Olympic champion Mo Farah revealed on Wednesday that he was trafficked from Somalia to the UK as a child and forced to work as a domestic servant for a London family.
He also announced that Mo Farah is not his real name.
“Most people know me as Mo Farah,” he told the BBC. “But that’s not my name or it’s not reality. The real story is that I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin.”
Farah made the revelation for a BBC documentary due to air on Wednesday. The BBC released clips and quotes from the documentary on Monday.
Farah previously said he was brought to the UK from Somalia as a child with his parents. He told the BBC that his parents never lived in the UK and that his father was killed in a civil war when he was four. His mother and two brothers remain in Somaliland, a self-proclaimed country neighboring Somalia on the east coast of Africa.
Mo Farah. (Action Images via Reuters/Molly Darlington)
When he was eight or nine, he says he was taken from his home to stay with a family in Djibouti and eventually taken to the UK by a strange woman who told him he would be living with relatives. Instead, he was given the name of another child – Mohammed Farah – and false travel documents.
When he arrived in the UK, he says the woman took him to her home in London and told him to do housework, including childcare, “if I wanted food in my mouth”. For Farrah, she told him not to say anything about the arrangement “if you ever want to see your family again.”
“For years I just blocked it out,” Farah, now 39, told the BBC. “But you can only block it for so long.”
Farah was eventually allowed to attend school aged 12, where his former teacher told the BBC he arrived as an “emotionally and culturally alienated” child. He developed a love of sport in PE and his PE teacher Alan Watkinson arranged for him to be raised by a Somali family, according to the BBC.
The identity of the woman who trafficked Farah was not revealed in the videos. It is unclear what consequences she faces.
The story continues
Farah’s talent on the track became apparent as a teenager, and he has since become one of the world’s greatest distance runners. He received British citizenship in 2000. He competed for Great Britain at the 2012 London Olympics and again in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. He won four gold medals, two each in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres. He won six world championships and two silver medals over the same distances from 2011-17. He received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth in 2017.
He told the BBC that his talent and love of running saved him from his previous life.
“What really saved me, what made me different, was that I could run.”
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