Athletics: Sir Mo Farah's mask beginning to slip in nasty spat

Mo Farah seizes the moral high ground. Photo / Getty Images

As a visual metaphor for Mo Farah's travails, it is difficult to surpass the sight this week of him leaping, heedless of any sense that discretion might be the better part of valour, on to a fast-moving treadmill, only to find himself spat out backwards. Twice. But if this seemed a foolhardy antic for a man trying to usurp the world record holder at the London Marathon, it paled against the study in reputational hara-kiri he would deliver at his pre-race press conference.

Farah did not so much go off-grid as plough into tundra regions hitherto uncharted in the realm of athletics PR. It was as if, in his apparent determination to stoke a feud with Haile Gebrselassie over an alleged burglary at the Ethiopian's hotel, he had mapped out his own Liam Neeson moment. Neeson, infamously, has a bespoke take on handling film junkets: start with a few token pleasantries about the movie, then veer off into a vignette about how you once tried to avenge a rape victim by prowling the streets in search of the nearest black person to kill.

Farah, we can surmise, shares a similar taste for the unexpected: kick off with some pabulum about how great it is to be back in London, then offer up the full script for a pilot episode of CSI: Addis Ababa.

It is the type of handbrake turn we will remember for some time, not least because the plot has since thickened to the point of Gebrselassie accusing Farah of assault, blackmail, defamation and of harbouring a grudge ever since Jama Aden — the Briton's former "unofficial facilitator" in East Africa, later arrested on suspicion of doping offences with other athletes — was refused access to the hotel. Farah denies all the claims.

Gebrselassie, for his part, is standing firm, ominously promising that in the looming legal battle, "one of us will be the winner". Truly, Coe versus Ovett had nothing on this pair.

Hard though it might be to believe, based on the latest lurid crossfire, Farah does care about his image. So much so that in 2015, he solicited crisis management expertise from Freud's, PR advisers to the stars, to help him fend off controversy around his relationship with coach Alberto Salazar.

Would that a similar guru could have been on hand to counsel against using his London platform to fan the flames with Gebrselassie. For in his eagerness to give chapter and verse on the alleged incident at the Yaya Village resort, Farah has neglected to consider what this all says about him.

While we do not yet know where the truth lies, beyond a "he says, she says" tit-for-tat, Farah's handling of the matter so far does offer a window into his character. What type of person uses a press call at the London Marathon to launch an unedifying public spat with a fellow running great? And what type of person signs off a passive-aggressive text message with the words "Greetings, Sir Mo"?

Regardless of culpability in this dispute, Farah seems hell-bent on painting himself in the least flattering light.

There have long been two versions of Mo Farah. Already, the memory of him streaking away for his second gold at London 2012, to be greeted by an ovation louder than a 747 at take-off, belongs to a simpler time. That incarnation of Farah still exists but over the seven years since his Olympic zenith, we have seen glimpses of a different side.

There was the dismally tin-eared decision to run only half the London Marathon in 2013, a move that, according to Michael Johnson, gave the impression "it was all about the money". Then there was a bizarre episode at Munich airport last year, when he purported to show security guards racially harassing him — "you're on Instagram Live" — only for German authorities to throw out the complaint and explain that he was filming illegally. Behind that soft-spoken bonhomie, are there more cynical calculations at work? It certainly looked that way from his broadsides against Gebrselassie.

Farah has been adept at spinning a narrative of media conspiracy against him — after his last track race in 2017, when he took world silver over 5000m in London, he raged that journalists were trying to "destroy" him — but this week's episode looked wholly premeditated. The press conference was over by the time he grabbed the microphone, made his allegations and fleshed them out in precise detail afterwards.

Having once spent time with Gebrselassie in Addis Ababa, I cannot shake the sense that Farah, in choosing such a target, is playing with fire.

Gebrselassie is not so much adored as revered in Ethiopia, with periodic suggestions that he should run for president. In a global popularity contest between the two, there is little doubt who would prevail.

At a time when his only focus should be on reeling in Eliud Kipchoge, Farah is instead fuelling an ugly squabble. Has the mask finally slipped? Quite possibly.