Twin Ambitions - My Autobiography (30 page)

Ivan Gazidis had invited me down to the Arsenal training ground at London Colney near St Albans. I’d got to know Ivan and his family quite well by this point and we became personal friends. I’ve had a great relationship with the club going all the way back to Barcelona in 2010. From time to time I’ll get emails or texts from Ivan or his PA, asking how training is going, wishing me luck in a race, that sort of thing. Of course, I jumped at the chance to spend the morning training with some of the club. Thierry Henry was there at the time, on loan from New York Red Bulls. I was so excited at the chance to finally meet Henry, for me one of the greatest players of all time. And the rest of the guys too: Bacary Sagna, Jack Wilshere, Theo Walcott. I took part in all the training drills with the rest of the guys. The only thing I had to sit out was the practice game – my legs being as valuable as they are, I didn’t want to risk getting on the wrong end of a meaty challenge. Combined with beating the Cube and winning a quarter of a million pounds for my Foundation, it was a dream day for me.

I also guest-starred with Clare Balding and David Walliams on
A League of Their Own
on Sky. Midway through the show the host, James Corden, turned to the audience and said, ‘I was thinking … wouldn’t it be amazing if we could come up with something that Mo could do when he wins at the Olympics?’ I smiled and mumbled something like, ‘That sounds like a great idea.’ But inside I was thinking, ‘I’m not too sure about this.’ I was slightly worried that if they chose a celebration for me that was a bit weird, and I had to do it in front of that huge crowd at the Olympics, people would be ribbing me about it for the rest of my life.

‘What do you think, Mo?’ James asked me. ‘If we come up with something …’

‘I’ll definitely do it!’ I replied. The crowd started cheering as all the other panellists racked their brains to think up a celebration. That’s when Clare Balding said, ‘I think he should do the “M” from YMCA.’ She demonstrated by putting her hands above her head to form an ‘M’. James had me trying it out. Then he started doing it too. David Walliams joked that my hairy armpits might put people off when I did the ‘M’.

‘I can draw a smiley face on them,’ I joked back.

‘I’ve just named it,’ James piped up. ‘It’s the Mobot!’

This was all well and good, but the most important thing for me was to get back to winning ways on the track. On 18 May I ran a low-key college race called the Oxy High Performance Meet. It’s held the third week of May each year at Occidental College in the historic Eagle Rock neighbourhood of Los Angeles. The Oxy HP Meet is a sort of mini-race. That said, there are still some very good athletes competing there. It marked my first race of the outdoor season and I went into it badly needing to bury the demons of Birmingham and Istanbul. Those defeats had been in my system for two months and this was my first opportunity to make up for them. The Olympics were very close now – just seventy days away. It was crunch time.

I was scheduled to run the 1500 metres in order to work on my speed. I came through that race and won in a good time of 3:34.66. Considering that I was up against some experienced runners, to not only win but clock a fast time showed that my speed was there. Fifty minutes later, to the surprise of many including my wife, I reappeared on the track to take my place on the start line for the 5000 metres race. Although this hadn’t been part of the original plan, Alberto had asked me and Galen to act as pacemakers for Dathan Ritzenhein in order to help him qualify for the Olympic standard for the US Track & Field team. The idea was, me and Galen would help Dathan go through, then we’d both drop out at the halfway mark. But then a funny thing happened. There was a guy in the pack using me as a pacemaker, sitting on my shoulder throughout the first half of the race. As we approached halfway, Galen dropped out. I still felt good, despite having had less than an hour to recover from the 1500 metres, and having done all the hard work for this guy on my shoulder and leading the race. I didn’t want to drop out and let him go on to take the glory. That didn’t seem fair to me. So I decided to continue – and held my position to go on and win the race. This was a great result for me, and one that had my critics frantically revising their predictions for 2012. I had done two races back-to-back within an hour of each other and won them both. That’s unheard of. I’d turned the corner. I was back to winning – just in time for the Olympics.

On 27 May I returned to London and ran the Bupa 10 kilometre road race, retaining my title. I pulled the Mobot for the very first time as I crossed the line. Five days later I was back on the West Coast, in Eugene, to compete in the Pre Classic – the scene of my breakthrough in 2011. I competed in the 5000 metres instead of the 10,000 metres this time. I won that race too, in a strong field including Isiah Koech, Galen, Kenenisa Bekele, Thomas Longosiwa and Yenew Alamirew. Having endured a miserable run at the start of the year, I was now on a roll.

