The great Games

The other day, I was listening to Radio 5 from Crystal Palace, where there had been a Diamond League athletics meeting. By this time the stadium was all but closed, the event had finished, the lights were out and the rain was falling. But what the commentators were seeing was this: in the deserted stadium Mo Farah and his training partner Galen Rupp were being put through a series of 200m interval sprints by their trainer, the legendary Cuban Alberto Salazar. As they churned out endless 25-second runs in the rain, the final touches were being put to a training regime that was to climax in last weekend’s epic 10,000m victory for Farah — not to mention Rupp’s own silver medal.

Salazar, who was recently the subject of a brilliant New Yorker profile by Malcolm Gladwell, was for a brief period in the 1980s one of the finest distance runners in the world.