big race so that I can go into it with fresher legs. That hadn’t been the case in Boston and Birmingham, because my eyes were on the big prize that summer and the plan was to train right the way through the season up until the Olympics, doing races along the way.
There would be no extended rest periods. That still doesn’t excuse the fact that I came second in Birmingham. My defeat led to some people doubting whether I was capable of winning gold at the Olympics. That race showed that I was human after all – that I was beatable. I lost that aura of invincibility, and as Steve Cram has said, that’s extremely important as an athlete, because the longer you’re unbeaten, the more of a psychological edge you have over your opponents on the start line – they’re worrying about how to beat you, rather than concentrating on running their own race.
First Boston, then Birmingham. I was on a losing streak. Worse was to follow at the World Indoor Championships in early March. Psychologically I wasn’t feeling great in the build-up to Istanbul. My legs felt heavy from training and I wasn’t in the best shape. I came second in the 3000 metres heats behind Choge and finished fourth in the final behind Bernard Lagat, Choge and Edwin Soi, another Kenyan who had won gold twice in the 5000 metres and once in the 3000 metres at the IAAF World Athletics Finals in Stuttgart. In the last bend, coming into the home straight, there was a big tussle between me and Soi, some pushing and shoving, and I felt that Soi blocked me from coming around him. After the race I notified the GB team staff and they contested the result on the grounds of foul play. Soi was subsequently disqualified and I was moved up to the bronze medal position. But on my way to the medal ceremony the Kenyan team successfully appealed the decision. Soi was reinstated to third place, pushing me back down to fourth. That was a real punch in the guts. Third wouldn’t have been a great result but it would still have meant a medal, and it was better than finishing fourth. To be told on my way to the ceremony that the other guy had been put back up to third and I wouldn’t be getting a medal after all was disappointing. From having gone a year unbeaten previously, I had now suffered four consecutive defeats: Boston, Birmingham, the heats and the finals in Istanbul. The media had a field day. Some people wrote me off. I got pasted by the media, there was a lot of negative stuff in the press. I don’t think anyone really would have backed me as a gold medal prospect after Istanbul. I flew back to London to join Tania and Rhianna for a couple of weeks, feeling depressed. The biggest year of my career, and things were not exactly looking good.
At the same time, I did feel that a lot of the coverage was unfair. I’m human, the same as everyone else, and I think people tend to forget that. They expect me to win every race and that’s just not how athletics works. In the wake of Istanbul the media suddenly chose to forget about my World Championship gold and my long run of victories in 2011. Now the knives came out. ‘He’s done too much travelling,’ they said. ‘This guy is finished.’ ‘He’s not going to win gold at the Olympics.’ These are the same people who had been writing about how well I’d been doing. In my view, the fact that I lost a couple of races didn’t make me a bad athlete all of a sudden. I underperformed in those races, but we all do it from time to time. In certain races things don’t quite go as you’ve planned, you take a fall or don’t feel 100 per cent. For sure, I was disappointed with myself after Istanbul, but the way the media painted it, I was being written off for London.
In the build-up to the Olympics I took part in a couple of TV shows. In January I filmed a celebrity edition of The Cube, a game show hosted by Phillip Schofield, where you have to complete increasingly tricky challenges while you’re encased inside a 4 × 4 metre Perspex cube. Each time you successfully complete a challenge you move up the money ladder, which brings you closer to the top prize. In order to defeat the Cube you have to complete seven challenges and then you win the £250,000 jackpot. As this was a celebrity edition, I was competing for charity – in my case, the Mo Farah Foundation. At the time I appeared on the show, no one had managed to win the jackpot. The closest anyone had come was £100,000. It’s not easy: you need a lot of mental strength and the ability to hold your nerve in each challenge. To everyone’s surprise, I managed to defeat the Cube with six lives to spare, making me the first (and to this day, only) person to have achieved that feat. The show wasn’t due to air until the summer, but news of my performance quickly leaked. Phillip Schofield tweeted a picture from inside the Cube, having earlier claimed that he’d only set foot inside the Cube when someone had beaten it. It was a great end to a brilliant day. That morning, I’d hung out with my heroes at Arsenal.
Ivan Gazidis had invited me down to the Arsenal training ground at London Colney near St Albans. I’d got to know Ivan and his family quite well by this point and we became personal friends. I’ve had a great relationship with the club going all the way back to Barcelona in 2010. From time to time I’ll get emails or texts from Ivan or his PA, asking how training is going, wishing me luck in a race, that sort of thing. Of course, I jumped at the chance to spend the morning training with some of the club. Thierry Henry was there at the time, on loan from New York Red Bulls. I was so excited at the chance to finally meet Henry, for me one of the greatest players of all time. And the rest of the guys too: Bacary Sagna, Jack Wilshere, Theo Walcott. I took part in all the training drills with the rest of the guys. The only thing I had to sit out was the practice game – my legs being as valuable as they are, I didn’t want to risk getting on the wrong end of a meaty challenge. Combined with beating the Cube and winning a quarter of a million pounds for my Foundation, it was a dream day for me.
