The Olympic champion on why he never wants to do another Mobot, how he avoided prison and the army, and why the Daily Mail almost cost him his gold medals

By Tim Jonze

It’s neck and neck at the halfway point. I get the better start, but Mo Farah – a man renowned for his strong finish – remains tight on my shoulder. I begin to wonder whether challenging the double Olympic and World champion to a race is going to end in embarrassment. But then, with less than 50 metres to go, something astonishing happens. Farah loses his stride at the exact point where I find another gear. I storm through the finish line a good three seconds ahead.

“No way, you beat me!” a dejected-looking Farah groans, before adding: “You’ve practised this before, I can tell.” He closes down the Finger Games 100m Sprint app and slides my iPhone across the table. “You went before the gun anyway.”

It is no surprise to discover that Mo Farah is a man who doesn’t enjoy coming second. His autobiography, Twin Ambitions, documents a life dominated by winning races: from setting new European records to that famous Olympic double gold haul during London 2012. But the most vivid are the races that Farah didn’t win. Races such as the 10,000m World Championships in Daegu, when the 22-year-old Ethiopian Ibrahim Jeilan stormed past him on the final straight. Or the European Championships in 2006, when he missed out on gold by less than a 10th of a second. Without these defeats, and the learning curves they prompted, Farah’s later triumphs would surely never have happened.

His life, in a strange way, began in second place – he emerged from the womb moments after his twin brother Hasan. Could this be what triggered his determined, competitive mindset? “I hadn’t thought of that before. Second place to the Earth. Maybe that’s where bits of me come from, saying I don’t want to lose no matter what.”

We meet on the 19th floor of a Canary Wharf skyscraper – perhaps the only place in London secluded enough for Farah to have a chat without some fan or other requesting a Mobot selfie – where he is hard at work signing a pile of his autobiographies. Well, he is supposed to be signing them – actually, he is building a tower out of the copies, a task he seems so engrossed in that he barely acknowledges my arrival, let alone the requests from PRs and agents that he really should start the interview now. This is a man who knows how to shut out the world and focus.

Before meeting Farah, I worried he would be media-trained and diplomatic to the point of bland. After all, aside from a Christmas day scrap with a member of the public who was blocking his running path, his autobiography has barely a bad word to say about anyone. No score-settling, no pot-shots at his critics … even a dispute with Australian distance runner Craig Mottram is concluded with Mo deciding it was probably all his fault.

Today, happily, such diplomacy gets left on the starting blocks. The non-authorised version of the Mottram spat is rather less restrained (“He thought the whole world should just bend behind him!”) and he freely admits there are times when he doesn’t want to perform another Mobot ever again. “You’ll be in the middle of dinner and someone will ask for a picture. It’s like: ‘At least let me eat my food.'” Before I can ask him about it, he remembers someone else that gets on his nerves. “Busta Rhymes!” he spits. “He annoys me!”

Busta Rhymes?

“Yeah, I met him as we were getting on a flight. I asked for his autograph and he started laughing with his mates. They were taking the piss and saying [adopts English accent]: “Could I have your autograph? Could I have your autograph?” and I was like …” he trails off looking genuinely hurt. “I just couldn’t believe that.”

Also high on the Annoys Mo Farah list is the Daily Mail. “They reallyannoy me!” he blurts out, before checking himself: “You don’t work for them do you? Ah, good. They’re liars. They write so much stuff that’s not true. And it gets personal in their disrespect. Writing things about your family.”

One such story was the claim that he was cashing in on his success at the behest of his, as the paper put it, “very ambitious wife”. Another – before the Olympics – took aim at the “plastic Brits” competing for Great Britain . “It’s just a saying that makes no sense,” he says. “This is where I grew up and I’m proud to represent my country and I feel more British than anyone else.”

Worst of all was the time the Mail sent journalists to Somalia to track down his twin brother and convince him to sell them his story. “They tried to stitch him up!” claims Farah. “He doesn’t speak English, and they were trying to get him to sign this contract.” Farah says the incident caused him so much stress that it interfered with his preparations for the 5,000 metre final at the 2012 Olympics.

Rewatching Farah’s first Olympic triumph, in the 10,000 metres, reignites all the emotions of Super Saturday: first the tension, then the elation, then the fear that Farah – having collapsed in a heap in the ground – is about to roll his head into the spit of his teammate Galen Rupp. “Yeah, I know! I was THAT close!” grins Farah, his eyes widening. “Galen just went ‘Phhhtttt’ on the running track and I rolled towards it. What would I have been called if I’d done that? Everyone would call me Shithead! No! Spithead! Haha!”

Farah claims that in the buildup to the race, he had agreed with his wife, Tania, that, should she go into labour with their twin girls, she would hide the news from him so he could focus on the medals. Which means that, when he was lining up on the track, he could have been a father and not known it. Surely that must have messed with his head? “No. I blocked it out – 75,000 people blocked it out for me.” The twins finally arrived later that same month, an event Farah attended and describes in the book with the winning phrase: “Totally gross.”

