Mo Farah, the first British athletics athlete to win four Olympic gold medals, has revealed that he was trafficked to the UK three decades ago as a child with a false name.
The impressive revelation significantly rewrote the life story of Farah, one of Britain’s most famous athletes. He also raised questions about his status as a citizen in a country where the battles for immigration have become a polarizing issue in domestic politics in recent years.
“Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name, or it’s not the reality,” he said in a BBC documentary to be released on Wednesday.
“The real story is that I was born in Somaliland, in northern Somalia, as Hussein Abdi Kahin. Despite what I have said in the past, my parents never lived in the UK,” Farah said in clips from the documentary that were published Monday.
Farah, 39, previously said she came to Britain with her parents as a refugee.
He said he was putting his citizenship at risk by sharing his story, but the British government quickly indicated he had little to fear. An Interior Ministry spokesman said in a statement on Tuesday that no action would be taken against Farah and that “suggesting otherwise is incorrect.”
According to government guidelines, children are not complicit in fraud or misrepresentation committed by their parents or guardians.
A lawyer who spoke to Farah in the documentary, Alan Briddock, said it was unlikely Farah would lose her citizenship because she was treated as a child and had shared her story with relevant authorities.
In the documentary, Farah said he was separated from the family after his father was killed during the Somali civil war. He was taken to Britain at the age of 9 with a woman under the name of another child, Mohamed Farah. He thought he would stay with relatives, but he was forced into domestic servitude.
“I had all the contact details of my relative and once we got to her house, the lady took it out of me and right in front of me she ripped it off and put it in the bin and at that moment I knew I was in trouble, “He said.
“If I wanted to eat in my mouth, my job was to take care of these kids, shower them, cook them, and clean them,” Farah said. “And she said,‘ If you ever want to see your family again, don’t say anything. If you say something, they will take you away. ”
Years later, when she was enrolled in school, Farah told her gym teacher, Alan Watkinson, about her real identity. It was put in charge of a friend’s mother.
In July 2000, with Watkinson’s help, Farah received British citizenship under the name Mohamed Farah, according to the BBC. He would become one of Britain’s greatest sporting heroes.
Farah, a distance runner, won two gold medals at the 2012 London Olympics, in the 5,000 and 10,000 meter races. He successfully repeated as champion in both races four years later at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, winning gold despite a dramatic drop in the mid-10,000s.
Farah was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 2017.
He has competed in major marathons since he briefly retired from competitive athletics in 2017 and set a national record after winning the 2018 Chicago Marathon with a time of 2 hours 5 minutes 11 seconds.
Farah recently announced that she will run this year’s London Marathon on October 2, her first marathon since 2019.
Isabella Kwai contributed to the report from London.