I also guest-starred with Clare Balding and David Walliams on A League of Their Own on Sky. Midway through the show the host, James Corden, turned to the audience and said, ‘I was thinking … wouldn’t it be amazing if we could come up with something that Mo could do when he wins at the Olympics?’ I smiled and mumbled something like, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’ But inside I was thinking, ‘I’m not too sure about this.’ I was slightly worried that if they chose a celebration for me that was a bit weird, and I had to do it in front of that huge crowd at the Olympics, people would be ribbing me about it for the rest of my life.
‘What do you think, Mo?’ James asked me. ‘If we come up with something …’
‘I’ll definitely do it!’ I replied. The crowd started cheering as all the other panellists racked their brains to think up a celebration. That’s when Clare Balding said, ‘I think he should do the “M” from YMCA.’ She demonstrated by putting her hands above her head to form an ‘M’. James had me trying it out. Then he started doing it too. David Walliams joked that my hairy armpits might put people off when I did the ‘M’.
‘I can draw a smiley face on them,’ I joked back.
‘I’ve just named it,’ James piped up. ‘It’s the Mobot!’
This was all well and good, but the most important thing for me was to get back to winning ways on the track. On 18 May I ran a low-key college race called the Oxy High Performance Meet. It’s held the third week of May each year at Occidental College in the historic Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The Oxy HP Meet is a sort of mini-race. That said, there are still some very good athletes competing there. It marked my first race of the outdoor season and I went into it badly needing to bury the demons of Birmingham and Istanbul. Those defeats had been in my system for two months and this was my first opportunity to make up for them. The Olympics were very close now – just seventy days away. It was crunch time.
I was scheduled to run the 1500 metres in order to work on my speed. I came through that race and won in a good time of 3:34.66. Considering that I was up against some experienced runners, to not only win but clock a fast time showed that my speed was there. Fifty minutes later, to the surprise of many including my wife, I reappeared on the track to take my place on the start line for the 5000 metres race. Although this hadn’t been part of the original plan, Alberto had asked me and Galen to act as pacemakers for Dathan Ritzenhein in order to help him qualify for the Olympic standard for the US Track & Field team. The idea was, me and Galen would help Dathan go through, then we’d both drop out at the halfway mark. But then a funny thing happened. There was a guy in the pack using me as a pacemaker, sitting on my shoulder throughout
the first half of the race. As we approached halfway, Galen dropped out. I still felt good, despite having had less than an hour to recover from the 1500 metres, and having done all the hard work for this guy on my shoulder and leading the race. I didn’t want to drop out and let him go on to take the glory. That didn’t seem fair to me. So I decided to continue – and held my position to go on and win the race. This was a great result for me, and one that had my critics frantically revising their predictions for 2012. I had done two races back-to-back within an hour of each other and won them both. That’s unheard of. I’d turned the corner. I was back to winning – just in time for the Olympics.
On 27 May I returned to London and ran the Bupa 10 kilometre road race, retaining my title. I pulled the Mobot for the very first time as I crossed the line. Five days later I was back on the West Coast, in Eugene, to compete in the Pre Classic – the scene of my breakthrough in 2011. I competed in the 5000 metres instead of the 10,000 metres this time. I won that race too, in a strong field including Isiah Koech, Galen, Kenenisa Bekele, Thomas Longosiwa and Yenew Alamirew. Having endured a miserable run at the start of the year, I was now on a roll.
There were just a few races left before the Olympics. On 27 June, exactly one month before it all kicked off in Stratford, I travelled to Helsinki and competed in the European Championships. I was already reigning European Champion from Barcelona and I wanted to defend my title. It was the chance to win another gold medal and I seized it with both hands, winning by a healthy margin, a full two seconds ahead of Arne Gabius, a German athlete.
In the final few weeks before the Olympics, I retreated to the camp in Font-Romeu to begin my final preparations for London. The plan was to fly back to London on 2 August, two days before my first event, the 10,000 metres final. Tania and Rhianna joined me in Font-Romeu for ten days. That was good. They helped take my mind off training. There were a lot of athletes hanging around the camp who were, like me, waiting to fly out to the Olympics. Being able to spend time with my family allowed me to switch off from all that and take my mind off the Games. When they left, I wouldn’t see them again until I went to the Olympic village – almost a month later.