The long-distance runner, a four-time Olympic gold medalist and one of the country’s greatest athletes, was taken from Djibouti at the age of 9 by a woman he had never met. Farah was then forced to work looking after another family’s children, he said in an interview to be shown on Wednesday as part of the documentary “The Real Mo Farah” on BBC One. He said he was provided with fake travel documents under his current name, Mohamed Farah. His birth name, he told the BBC, was Hussein Abdi Kahin. The woman who arranged his trip said she was taking him to Europe to visit relatives there, which he was “excited about,” Farah recalled. But when he arrived, his wife told him he had to do the housework and take care of the children “if I wanted food in my mouth.” For years “I just kept blocking it,” Farah, who was knighted in 2017 and became Sir Mo, told the BBC. “But you can only block it for so long.” In the past, Farah said he moved with his parents from Somalia as refugees. But, in reality, his parents never visited Britain, he said. His mother lives with his two brothers on their family farm in northern Somalia. His father was killed amid political violence when Farah was 4 years old. He didn’t go to school in Britain until he was 12. Farah soon became a track and field star and the foster child of a Somali family. He said running saved him. “I still miss my real family, but everything has gotten better since then,” she recalled to the BBC. “It felt like a lot of things were lifted off my shoulders and it felt like me. That’s when Mo came out — the real Mo,” he added. Farah finally decided to speak out, he said, to “challenge” public perceptions of trafficking and slavery, the BBC reported. “I had no idea there were so many people going through the exact same thing I did,” she added. However, others have faced very different trajectories. “It just goes to show how lucky I’ve been,” he said. See the full BBC story here and an excerpt of the documentary above.
