Mo Farah wins the 5,000m final: Team GB’s golden boy completes the historic double double
Mo Farah has joined the immortals. With the type of exquisitely-judged run that is now his stock in trade, he became only the second athlete ever, after Finland’s Lasse Viren, to secure a ‘double-double’ of Olympic distance titles over 5,000 and 10,000 metres. In what he claimed was his last ever outing on this stage, Farah was composure personified, fending off all pretenders to his 5,000m crown with astonishing poise.
There could have been no more rousing way for Britain to win a 27th gold of these gilded Games, or to have equalled the London 2012 haul with a 65th medal.
Barely 20 minutes later, the women’s 4×400 metres relay quartet snaffled the bronze that sealed a record 66th. The total is guaranteed to rise at least to 67 today, with Joe Joyce guaranteed no worse than a silver after reaching the final of the super-heavyweight boxing.
And this is with 17 fourth-place finishes into the equation. Countries that host an Olympics can normally expect a sharp drop-off in their medal count at the next Games, but this British team, who gathered 29 golds in London, have bucked the trend to spectacular effect.
There is no more potent emblem of such sustained success than Farah. This was his ninth successive title at major championships, stretching back to his 5,000m victory in Daegu in 2011.
To place such a streak into context, no other man, not even Viren, has ever managed more than five in a row. That Farah was intent on seizing the moment was evident even in his warm-up, which he spent limbering up like a prizefighter.
From there, his usual arc of dominance unfolded: some cagey running at the back of the field, followed by the surge to the front and then the signature last-lap pounce. And, of course, as he let himself go amid the jubilation that ensued, the ‘Mo-bot’, coupled with a few selfies.
Farah, now a four-time Olympic champion after repeating his London heroics, looked overwhelmed. “I cannot believe it,” he said. “I always wished that I could win just one medal.
It has been a long journey, but if you dream and have the ambition and want to work hard, then you can achieve. It’s hard, and I don’t always get to see my kids. I will never catch up on that time I’ve missed. This is for them.”
It was a tall order that Farah should be asked to follow Usain Bolt, the night after the greatest sprinter in history had taken his bow. But he engineered an equally stirring Olympic farewell with a race that closely mirrored his triumphant 5,000m in London four years ago in its execution.
On that Saturday night in Stratford, the noise inside the stadium had surpassed that of a 747 aeroplane. The din generated by the Brazilian fans in Rio might not have approached this, but the acclaim that greeted him as he hared down the back straight was unmistakeable.
“This is the most satisfying,” he said. “It wasn’t a fluke in London, because I’ve done it again here. I want to go home now and take the medals home to my children. I cannot wait for that.”
Farah’s tiny, fragile physique belies freakish powers of endurance, acquired through a remorseless regime of pounding the paths and fields around Font-Romeu, his training base in southwest France.
It is a remote Pyrenean village, eerily quiet in those early summer months after the snow has melted, but it allows Farah the space and serenity he needs to thrive on the grandest stage. How beautifully it has all worked out. Farah emphasised once more that he was made for moments such as this.
Now he has vaulted beyond even such greats as Emil Zatopek and Kenenisa Bekele with this second double.
The sole figure who stands comparison is Viren, the ‘Flying Finn’, who doubled up at the 1972 Games in Munich and again in Montreal four years later.
If Viren was the finest exponent of his era, then Farah is indisputably the outstanding figure of this one.
For 12 months Farah has been scrupulously, meticulously preparing for this coronation. He explained to Sebastian Coe earlier this year, during a break from his all-consuming workload, how nothing else mattered in his career beyond Rio.
To that end he has followed his most onerous programme yet, encompassing everything from 25-mile runs to savage sequences of tapered sprints. It is, more often than not, a painfully lonely business. His tale is one of solitary graft that would long since have broken lesser athletes.
There had been a sense, however misleading, that Farah’s 5,000m rivals had been closing in on him. Two of the Ethiopians, Muktar Edris and Dejen Gebremeskel, had both broken the 13-minute mark this year, while a third, 22-year-old Hagos Gebrihwet, had highlighted his pedigree with a bronze medal at last summer’s worlds in Beijing. But still Farah swatted away all such challenges with disdain. No matter how cute his pursuers’ tactics in the early part of a race, he possesses, at 33, the kind of sprint finish that leaves them all in his contrails.
It was quite an evening, too, for Farah’s coach, Alberto Salazar. While Farah assumed his place among the distance immortals, Matthew Centrowitz of the US, another Salazar protégé at the Oregon Project in Portland, delivered a remarkable display to win the 1,500m, holding off a late surge by Algeria’s Taoufik Makhloufi, the reigning Olympic champion.
Farah, for all his feats, will never be entirely free from controversy.
Throughout these Olympics he has been stalked by questions about his relationship with Somali coach Jama Aden, who was arrested in June after the blood-boosting drug erythropoietin was reportedly discovered in his hotel room near Barcelona.
And yet his performances here have only strengthened. Allied to his apparent physical indestructibility, clearly, is formidable psychological resilience.
Looking younger than fresher than ever – a consequence, in part, of shaving off his beard – Farah appeared last night as if he could continue in the sport indefinitely.
But this was, he maintained, his final race at the Olympics before he takes his curtain call at the world championships in London. “All good things come to an end, right?” he said, grinning. The athletics community might never grasp what he has given them until he is gone.
telegraph