There were just a few races left before the Olympics. On 27 June, exactly one month before it all kicked off in Stratford, I travelled to Helsinki and competed in the European Championships. I was already reigning European Champion from Barcelona and I wanted to defend my title. It was the chance to win another gold medal and I seized it with both hands, winning by a healthy margin, a full two seconds ahead of Arne Gabius, a German athlete.

In the final few weeks before the Olympics, I retreated to the camp in Font-Romeu to begin my final preparations for London. The plan was to fly back to London on 2 August, two days before my first event, the 10,000 metres final. Tania and Rhianna joined me in Font-Romeu for ten days. That was good. They helped take my mind off training. There were a lot of athletes hanging around the camp who were, like me, waiting to fly out to the Olympics. Being able to spend time with my family allowed me to switch off from all that and take my mind off the Games. When they left, I wouldn’t see them again until I went to the Olympic village – almost a month later.

I did return to the UK briefly in mid-July for the Grand Prix at Crystal Palace. This was my last race before the Olympics and the place was buzzing. You could feel the mood of the whole country, this sense of excitement building up. Everybody was talking about the Games. The torch relay was going through towns and villages. Every time you turned on the TV it was about the Olympics. I tried not to think about any of this going into the Grand Prix. ‘Just focus on doing well here,’ I told myself. I knew that if I didn’t do well in the 5000 metres, there’d be another round of negative stories in the press. ‘Mo isn’t going to do well at the Olympics,’ ‘Farah out of form,’ that kind of thing. I was on a winning streak and I wanted to keep it going. Tania and Rhianna weren’t there – the doctors had advised Tania that she was dangerously close to going into labour with the twins, so she was ordered to rest up in Teddington and not go anywhere.

The track was slick with rain that day in London but I was the strong favourite and I came through to win ahead of Moses Kipsiro and Collis Birmingham, breaking clear of the competition on the last two laps. My speed was something that I’d been working on with Alberto in training. Finally, everything was looking good. I had put in the hard hours on the track in Portland. I’d done my high-altitude work in Iten. I was in the shape of my life. I was ready for London.

In the back of my mind there was the realization that if I didn’t run well in London 2012, people would say that Daegu was a fluke, that I was a flash in the pan. I tried not to think about that. I went into London with my confidence high after the Worlds, knowing that if I performed to the same level as I’d done in 2011, I had a great chance of finishing up there on the podium, a gold medal around my neck.

In between training sessions in Font-Romeu I watched the Olympics on TV. I saw Danny Boyle’s breathtaking opening ceremony. I watched the other guys on Team GB competing for medals in the first week of the Games. It was a strange feeling, sitting in a room high up in the Pyrenees, watching Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield compete in the synchronized diving, Rebecca Adlington taking bronze in the 400 metres freestyle. Knowing that, in a few days’ time, the attention would switch to athletics and those same cameras would be focusing on me.

On 2 August I flew back to London and headed straight to the Olympic village. Tania and Rhianna were in Teddington. Tania’s due date was September, but we were told that twins are born on average a month early and sometimes two. It’s very rare that twins go to full term, which meant that Tania might be going into labour during the Olympics. I wanted to be with her, but we had agreed, along with Ricky, that I needed to focus purely on the Olympics. Any distractions could undo all the hard work of the last few years. It got to the point where we decided that if Tania did give birth while I was in training or at the village, she wouldn’t let me know. This was an agonizing time for me. There I was, preparing to run the biggest race of my life in front of billions of people, and I kept thinking, ‘The twins might already have been born …’

Once I arrived in the village I went through the usual routine of collecting my accreditation and doing all my blood tests. On the second day I rested. Even if I wanted to, going outside the village wasn’t an option for me. British athletes were getting mobbed everywhere they went. If you were wearing a Team GB vest, you were getting loads of attention, didn’t matter who you were. On top of that, you had to go through a ton of checkpoints to get in and out of the village. Instead I stuck around the village and watched as many Olympic events as possible. More and more Brits were winning medals and I was really getting into it. I caught some of the boxing matches. I watched Andy Murray beat Novak Djokovic in the Olympic tennis semis at Wimbledon to set up a final against Roger Federer. I felt the excitement building as I counted down the hours to my first race.

