Sir Mo Farah has waded into the row over whether his blood and urine samples should be retested as part of a World Anti-Doping Agency investigation into the Nike Oregon Project, where he trained from 2010 and 2017, to insist that he is more than happy for the authorities to do so.
Wada launched a fresh investigation into the NOP in November after Farah’s former coach Alberto Salazar was given a four-year ban for doping offences. However Farah has never been implicated in any wrongdoing and speaking in Kenya, where is training for the Big Half race in London in March, the 36-year-old Briton reiterated that he was happy for the UK Anti-Doping Agency to hand over his samples for further scrutiny.
“I’ve seen reports of my name in connection to Ukad and Wada about sample retesting,” he wrote on Twitter. “Just to be clear, I was not consulted about this and as I’ve said many times, I am happy for any anti-doping body to test any of my previous samples anytime.”
Farah’s comments came as criticism of Ukad’s apparent reluctance to hand over any of the samples in its possession intensified, with Renee Anne-Shirley, the former head of Jamaican Anti-Doping, branding the position as “absurd”.
On Friday Nicole Sapstead, the chief executive of Ukad, suggested that she wouldn’t agree to a “trawling expedition” without evidence of what might be in Farah’s samples, as she wanted to preserve any samples in her organisation’s possession in case there were scientific advances in the future.
“When you open a sample up, every time you freeze it and you thaw it and you freeze it again, you are degrading the sample,” she explained. “I’m not going to risk samples that we hold in storage that could enable us to retest when the science moves along.”
However Shirley was fiercely critical of Sapstead in an exchange with another former Nike Oregon Project athlete, Kara Goucher.
When Goucher suggested that Ukad should be able to spare a sample or two of Farah’s from 2012, Shirley agreed, adding: “This is the key point. Surely this is one of the most tested athletes in the world. And the idea that ALL his samples must be preserved in the nebulous hope that there will be some miraculous new test in a couple years so that NO negative sample can be spared to be retested is absurd.”