Coach Gary Lough insists Sir Mo Farah has not run his last race
Farah will not be in the Team GB squad at this year’s Olympic Games.
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Your support makes all the difference.Sir Mo Farah will not make his Olympic failure his last race, according to coach Gary Lough
Four-time Olympic champion Farah will not be at next month’s Tokyo Games after his hopes disappeared during an anti-climatic 10,000m attempt on Friday.
He was 19 seconds outside the time needed to make the Team GB squad and will not defend the title he won in 2012 and 2016.
Farah, who also won the 5,000m at London and Rio, said afterwards he will consider his future but Lough believes he will race again.
He said: “If it was just one of those ‘past your sell-by date’ or ‘you can’t do this anymore’ things… but it really, really is not that situation. There’s no way Mohamed Farah is going to end his career running around the track here.
“In terms of what’s next, I honestly don’t know. There wasn’t really a Plan B – this was kind of a plan B after Birmingham and there’s definitely not a plan C right at this minute.
“He wasn’t really aware of split times. I wasn’t allowed to go on the inside. Even though all these other people do it, in Britain you’re not allowed to do stuff like that. So he wasn’t aware of lap times.
“I tried to shout. So he didn’t know any split time so he wasn’t really aware that they were down and they were slow.”
Farah failed in his first qualifying attempt in Birmingham, the 10,000m Championships, at the start of the month and said he was hampered by ankle and foot injuries but Lough insisted the 38-year-old was fit enough in Manchester.
He said: “The most devastating and frustrating thing is that he’s in shape and he can do this.
“He struggles in conditions like this but don’t want to make excuses. That was the concern all day – the conditions and the cold.
“He struggled through the first half of the year. He continued and got things OK, got through the summer, he ran in Brussels.
“This year he’s been pretty good. He’s struggled to see the people that he usually would see because of Covid.”