Sebastian Coe: watching Mo Farah training reminded me of what it takes to be a champion Foremost among them was Alberto Salazar, the former marathon world-record holder who has masterminded Mo's elevation from a good international competitor to double Olympic champion and now owner of a World Championship gold over 10,000 metres. The training session unfolded - 1,200m repetitions with shortish recoveries. The training partners included US athlete Galen Rupp, silver medallist in the 10,000m at last year's Olympics, who dipped in and out to pull the best out of Mo on every lap. Hundreds of sessions like these have made Mo well-nigh unbeatable in the past two years and explained how in Moscow he was able to see off the challenge of Ibrahim Jeilan, his nemesis two years ago in Daegu. Maybe I did actually miss this element of my former trade. The day-to-day, hour-by-hour navigation, mental and physical, to a championship. These memories certainly came flooding back to me in Moscow - where, 33 years ago, I competed in the Olympics, the last major track and field championships that the city staged. Some of the architecture has changed since 1980. Steel and glass corporate buildings now tower over parts of the city where drab blocks of state-built housing once stood. I particularly recall a July afternoon when the British team of which I was a member arrived at Domodedovo Airport having rebuffed the call for a boycott of the Games. As we came down the steps from the plane in our badly crumpled bright blue nylon suits to an ocean of snappers and TV crew, Brendan Foster muttered that he was pleased not to be a shareholder in the company that supplied the team's official apparel. We were taken straight to the Olympic Village, a collection of tower blocks soon afterwards to become home to Muscovite car workers - a legacy of sorts. Under the watchful eye of the ever-present attaché called - I kid you not - Boris, we settled in. After a couple of days - and Boris now a permanent fixture in what passed for a recreation area - I plucked up enough courage to ask him what the book was he was reading so intently, but which was concealed under a brown paper wrapper. He slipped the cover just enough to reveal Graham Greene's The Human Factor. Two days later, Boris was asked where the nearest nightclub was by a member of the team who presumably had little expectation of progressing beyond the opening day of competition. Without averting his gaze from Greene's depressing Cold War tale, Boris replied: "Helsinki." At this World Championships, I stayed in the refurbished Ukraine Hotel - one of Stalin's monuments - where my father had stayed in 1980. He would have been amused. Gone are the never-ending soulless corridors with stern women sitting at tables with telephones 50 yards apart and monitoring every movement in and out of the rooms. Now the lobby in all its marble splendour is a tribute to the world of luxury brands, complete with a Roll's Royce dealership, restaurants, nightclubs, spas and rooftop bars. Today he would not be packing his own bath plugs. Much water has flowed past in the last 33 years.