Mo Farah breaks one-hour world record at Brussels Diamond League
Four-time Olympic champion Mo Farah broke the one-hour world record on his return to the track at Friday September 9, 2020 Diamond League meeting in Brussels.
Farah ran 21,330m, bettering the record of 21,285m set by Haile Gebrselassie in 2007.
It is the 37-year-old Briton's first world record outdoors.
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"It isn't supposed to be easy to break a world record, but I can tell you that it was really hard. The record stood for a very long time," said Farah.
"So that says a lot. I was very excited to be back on the track. My first meet back on the track was what was driving me," he added
In the rarely run one-hour race athletes try to cover as much distance as possible in 60 minutes.
Earlier on Friday, Sifan Hassan of the Netherlands set a new world record in the women's race. Her 18,930m effort surpassed Dire Tune's mark of 18,517m, set in 2008.
Farah switched to road running after the Rio Olympics but was returning to the track in his bid to compete in the 10,000m at next year's postponed Tokyo Games.
Competing for the first time since October's Chicago Marathon, Farah pulled away alongside Belgium's Bashir Abdi with 30 minutes left.
The pair's effort looked in doubt as they fell behind Gebrselassie's record pace with no fans in the stadium to drive them on, but they went ahead again as the final quarter of the race began.
Abdi briefly took the lead, but in the end six-time world champion Farah kicked away and won the race with ease.
He completed over 53 laps at an average pace of 67 seconds per lap to become the 12th athlete to hold the record.
"At a certain point, with just 10 laps to go, it became tough so I was happy that Bashir took the lead," Farah added.
"However, I felt great with just one minute to go. I kept believing in my speed so I knew I had a good chance to take this win. A last fast lap is still my best tactic," he noted.
Farah will return to road racing when he competes in the Antrim Coast Half Marathon on September 12 this year.
He will then act as a pace-setter for Kenya's world record holder Eliud Kipchoge and Ethiopian Kenenisa Bekele at the delayed London Marathon on 4 October this year.
Mo Farah, in full Mohamed Farah, (born March 23, 1983, Mogadishu, Somalia), is a Somalian-born British distance runner reports the Britannica.
Farah and his twin brother, Hassan, were among the six children of British-born Muktar Farah and his Somali wife.
Violent conflict in Somalia drove the Farah family from their home in Mogadishu in 1990.
The twin brothers and a sister went to live with a grandmother in neighbouring Djibouti.
When Farah was eight, however, he was separated from Hassan and sent with two younger brothers to join their father in London.
Farah arrived with no knowledge of English but with a love for association football (soccer), which he expected to pursue.
Instead, he was steered at age 11 toward running by his sports teacher, who drove him to club training sessions and later served as best man when Farah married in 2010.
Farah finished ninth in his first English schools cross-country championships in 1996, but the next year he won the race, taking the first of five school titles.
He was supported in his early career by a number of major figures, including women’s marathoner Paula Radcliffe, who paid for his driving lessons, and philanthropist Sir Eddie Kulukundis, who covered the legal fees for his naturalization as a British citizen.
