Mo Farah wins 5,000m gold: Briton makes it a double success at the World Championships in Beijing

The long-distance runner won the 10,000m last weekend

Mo Farah wins 5,000m gold (GETTY IMAGES)

Victory over 5,000 metres, and the completion of a hat-trick of global doubles, was not about entering the pantheon of greats. Mo Farah was already there.

It was a night of greats: Usain Bolt delivering a third world title here and Ashton Eaton the first world record of these World Championships, in the decathlon.

There were calamities too as a row erupted among the British 4 x 100m men’s relay team over a fluffed final changeover that effectively cost them the chance of a silver medal.

Amid it all, Farah was serene, steering clear of the trips that had nearly derailed him in the 10,000m and 5,000m heats for another dominant victory. It led Linford Christie to call for a knighthood.

Sir Mo might not yet be in the offing, although Prime Minister David Cameron is clearly a fan, tweeting his congratulations after Farah’s trademark double was completed.

With that additional title, Britain’s record was a mirror of the four athletics golds from London 2012, and with the same recipients – Jessica Ennis-Hill and Greg Rutherford having previously triumphed. It added up to Britain’s greatest gold-medal haul at the World Championships since their inception in 1983.

Farah said it was not up to him to decide if he was great after surpassing Haile Gebrselassie’s haul of world titles and leaving him just one shy of the eight global victories – five world and three Olympic – achieved by Kenenisa Bekele.

Instead, after his fifth world title, Farah said: “Seven years ago Bekele was winning everything and I remember thinking with all those medals he has, if he only gave me one that would be fine. If you’d have said to me seven years ago, ‘You’d have one medal,’ I would have said OK, but to win as many medals as I’ve had is just incredible.”

There are those who argue that Farah cannot aspire to greatness without the world records of his aforementioned predecessors, but the Londoner can only race those up against him, and the pace of the final was incredibly slow.

That was until Kenya’s Caleb Ndiku, who had promised to take the fight to Farah, broke with two laps clear. It meant the Briton was in the unfamiliar position of not leading at the 600m mark, but he passed Ndiku on the final bend and ran clear of him in the sprint – his last 600m was quicker than David Rudisha had managed in the 800m final.

And all this was achieved despite doubts over a hamstring twinge, thought to have been caused by a last-lap stumble in the heats earlier in the week.

That the double was achieved against a backdrop of doping allegations levelled at his coach, Alberto Salazar, and training partner, Galen Rupp – which both men have denied – and the missed two drug tests in the lengthy build-up to London 2012 made it all the more impressive.

“It’s definitely been hard,” was his assessment of an occasionally explosive pre-Championships build-up. “But all successful athletes come with other things in the way, you just have to deal with it in the right way.” As for Sir Mo, he smiled, saying: “It’d be incredible, wouldn’t it?” before joking he might need to move home to accommodate his latest trophies.

Bolt’s Beijing lead-in had seen him written off as a spent force by many; instead he eclipsed the race favourites, the US, on the final leg of the 4 x 100m for a successful defence of the three world titles won in 2013.

His cause was helped by the fact the US fluffed their last changeover, which set them well back and subsequently meant they were disqualified. But it was a fitting finale for Bolt in what could be his World Championships swansong; he hinted earlier in the week that he may forego London 2017.

It proved another calamitous competition for Britain’s male sprinters, who were erased from the results for the fourth straight time in global championships after James Ellington failed to connect with CJ Ujah on the final changeover.

It led to a war of words between the quartet. Replays suggested Ujah had gone early, but he defended his position, saying he had merely done what he was told to do.

Richard Kilty, however, said: “I think if we’d had Dina Asher-Smith on the last leg we would have taken the baton and we’d have got the bronze.”

Ellington, who is solely on funding for the relay, said he feared the mishap would cost him his backing and that “I might be back to nine to five going to the Olympics next year”.