The heartbreaking revelation of Mo Farah, the best English athlete in history: at 9 he was taken to England as a slave

With time running out towards the start of the World Cup in Eugene, which kicks off on Friday, the world of athletics -and sports in general- was rocked this Tuesday by a shocking revelation from Britain’s Mo Farahone of the best long distance runners in history.

“Everyone knows me as Mo Farah, but that’s not my real name. I was actually born in Somaliland, north of Somalia, with the name of Hussein Abdi Kahin“said the six-time world champion and owner of four Olympic gold medals, in an online documentary BBC.

This was reported by Farah, who will not compete in Oregon after confirming his retirement from the tracks a few weeks ago was illegally brought to the UK when he was nine and was forced to work as a servant for a London family for years.

The 39-year-old cross-country skier had always claimed to have arrived in his adopted country from Mogadishu as a refugee, to join his father, who worked in London. In the preview of the special program, which will be broadcast in full Britain on Wednesday, he acknowledged that this story is not true.

“Despite what I have said in the past, my parents have never lived in the UK. When I was four, my father Abdi was killed in the civil war in Somaliland and my family was destroyed. I was separated from my mother and taken to the UK illegally under the name of another child. ”

And I add: “For years I have blocked that part of my life. But you can only block it for a certain amount of time. “

Farah, winner of the 5,000 and 10,000 meters of the London 2012 and Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics, said that when he was nine his mother sent him to Djibouti, a country located north of Somalia, to escape the violence of war. There he was to meet his uncle.

However, little Mo was brought to the UK by a woman he had never seen and had no relationship with. He had fake IDs, in which his “new name” appeared. Y He told her he was going to live with someone from his family. “I was excited”He remembered Farah. “I’ve never been on a plane before.”

But when he arrived in London, he quickly realized it was all a lie. The woman took him to her apartment in Hounslow, in the western part of the English capital, and took the sheet on which she had the contact details of her mother and brothers.

“He tore it up in front of me and threw it in the garbage. At that point I knew I was in trouble,” he explained. “What that woman did is not right. They did not treat me as part of the family. Was ‘the boy who did it all’. If I wanted food in my mouth, I had to take care of the children in the family, wash them, cook for them, clean up. And she told me ‘If you ever want to see your family again, don’t say anything ‘. Many times I would lock myself in the bathroom crying. There was no one to help me, ”Farah said.

During his early years in England, he was not allowed to go to school. But at 12 they enroll him in the Feltham Community Collegewhere everyone thought he was a Somali refugee.

Sara Rennie, his former tutor, recalled that Mo came to school “disheveled and unkempt”, that he spoke very little English and that he was an “emotionally and culturally alienated” child. But it didn’t take long to find his place.

“The only language he seemed to understand was physical education and sport,” he told the BBC. Alan Watkinson, his former physical education teacher. “The sport was a lifeline for me. The only thing I could do to escape was to go out and run,” said Farah.

The relationship with Watkinson grew closer and one day Farah told her teacher her true story. The teacher helped him contact social services and find a Somali family to welcome him. And she even accompanied him through the process of acquiring British citizenship, which he was granted under the name of Mo Farah in July 2000.

From the UK Home Office they assured the BBC that Farah is not in danger of losing her citizenship after she confessed to illegally entering the country and obtaining citizenship for “fraud”.

“I still missed my real family, but from the moment I told Alan everything, everything got better. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. That’s when Mo, the real Mo, showed up.” .

Reuniting with his family

Farah’s story and the achievements he quickly began to achieve on the race track made him increasingly well known in the Somali community of London. And that “fame” eventually allowed her to reconnect with her mother Aisha and her siblings, who still live on her family’s farm in Somaliland, a state that declared independence in 1991 but is not internationally recognized.

One day, a woman approached him in a London restaurant and handed him a cassette containing a recorded message from his mother.

“It wasn’t just a tape. It was a voice … and then she sang sad songs for me, like poetry or traditional songs. I listened to her for days, weeks,” recalled the cross-country skier, who was a world and European champion in the 5 thousand and 10 thousand meters. “On the side of the tape was a phone number and a request to call. But she also said ‘If this bothers you or causes you problems, no, forget it, you don’t have to contact me.’ But I immediately thought “Of course I’ll call you”“.

After that first telephone contact, Farah and her family resumed their relationship. Also, in the documentary you can see the moment when the British went with his son to Somaliland to be reunited with his mother and siblings.

“We lived in a place with nothing. All we felt was ‘Boom, boom, boom …’. I sent him away from his uncle because of the war,” Aisha said. “Nobody told me he would be taken to the UK. I lost contact with him. We had no phones, no roads, nothing. There was nothing here. The land was devastated.”

Farah ended up becoming one of the most outstanding athletes in British sport. In 2013 he received the Order of the British Empire and in 2017 the rank of Knight for his contribution to athletics. And he has a guaranteed place in the history books of the sport. In addition, he has created a family of his own: he and his wife Tania Nell have three children (twins Aisha and Amani, born in 2012 and Hussein, born in 2015), as well as Nell’s daughter Rihanna. Why, then, did he choose to reveal his true story about him now?

“As a father, you always teach your kids to be honest, but I feel I’ve always had that private side where I could never be myself and tell what really happened. I’ve kept it to myself for a long time, but it’s hard when you are face to face. face to face with your children and they often ask me. This is the main reason why I am telling my story. I want to feel normal and not like someone hiding something, “he explained, which he hopes also to help those who are experiencing a situation similar to that experienced by him.

“I had no idea there were so many people going through exactly the same thing as me. This just shows how lucky I was. What really saved me, what made me different, was that I could run,” he said.