“It was gross though, weren’t it?!” he says. I don’t know Mo, I wasn’t there! “Haha! But it’s like … when your wife’s giving birth, it’s …” he scrunches up his face, then grins again: “But the babies come out at the end of the day, right?” Having kids was a better feeling than winning an Olympic gold, he says, and family life has helped keep his feet on the ground. As does the fact that he doesn’t get recognised across the Atlantic: “I could walk around naked and nobody would recognise me.” After his victory in the New Orleans half-marathon, one American news anchor famously asked him if he had ever run before. Another thing keeping Farah grounded – sometimes literally – is the fact that no amount of superstar status can ease his woes at the immigration desk.

“I have to turn up to every flight early, three hours at least,” he says. “I don’t know what it’s about, maybe I should change my name. Ever since 9/11 that name [Mohammed Farah] must have been on their radar.”

Don’t they recognise him yet? “It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who you are, because it’s nothing to do with the person scanning your passport, it’s the system behind it. It’s like working at Tesco – you scan something and it comes up: ‘Please see assistant’.”

Farah is used to setbacks. He struggled in school because of dyslexia, although he thinks this might have helped push him towards being more active. “I always knew I couldn’t work in an office,” he says. When he moved from Somalia to London, aged eight, he could barely speak English and says he was lucky to have athletics keeping him on the straight and narrow. “Otherwise, I might have been in trouble with the law, you know? I’m quite easily led. You can be the nicest guy, but you can get influenced. A lot of people I know went down that road and ended up in prison. The neighbourhood [Feltham], it wasn’t posh … many kids didn’t make it out.”

When sixth form ended, Farah decided to sign up for the army – it seemed like the best way of making some money while being able to continue his running. It was only a chance conversation with UK Athletics endurance coach Alan Storey after a race that convinced him to change his mind. “I would have gone. I didn’t want to be working in McDonald’s all my life. I didn’t think about fighting or anything like that, it was just something cool at the time.”

It is well known that Farah’s time at St Mary’s University College in Twickenham, where he trained on a scholarship, was rather different to the regimented lifestyle of a soldier, or indeed what you would expect of an elite athlete. His bedroom swiftly became the university’s party HQ – a hangout for late-night videogame sessions. And as for his diet … “I used to just buy those ready meals you microwave,” he says. “I probably ate so much horsemeat – maybe that’s why I couldn’t run as well before.”

Other aspects of Farah’s life were not exactly conducive to sporting success either. When he started blacking out after completing races, his coaches were astonished to discover that Farah, a devout Muslim, had been fasting for Ramadan. He still fasts, but nowadays catches up afterwards “because it always comes around Olympics time”.

It was not until his 20s that Farah realised that, to compete with the elite East African runners from Kenya and Ethiopia, he would need to train with them and replicate their monk-like devotion to the sport: early nights, mid-afternoon naps, a refusal to engage in any form of entertainment beyond rewatching old races and analysing the tactical decisions.

Farah eventually moved to Kenya, where the locals would shout “Mzungo!” (white man) at him. His journey to where he is today has involved relocating his entire family to Portland, so he could work withfamed coach Alberto Salazar, and intense altitude training at places such as the French Pyrenean town of Font-Romeu. It has clearly paid off, even if some of the effects aren’t always welcomed: when Farah went deep-sea diving on his honeymoon, his lung capacity had developed to the point that he ran out of oxygen 20 minutes earlier than the instructor thought possible, he recalls with a mixture of terror and pride.

The loneliness he has experienced – he has talked about his twin daughters not recognising him – combined with a strict lifestyle regime, is enough to make almost anyone wonder how and why he puts himself through it. Surely he must wake up some days and think “sod this” before opening a tub of Häagen-Dazs Strawberry Cheesecake?

“Oh, I’ve been enjoying myself this week, dude,” he says, a little sheepishly. “This last couple of weeks I’ve been off so I’ve been letting go: sweets, McDonald’s, Burger King, everything … BBQ chicken pizzas! My bodyweight has gone up from 54 kilos to around 60.”

Farah’s next big target is to win the London Marathon, something he aims to do with the help of a “top secret” shoe, designed for him by Nike and allegedly costing $1m (£0.63m). He knows he will need to burn off those burgers and focus once more. But focusing is something Farah is obviously good at. In fact, no sooner have I turned off the tape recorder than he thanks me for the interview, then restarts that all-important task of building a tower out of his autobiographies. As his agent and various PR people explain his schedule – and I attempt to say goodbye – he seems to have blocked us all out again to concentrate on the task in hand. He lays the final book on top with the determination of a man who really doesn’t enjoy settling for second best.

Source: The Guardian