casual obsever wrote:
If Farah ever gets caught (a big "if", I'd bet against that), British Athletics and UKAD and IAAF go home devastated. Won't happen, no worries.
More like the multicultural political establishment will go home devastated.
Not sure somebody like Mo is good for British athletics in the long run. Sure he will get lots of Somali immigrant kids into distance running, aided and abetted by their stereotyping teachers. He also puts off millions of other kids from the idea of pursuing athletics because they have the wrong skin color and, now with the increasingly obvious doping suspicions, the belief that they would still have to cheat anyway.
Mo is the perfect example of the myth of East African 'running genes'. It's been pointed out a dozen times to me here by racists and doping apologists that the odds of a Somali being the best runner Britain has ever produced is tiny - therefore Mo is proof that East Africans are genetically different to the same the genes that produced Coe, Cram, Ovett, Bannister, Moorcroft etc.
Actually what we know now is that Mo wanted to be a football player at school but was useless, was stereotyped and singled out by his racist white PE teacher to try cross country, which obviously his 85 lbs frame made him better at than his 200 lb obese white class mates. So he devotes his life to that, achieving unspectacular success at a time when UK distance running was terrible. On his 23rd birthday, his 5000 pb is still only 13:30, half-a-minute slower than David Moorcroft ran without pacemakers 30 years before, and his 1500 pb is 3:38. He then happens to meet a group of Kenyans living in London who invite him to live and train with them and 'share their secrets' with him, and he quickly becomes an athlete capable of making major finals without really threatening to medal. Of course when he starts to train with Salazar (and Aden in Ethiopia in the winter) is when suddenly he turns into an invincible GOAT.
You seem to think I'm a great defender of British Athletics. I'm a defender of clean British athletes and clean athletes in general, and the sport in the general. I've almost run out of my year's supply of popcorn already, but even if Kipchoge and the Manangois were busted next week, I'd be sure to save some for the inevitable humiliation and comeuppance of Farah.