February 27, 2012

A Bond Born At Speed

Distance runners Mo Farah and Galen Rupp come from different worlds, but their lives are in step as each carries his nation's hopes toward London

TIM LAYDEN

One of the two distance runners, the one born in Somalia and raised from age eight in west London, will race the Olympics at home. Mohammed (Mo) Farah will circle the track and hear a sound unlike anything he's heard before, initially in the 10,000 meters on the first Saturday night in August and then seven days later in the 5,000. He will feel a nation's passion, sprung not just from patriotic medal lust but from a cultural love of the long run, an affair gone fallow for decades and now revived by this 127-pound wisp of a man with a shaved head and a small tuft of black hair that clings to the point of his chin, like a little climber on the underside of a cliff.

On that Saturday night he will give Great Britain its first real chance at a gold medal in track and field at the London Games, and its first ever in a flat track event longer than 1,500 meters. He will understand what Cathy Freeman felt in Sydney 12 years ago when she won the 400 meters in her home country, sprinting through a torrent of noise. "Of course, Cathy ran for 49 seconds," says retired British triple jumper Jonathan Edwards, who won a gold medal on the same night as Freeman. "Mo will be running for 27 minutes."