The following morning is Saturday 4 August.

I wake up early and go for a light jog around the village. I do 3 miles. I don’t see much of Alberto today. Normally he’s the calmest guy on the planet – so laid back he’s almost horizontal – but you don’t want to be around Alberto on race day. He gets so nervous that he makes everyone else nervous too.

The race doesn’t start until 9.15 p.m., so I have a lot of time to burn. For the hours leading up to the race I try to keep things as normal as possible. Every athlete has a pre-race routine they like to stick to. Galen, he has his pre-race pancakes. Me, I like to shave my head – to feel my scalp smooth, the refreshing sense of slapping cold water over it. It’s sort of a ritual, I guess. Then I’ll listen to some tunes. Depending on my mood, it’ll be some Tupac or maybe Dizzee Rascal. If I want something a bit more chilled, I’ll put on some Somali music. The older stuff from the 1970s and ’80s has a really good beat to it. People sing about the country, about the history and the culture. I have a few favourites: Walaalaha Sweden (Brothers of Sweden), which is where the duo, Sir Mohamud Omar and his brother, used to live. Then there’s Hibo Nuura, and K’naan, the rapper and poet who recorded ‘Wavin’ Flag’, the official song used for the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. I’ve met K’naan a few times. Nice guy.

All morning long I’ll be drinking water to keep myself hydrated. The rest of the morning is spent chilling out and talking to one or two of the other athletes. After lunch I grab a couple of hours’ sleep. Then I wait.

Three hours before the start of the 10,000 metres race, I head down to the stadium and make my way to the warm-up area. The atmosphere around here is tense. Everyone is stretching, jogging, watching the races unfold live on TV. Waiting for the call to head out to the track. Some people share a few jokes or comment on the race times, wishing each other good luck. Others are wearing their headphones and listening to music, trying to shut out everything else. Alberto is hanging somewhere in the background. He’s got a second pair of spikes with him – ever the man who’s prepared – just in case there’s something wrong with my regular ones. Neil Black is waiting for me in the warm-up area. I lie down on the massage table and say, ‘Make me feel good, Blackie.’

Neil just laughs. He knows what I’m like. He understands my body and the sheer hell I am about to put it through. At the end he claps his hands and says, ‘You’re good to go. Now get off my bed.’

Barry Fudge is there too. I met Barry a couple of years before the Olympics through Ian Stewart, the Head of Endurance for UK Athletics at the time. Barry is the physiologist for the English Institute of Sport (EIS) at UK Athletics. For the duration of the Olympics, Barry is my go-to guy. Whatever I need, Barry is there for me. While I was in the training camp, he would periodically check up on me and make sure that everything was going okay. When I had my blood tests done, he’d look at the samples to make sure my levels were good. If I need to be driven somewhere, Barry is the man. If something bad has happened or if something is bothering me, Barry is the guy I talk to, the guy who gets it sorted. Barry has allowed me to focus solely on the race.

As I wait for the race to begin, I watch Jessica Ennis beat Lilli Schwarzkopf and Tatyana Chernova to win the 800 metres and take the gold medal in the women’s heptathlon. ‘Jess has just got a gold,’ I think.

Now it’s my turn.

Twenty minutes before a race, I’ll normally drink some coffee to wake me up. So now I have a shot of espresso – only nothing happens. I want to be pumped up for this race, so I take a second espresso. As I make my way out to the stadium track, I feel this massive caffeine high come on. I’m buzzing. My hands, my legs – everything is shaking. Then I stick my head out through the tunnel leading from the warm-up area to the track and the crowd goes mental. People are screaming and waving Union Jacks and shouting, ‘Come on, Mo!’ There are banners with the words ‘GO MO!!!!’ written in big letters. Each person shouting out pumps me up even more. And I’m already pumped up to my eyeballs from the caffeine. At that moment, I am more pumped than ever before in my life. My hands are trembling. My eyes feel as though they’re about to burst out of their sockets. As I approach the track, I do a couple of strides and put my hands up to wave to the crowd. The whole stadium just erupts. The crowd is unbelievable. The noise is deafening – like nothing I’ve ever heard before. I try to search out Tania in the crowd but I can’t see her. Too many people. Everywhere I look is this mass of noise and colour. It’s the biggest day, the biggest moment of my life. Everything has been leading to this.