Mo Farah is one of the great champions in athletics history. Thanks to his explosive acceleration, Farah won four Olympic titles and six world titles in the long-distance track events. The world admired his achievements also for the story of his difficult start to life as a refugee from Somalia, which led to the life of a great champion representing the country that welcomed him, the United Kingdom. But the story of this beginning, as he tells it in a documentary that will be shown by the BBC this Wednesday, was not quite like that. It was just as, or more difficult, than the version he always told.
“People know me as Mo Farah, but that’s not my name, that’s not the reality. The real story is: I was born in Somaliland, not Somalia. My name is Hussein Abdi Kahin. Contrary to what I’ve said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK. When I was four, my father died in the civil war. Then I was separated from my mother and entered the UK illegally under the name of another child, who was called Mohamed Farah.
These are some of the revelations that the four-time Olympic champion makes in The Real Mo Farah, a documentary produced by the BBC and Red Bull Studios. Farah tells what really happened in her childhood, after “years of blocking all this”. “But we can’t block these things out forever,” he says.
He didn’t go to school until he was 12
The real story is, in fact, quite different from what Farah told, according to which he himself had accompanied his parents fleeing Somalia to the United Kingdom. The origin was not Somalia, but Somaliland, a territory that unilaterally declared independence from Somalia in 1991, but which has no international recognition. He was orphaned by a father at the age of four—killed by a stray bullet during clashes—and was separated from his family by a woman he didn’t know, with a promise to go live with relatives in the UK.
“I had never been on a plane before,” he said of the trip he took to Europe from Djibouti when he was eight or nine years old, in which he assumed the identity of another child named Mohamed Muktar Jama Farah – Farah shows a copy of a document with your photo and new name. When they arrived at the home of this woman he didn’t know in London, she took the paper with the contact information of her relatives and tore it up in front of the child.
“Right in front of me, she untied the paper and threw it in the trash. I realized right away that I was in trouble. She had to do housework and babysit if she wanted to have food in her mouth. She would say to me, ‘If you want to see your family again, don’t say anything’. She would often lock me in the bathroom crying,” says Sir Mo Farah in the documentary.
This “family” only let him go to school when he was 12 years old. Her first teachers recall a child presented as a refugee from Somalia, “sloppy and untreated”, who barely spoke English and who was “culturally and emotionally alienated”. Where the child truly freed himself was in Physical Education classes and athletics. “The only thing I could do to escape this situation was to run”, says the athlete, now 39 years old.
Family remains in Somaliland
The young Farah/Kahin trusted his Physical Education teacher, telling him the story of his true identity. Social services took action and placed the child with another Somali family. “I still missed my real family, but everything started to get better. I felt like a weight had lifted off my shoulders. It was from here that the real Mo appeared,” she says.
Through this documentary I have been able to address and learn more about what happened in my childhood and how I came to the UK. I’m really proud of it and hope you will tune into @BBC at 9pm on Weds to watch. pic.twitter.com/rqZe41gFm8
— Sir Mo Farah (@Mo_Farah) July 11, 2022
It was from the age of 14 that Farah began to stand out as an athlete, and would advance to a unique career in British athletics, having as highlights the gold in the 5,000m and 10,000m at the London 2012 and Rio de Janeiro Games, in addition to more six world titles and five European titles between 2010 and 2017.
The mother and his two brothers, reveals the British champion, continue to live on a farm in Somaliland, while the woman who took him to the United Kingdom was contacted by the BBC to tell her version, but did not respond. As for Mo Farah himself, he hopes his story can draw the world’s attention to the human trafficking that still exists: “I had no idea that there are so many people going through exactly what I went through. It just shows that I was lucky. What really saved me is that I knew how to run.”
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