You need right mentality to beat Africans, says Mo Farah

Mo Farah remembers it well. It was 2010, a month after he had become a double European champion in Barcelona, and his boyhood hero, Haile Gebrselassie, was asked whether he believed the Londoner could ever challenge for medals on the world stage.

The Ethiopian's answer, delivered after his victory in the Great North Run, was resoundingly negative. There were simply too many top-class east African runners, he explained.

"The chances are getting smaller and smaller," he said. Three years and three global gold medals later - one from the 2011 World Championships and two from the London Olympics - Farah has never forgotten Gebrselassie's words. "He didn't think I had it," Farah said. "I still remember that clearly. People have always got their opinion.

At the time he just didn't see any Africans getting beat. "I was disappointed to hear that because he was someone I saw as a role model, but everyone is entitled to their opinion aren't they? Ever since then, I've become a different athlete."

And how. When Farah goes to the start-line for today's (Saturday's) 10,000?metres final at the World Championships in Moscow, he will be running not just for gold but for a place in distance-running folklore.

After his brilliant 5,000-10,000m double in London last summer, a repeat in the Luzhniki Stadium would confirm his place alongside Gebrselassie and countryman Kenenisa Bekele as one of the true greats of the sport. Only Bekele has held the Olympic and world double at the same time. "I'd love to be considered alongside them," Farah said.

"Years ago, if you had said to me 'you will be as good as Gebreselassie' or 'you will beat Bekele', I would never have believed you. "I was a junior coming through and I saw Bekele win the World Cross-Country. He broke the world record, you know. He even won the World Cross after stopping to tie his lace. How does somebody do that? I won't try that. I don't think I could get away with it.

"And at the Sydney Olympics, I was studying in the sixth form at school and I remember that we took a break to watch that 10,000?metres race and I was like 'wow!' Gebrselassie stuck his chest out and won by a hundredth of a second."

Those were the days, Farah admits, when the thought of challenging the long-distance superpowers of east Africa seemed preposterous. It was only when he began training with them several years later that he gained the confidence to believe that they were not quite so invincible.

"We had the mentality here that we could never beat the Africans," he said. "That's all we heard in the UK. We were never going to beat them. You get that into your head. Yes, you can beat the Europeans but these other guys are way too far ahead.

"What opened that up for me was living and training with them. I began to think that if I'm training with these guys and beating them, why can I not beat them in competition? "I lived with them in 2005 and 2006 and went on and got my first title in the European Cross-Country. I thought, 'I know what I have to do. As long as I keep doing that I can compete with these guys'.

"Since moving to America it's just been about tweaking things that little bit, and being able to believe yourself and being able to figure out the last lap, because if I look back at Osaka [at the 2007 World Championships] I was leading at the bell and then when I got to 200?metres they all came past me."

It is safe to say that will not happen either today or in next Friday's 5,000m final, for the last lap is now Farah's most potent weapon. Quite simply, there is not another distance runner in the world who can live with his finishing kick. If any of his opponents needed reminding about that, then Farah obliged with his remarkable 50.89sec last lap in his 5,000m race at the European Team Championships in Gateshead and his eye-watering European 1500m record of 3min 28.81sec in Monaco.

"Running that fast in the 1500 has given me a lot more confidence," Farah admitted. "In a way, it's like saying, 'Hey guys, this is what I can do'." Farah is not boasting when he says that if he is in the first three at the bell with no gaps, then "I should be all right". He is just stating a fact.

But, having sprinted away from the bell to win his two Olympic golds last year, he is not expecting his rivals to play into his hands again by leaving it to a last-lap shoot-out.

With four Ethiopians, including the highly talented Dejen Gebremeskel, and three Kenyans in the field, the likelihood is that they will turn up the heat early in the race to try to run the kick out of him, turning it into a test of endurance rather than speed. They could even use certain designated runners as rabbits who will sacrifice themselves for the national cause. "It's going to be exciting," Farah said.

"It's not what you think it is going to be, the normal thing, in my opinion. I think something is going to happen but I don't know exactly what. "I think something will happen from the start, or maybe a couple of laps into it or somewhere in the middle."

With only his American training partner, Galen Rupp, for company, the race will be full of dangers for Farah, though he is not lacking in motivation for it. At the 2011 World Championships he was beaten into second place in the 10,000m final by little-known Ethiopian Ibrahim Jeilan and he admits the memory still haunts him.

"I'm going to Moscow knowing I came second at a World Championship a couple of years ago," he said. "That still plays on my mind. It was so close. I haven't watched the video of the race for a while but I'll probably watch it again, just to remind myself."

But, despite the discomfort it still causes, it was a defeat that helped turn Farah into the athlete that he is now. The way his muscles froze, the way he began overstriding in his desperate lunge for the line, was an object lesson in how not to close out a race. Since then, he has learnt to be a sprinter as well as an endurance runner.

"I think that it was a good thing," Farah said. "Ever since then, it has made me stronger and made me want it more." What he now wants more than anything is to atone for two years ago and become the first British man to win a 10,000m world title. Not for the first time in Farah's extraordinary running career, history beckons.