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. Now he heads the Oregon project for distance training where Farah and Rupp work together. The extraordinary achievement of those two runners in breaking the African control of distance events is in large part down to the determination of Salazar.
Most popular
Charles Walford
Forget Adolescence: this is the Netflix drama teenage boys should watch
In 2007 he collapsed and his heart stopped beating: his brain was deprived of oxygen for 14 minutes before doctors got his heart fluttering back to life. ‘None of the doctors who treated me, and none of the experts I’ve consulted since the day I collapsed, have ever heard of anybody being gone for that long and coming back to full health,’ Salazar writes in his book, appropriately called 14 Minutes. With that sort of grit in his trainer, who would bet against Farah now bagging another gold in the 5000m on Saturday?
What a wonderful weepy Games this is.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in