By Ros Satar
- Mo Farah backed up his 10,000m win with the 5,000m at the IAAF World Championships
- Adds to his London 2012 Olympics and 2013 World Championships titles
- Round up of the relay action
BEIJING, CHINA – Mo Farah added to Great Britain’s tally as he sprinted to a spectacular 5,000m gold in the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing.
Farah stumbled in his 5,000m heat and in the final, with 500m to go, it was Kenya’s Commonwealth champion Caleb Ndiku who would hit the front at the bell and pull away from the pack. Farah kept in contention while the move splintered the rest of the field, before kicking and producing an eye-watering 52.6s final lap to leave Ndiku in his wake.
Farah has had a great deal to contend with this year. The allegations around his coach Alberto Salazar still swirl around, although the American is confident that Farah will soon re-join the Oregon Project, but after feeling that his name had been dragged through the mud, the Brit concentrated on letting his feet do the talking – rather quickly!
Furthermore, it gave him a chance to really bury the demons of his failure to even make it through the 5,000m heats of the 2008 Olympics.
He timed his race to perfection, staying out of trouble of shoves and clipped heels, finally moving up through the field with seven laps to go, before his blistering last 400m.
The women’s 4x100m relay team were just out of the medals in fourth, behind Jamaica, USA and Trinidad and Tobago, but set a new national record, and look to be contenders in the years to come. There was less good news for the men’s 4x100m squad. In recent years, there have been some spectacularly catastrophic changeovers (or not, as the case may be). Sadly this year was going to be one of those years. The Brits were very much in contention throughout the race, before the final changeover between James Ellington and Chijindu Ujah. Neither felt they were too slow in or too fast out respectively, as the group apologised for perhaps letting the squad and people at home down, before vowing to work harder to get it right in time for Rio 2016.
All four golds achieved by Team GB at the London 2012 Olympics were repeated here in Beijing, resulting in Britain’s best ever World Championships medal haul to date.
The IAAF World Championships concludes on 30 August.
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