Mo Farah It was the symbol of British athletics until last week it announced its retirement. But this has not been the most shocking announcement that he had planned to give the Olympic, world and European champion of 5,000 and 10,000 meters. The United Kingdom’s flag bearer at the last Games has revealed in the documentary ‘The Real Mo Farah’ from the BBC whose real name is not Mo Farah but Hussein Abdi Kahin. He was born in Somalia and was a victim of human trafficking and slavery. At the age of nine, he was forced to work as a domestic worker in England.
“The truth is that I am not who you think I am,” he says before telling his shocking childhood. “The real story is that I was born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin. Despite what has been said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK. When I was 4 years old, my father was killed in the civil war and my family was divided. I was separated from my mother and brought illegally to the UK as a new year under the name of another boy called Mohamed Farah. I often think of the other Mohamed Farah, the boy I took away from on that plane. I really hope he’s okay.”
In England he thought he would live with relatives, but that was not the case, because the woman who had accompanied him broke the contact information of his relatives in front of him: “I had the contacts of my relatives, but once we got to their house in Hounslow (West London), the lady took them from me, tore them up in front of me and threw them in the bin. Then I realized I was in trouble.”
His captor told him that at nine years old he would have to do housework and take care of the children “if he wanted to have food in his mouth.” “If you ever want to see your family, do not say anything (…). I would often lock myself in the bathroom and cry,” she confesses.
sport, salvation
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They did not send him to school until he was 12 years old and there sport changed his life. “What really saved me, what made me different, was that I could run.” “The only language he seemed to understand was physical education and sports,” his Farah physical education teacher, Alan Watkinson, recalls in the documentary. This teacher gained his trust to the point that Mo revealed what had happened and Watkinson spoke with social services so that he helped Farah to be taken in by a Somali family.
Now that he has hung up his boots, he has also decided to hang up that imposed name and make his secret public. “I kept it to myself for a long time, but it’s hard when you’re face-to-face with my kids and they often ask me ‘Dad, how was that?’ the main reason why I’m telling my story. I want to feel like someone normal and not like someone who hides something.”