Mo Farah, a four-time Olympic medalist has recounted version of events of how he was trafficked to the United Kingdom as a nine-year-old child under a false name.
In a recent interview with newsmen, the four-time gold medalist said he was born in the breakaway region of Somaliland with the name Hussein Abdi Kahin and illegally brought to the United Kingdom.
Most people know me as Mo Farah, but that’s not my name or the reality,” he said in clips released on Monday.
In previous interviews, Farah had said he came to the United Kingdom from Somalia with his parents as a refugee. But in the documentary set to debut this week, the 39-year-old opened up about the true experiences of his childhood.
Farah said his family was “torn apart” when he was 4 years old after his father was killed in a civil war in Somalia. Years later, he was separated from his mother and went to stay with family in Djibouti. From there, Farah says he was brought to the United Kingdom at the age of 9 by a woman he did not know. On the travel visa, he was named Mohamed Farah.
“For years I just kept blocking it out,” Farah said. “But you can only block it out for so long.”
Once in the United Kingdom, Farah said he lived under duress, doing chores for the woman who threatened he would never see his family again if he said anything. A few years later, after revealing his real identity to a teacher at his secondary school, Farah was put in foster care and taken in by another Somali family.
“I still missed my real family, but from that moment everything got better,” Farah said.
He was granted British citizenship under the name Mohamed Farah in 2000. The documentary acknowledges that the British government could strip any citizenship obtained through fraud, but a lawyer told Farah the chances of that happening are low because of the nature of his situation.
“I had no idea there were so many people who are going through exactly the same thing that I did,” Farah said. “It just shows how lucky I was.”
In the two decades since he was granted citizenship, Farah has represented Britain on the biggest stages as an elite distance runner, winning Olympic gold medals in 2012 and 2016 and six golds at the world championships. In 2017, he received his knighthood from Queen Elizabeth.
Farah has run mostly distance events since then, setting records at the Chicago Marathon in 2018 and in the one-hour run in 2020. Last week, he announced his plans to return to the London Marathon in October.
