After repeated requests, UK Athletics has handed over its complete internal review of Olympic star Mo Farah’s relationship with banned American coach Alberto Salazar.
The controversy around British distance runner Farah and his former coach Salazar refuses to go away – and now the UK anti-doping agency (UKAD) has been handed UK Athletics’ internal review into his activity at a US training camp known as the Nike Oregon Project in 2015, the same year the BBC’s Panorama leveled allegations involving Salazar and dubious practices with his athletes.
Previously UK Athletics had only supplied the agency with an edited summary of Farah’s training and medical data, from which it concluded that there were “no concerns” about the four-time Olympic Champion’s continued involvement with Salazar.
That was despite repeated requests for the full information and a rebuke from the head of the agency earlier this year.
Farah has always denied any suggestion of doping at any stage of his career, although he did tell a British tabloid that he was “human and makes mistakes.”
Salazar and the Nike Oregon Project were investigated by the US Anti-doping Agency (USADA), which led to the American coach receiving a four-year ban in 2019 for “orchestrating and facilitating prohibited doping conduct.”
Farah, 37, was not named in any of the allegations, but stopped training with Salazar in 2017 saying that he would have left much earlier had he known what the coach was doing.
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) is now expected to retest blood samples from several athletes who trained at the Nike Oregon Project between 2010 and 2017.
Earlier this year, Farah was forced to explain why he initially told USADA that he hadn’t taken the supplement L-Carnitine prior to the 2014 London Marathon, before changing his story to say that in fact he had been injected with the amino acid which, while not banned under a certain volume, is thought to give performance-enhancing qualities if introduced into the bloodstream.
