Dave Bedford hoping Mo Farah’s London Marathon gamble pays off with a ‘blinding’ return

In the long months spent away from their families in Ethiopia, Mo Farah and his coach Gary Lough have effectively erased the disappointment of his 2014 outing at the London Marathon.

As Lough’s wife, Paula Radcliffe, whom he also trained, puts it, the pair have started from scratch in their nascent relationship.

“For them, this is just the first step and they’re seeing this like a debut,” said the women’s marathon record holder.

“I know Mo did the race in 2014 but he had other ambitions then — there wasn’t quite the same build-up.”

The fanfare around his 26.2mile debut was huge, the track champion testing himself over the most gruelling of distances, as he attempted to break Steve Jones’s British record and thereby hold every metric national mark from the 1500metres to the marathon.

On the same London streets where he began his competitive career in the event’s mini-marathon, he quickly looked out of his depth. The British record eluded him and, in essence, it was a failed exercise.

Farah, 35, has little to prove after winning four Olympic golds, six world titles and five European crowns. But it is road running that drives him, the opportunity to potentially end the debate over the greatest distance runner of all time that has acted as the lure to continue his career.

Dave Bedford, London Marathon’s elite race coordinator, remembers Farah running as a youngster with his son, Tom. The two close friends and training partners were then in their formative years and it is Bedford who is responsible for luring Farah and the rest of the top runners to London.

It is a foray, he says, which comes with enormous risk. “There’s more at stake this time,” said Bedford.

“If he wanted to play it safe, he could have done the Commonwealth Games and the European Championships on the track and probably picked up more golds.

“This isn’t safe. It’s not as if he’s gone somewhere where the odds of winning are improved.

“This is one of the best fields assembled and you have to give him credit that he’s not ducked that.

“But there’s a lot more at stake than 2014 when he could return to the track. His performance will define whether he has a future in marathon running, and I genuinely don’t know the answer. I hope he has a blinder and shocks everyone, including himself.”

The barest minimum would to eclipse Jones’s time of 2:07.13 set 33 years ago — and Jones has already admitted defeat in that, as he remarked, “I should just wave the white flag and hand it over” — but the wider ambition spoken between coach and athlete is of the European best of 2:05.48.

His rivals are respectful but hardly full of ringing endorsements. Kenenisa Bekele predicts Farah “will do better this time”, while Eliud Kipchoge suggests that “in the presence of the Queen and the crowd cheering him on, he will run a good time”.

In truth, with Kipchoge, Bekele and Daniel Wanjiru potentially vying for world-record pace in what will be the hottest London Marathon in history, the trio know the Briton will almost certainly not be on their coat-tails.

Lough himself has tried to dampen the expectation around his athlete.

“Mo always has a massive level of expectation around him,” said Lough. “What he’s attempting, no one else has done. This is a guy that’s run 3:28 for the 1500m. Translating that the marathon is not an overnight fix.”

Nor does it need to be. The wider target for the road ambitions lie in a potential fifth Olympic gold.

Farah hailed Lough a “genius” in his pre-race press conference, with Radcliffe joking, “well, that’s not a word we’d use to describe him at home!”

But on a serious note, the partnership appears to be working better than perhaps either man anticipated.

What Lough has brought is the skill of transference from track to road, as he did with his wife.

“It’s not rocket science, it’s a learning process,” said Radclife. “Mo’s a very different runner to me but what Gary did with me he’s doing with Mo — focusing on the strengths and weaknesses and transferring that from one event to another.”

If the project continues to blossom, ultimately Tokyo 2020 is on the horizon. As Bedford puts it: “Mo’s arguably the greatest competition runner of all time and, if he adapts here on Sunday, then he will be going to Tokyo as a serious contender.”