Burdened by his discreet last athletic years, conditioned by his multiple injuries, Sir Mo Farah (40), knight of the Order of the British Empire, abandoned athletics on Sunday, and he did so behind the scenes: few newspapers took note of the goodbye.
Reflection can lead to misunderstanding.
Although the scene of his farewell had a local flavor (Farah said goodbye in the classic Great North Run, the Newcastle half marathon in which he finished fourth), in reality it is an anecdotal episode in a superlative race.
Experts consider Farah the greatest British distance runner of all time. According to some, he is the best universal distance runner. It is the award for his Olympic double.
Twice he won 5,000 and 10,000 in some Games. He did it in London 2012 and in Rio 2016, a feat that only another of the greats had achieved: Lasse Virén. Nobody else did it, nobody in history. Neither Nurmi, nor Zatopek, nor Gebrselassie, nor Bekele, nor Cheptegei, king of the present.
Those milestones made him transcend, even more so when his intrahistory became known.
In 2022, Mo Farah had decided to go on stage to deny the story that had always surrounded him. Mo Farah had not arrived in the UK as a child refugee from the Somali war, but had been tricked by a woman who had put him on a plane, promising attention and an immediate reunion with Somali relatives in London.
Farah was eight or nine years old.
Exactly, I didn't know.
What he experienced then was a story of slavery. She had to clean the house and take care of the rest of the children. It took them three years to educate him. When he started school, he barely spoke English. Alan Watkinson, his tutor at London's Feltham Community College, said the boy was alienated from British culture. “The only way to integrate him was through athletics.”
