2023-09-11 07:34:32
One of the greatest figures in the history of British athletics, Sir Mohamed Farah, concluded his sporting career this Sunday at 40 years of age. The long-distance runner competed for the last time as a professional athlete in the Great North Run, a half marathon that brought together 60,000 participants in Newcastle.
Farah crossed the finish line in fourth position with a time of 1:03:28 to the applause and greetings of the public who attended the farewell. Ethiopian Tamirat Tola won the race in 59:58.
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HE’S ARRIVED! ????
Let’s do this, #OneMoTime! ???? pic.twitter.com/kAv0WM6nei
— Great Run (@Great_Run) September 10, 2023
More than 26 years of career
Mo Farah came to prominence in the late 1990s, competing in long-distance races. cross and track. In 2001, at 18 years old, he was European junior champion. At the age of 23 he was absolute European runner-up in the 5,000m and a year later he won the British Championships over the same distance.
Starting in 2010, he became one of the best distance runners in the world. He won 2 golds at the European Championships in Barcelona 2010gold and silver at the 2011 Daegu World Cup, and two consecutive world golds in Moscow 2013 and Beijing 2015.
The peak of his career came in the London 2012 Olympic Gameswhen he obtained 2 gold medals in 5,000m and 10,000m, a double that he repeated in the Rio 2016 Games.
After winning everything on the track he moved to the Pheidipides distance and won the Chicago Marathonone of the most important in the world, with a time of 2:05:11, his personal best and British record.
In total they were 4 Olympic gold medals and 6 world championships, in addition to multiple medals and podiums in national and continental championships. Perhaps the only pending score for him was the London Marathon, his home, where he had to settle for a third place obtained in the 2018 edition.
For many, Mo Farah is the greatest British athlete of all time. He owns the British records for 1,500m (3:28.81), 3,000m (7:32.62), 5,000m (12:53.11), 10,000m (26:46.57), half marathon (59:32) and marathon (2:05:11) ).
Relationship with Alberto Salazar
Mo Farah’s life has not been without controversy. Around 2011, the long-distance runner decided to move to the United States to train under the orders of Alberto Salazar in it Nike Oregon Project, a program to train the best long distance runners in the world. The training paid off as it led Farah to win the Olympic double and become the best long-distance track athlete in the world.
However, in 2015 the BBC published a documentary in which it exposed the anti-doping rule violations committed by Salazar. These accusations led to an investigation by the US Anti-Doping Agency that ended with the coach’s suspension for a period of 4 years. Later, other athletes who had been under Salazar’s orders accused him of sexual abuse and the coach was finally banned for life.
This situation affected Mo Farah’s image and overshadowed his sporting achievements. The athlete himself admitted to receiving injections of L-carnitine before the 2014 London Marathon, a supplement that is legal in certain quantities. However, No evidence was found that Farah violated anti-doping rules.
The real Mo Farah
In 2022, Mo Farah surprised the world by revealing the terrible and unknown story of his childhood. His country of origin, Somalia, was already known, which he had to leave at the age of 4 due to the civil war. What was not known is that He arrived in Europe under a false name.
“The truth is that I was born as Hussein Abdi Kahin,” the athlete confesses in the documentary The real Mo Farah. “I arrived in London escaping the war, with a stranger and with a false identity,” he says.
After his father was killed in the Somali civil war, young Hussein was separated from his mother and brother and sent to Djibouti. At the age of 9, he traveled to the United Kingdom under a false name and went to live with a family that enslaved him., in his own words. “I ended up with a family that behaved really badly and treated me like I was a slave,” she says in the film produced by the BBC.
His life took a turn thanks to sport. At school he began to show a special talent for football and athletics, which caught the attention of one of his teachers.
“What really saved him was that he might run,” says Alan Watkinson, his physical education teacher. He was the one who took the case to social services and helped Farah find a foster family.
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