In Varsity athletics this year Oxford were the underdogs; we fought hard and were rewarded. The same could just as easily be applied to the state of British athletics.
Although the 2011 Daegu World Athletics Championships saw great success for Team GB, with the best medal haul since 1999, it was by no means as impressive as that statistic suggests. Britain had no representatives in the final of any event from 100m up to 1500m on the men’s side, and 100m up to 800m on the women’s side. As Charles Van Commenee, national head coach at UK Athletics, admitted, a ‘good number’ of his golden generation had underperformed. Jessica Ennis and Phillips Idowu, who went into the championships as favourites for the heptathlon and triple jump respectively, were both soundly beaten into second place by Tatyana Chernova and Christian Taylor. The World Indoor Athletics Champs in Istanbul brought further disappointment for Ennis too: after a two-year undefeated run, she had now lost both her World Outdoor and Indoor titles in the space of seven months. Moreover, as we moved into Olympic year the fortunes of even our best athlete from Daegu, Mo Farah, were taking a turn for the worse. After laughing off a fall at the Boston Mile at the beginning of February, he was beaten in three successive races – over two miles at Birmingham and in the two rounds of the World Indoor Athletics Champs over 3000m. The usually amicable Farah stormed past journalists after his fourth successive defeat and, suddenly, the rather quaint notion that at the start of 2012 Farah had ‘no idea’ when the Olympics started was jumped upon as a sign of over-confidence, as a lackadaisical attitude towards what had been heralded as Britain’s best chance of gold. As The Guardian’s Andy Bull proclaimed in March after Farah’s defeat in Istanbul, ‘[he] looks a shadow of the runner he was last year’. Much like the anti-climax of the England Football team at every world cup since 1966, after a sniff of glory, the media-hype surrounding the Olympics had put British athletes upon a lofty plinth and cracks were now beginning to appear.
Inadvertently though, critics such as Bull were doing UK athletics a favour. After all, the best way to spur on a real champion is to count them out, put their back up against a wall, and make them fight their way back to the top. The previous weekend is a perfect example of this. The three aforementioned athletes all competed this weekend, and all three produced stellar performances to defy their critics. On Friday night, Farah and Idowu were out to show that they are back to their best. At the ‘Oxy High Performance’ meet in California, Farah ran Olympic ‘A’ Standards of 3:34.66 and 13:12.87 to win the 1500m and 5000m in the space of just 90 minutes. On the other side of the world, at the Diamond League Match in Shanghai, 5000m and 10,000m world champion Kenenisa Bekele (arguably Farah’s biggest competition for gold this summer) came a lowly fifth in 13:13 – a time slower than Farah’s second race of the night. Idowu, at the same meeting where Bekele struggled, produced an exemplary performance to win the triple jump with four jumps of over 17 metres. Christian Taylor, on the other hand, the man who beat Idowu to Gold in Daegu, had four no-jumps and didn’t manage a single jump beyond 17 metres. On Sunday, as the varsity athletes were still recovering from their celebrations the night before, Ennis celebrated what was initially thought a new personal best of 12.75 over the 100m hurdles at the Great City Games in Manchester. The event was unfortunately marred by confusion and controversy as it was discovered that only 9 hurdles, not 10, had been put out for the race, thus invalidating the time. Take nothing away from Ennis’ performance though; on a miserable looking day she beat both the Olympic 100m hurdles champion, Dawn Harper, and the World silver medallist, Danielle Carruthers, in one of her seven heptathlon events.
Charles Van Commenee must have woken with a smile on Monday morning as, after a less than ideal winter, his athletes are starting to show the form he hoped for when setting the ambitious target of eight medals at the Olympic Games this summer. As well as Ennis, Farah and Idowu, Andrew Pozzi and Lawrence Okoye recorded Olympic ‘A’ Standard performances in the 110m hurdles and discus respectively, at the Loughborough International meeting, Okoye just 24 hours after breaking the British record in Germany. At the same meeting, Hannah England, silver medallist over 1500m in Daegu, ran her fastest ever opening time over 800m to win by more than a second.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be writing this article at all. Tom Daley’s victory at the European Diving Championships on Sunday is but further testament to the increasingly apparent correlation, across sport as a whole, between media criticism and impressive results after his high-profile telling off by Alexei Evangulov for spending too much time with sponsors and the media. If we want Team GB to achieve Van Commenee’s tough medal target at this summer’s Olympics, now only nine weeks away, perhaps we should stop exhorting our athletes and start invoking the old dating cliché, ‘treat them mean to keep them keen’. We don’t want to risk the state of UK athletics ending up like that of England’s football team.
