MONTE CARLO, Monaco: Mo Farah will head to next month’s World Athletics Championships in Moscow full of confidence in his bid to replicate his stunning London Olympic double distance gold.
The Somali-born Briton topped the podiums of the men’s 5,000 and 10,000m in the English capital, a year after winning a gold (5,000) and silver (10,000) in the Daegu worlds to assure himself a place in the pantheon of distance greats.
Farah will step down to run the 1500m at the Monaco Diamond League in a bid to ramp up his pace in the build-up to the August 10-18 Moscow words, a distance he also raced in the principality in impressive style before Daegu.
“Training’s going very well,” Farah said. “It’s important going into Moscow that I work on my speed and count on everything.
“I’ll run the 1500m and see what I can do and learn something from that race.
“The 1500m’s an interesting race, those guys don’t hang around!”
Farah added: “I ran 3:33 in 2011, so hopefully if I can run that or just under would be great for me. At the same time, I’m not thinking about times but racing against these guys.
“It’s a different pain from 1500m to 5k and 10k.
“My aim is to get stuck in to see what I can do, come away with a good time and hopefully a good position.”
Despite setting a personal best and national record of 12:53 in the 5,000m the last time he raced in Monaco, Farah insisted he was happy to follow his coach Alberto Salazar’s advice to drop down.
“I’ll just go with the plan and what my coach says,” he said. “My aim is to be healthy going into Moscow, that’s the big one, I’ll just take it one race at a time.
“Everything’s going to plan. I’ve just got to stay injury free. Pretty much all the work’s been done, I’m just enjoying it.”
Farah admitted that the sensations he felt when he won in London would likely never be repeated.
“It’s great to win the Olympics in your home town. Nothing gets better than that. In my entire career, I don’t think I’ll ever feel the same again,” he said.
“After London, life has changed a lot. Two races have changed my life. I’d raced so much before, but the Olympics changed things.
“People think I just came along, but I’ve been around for ages. As a senior I never broke through.
“I wouldn’t say I was doing the wrong training but I wasn’t smart about my training.
“I started taking it seriously in 2006 when I lived with the Kenyans. I said to myself, ‘If I ever have a chance to compete with these guys, I must do what they do’, and so I went to Kenya, Ethiopia, Australia (to train).” REUTERS
