Olympic legend Sir Mo Farah revealed he was traded to the UK when he was just nine years old (Image: GETTY)
The sports icon revealed that his real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin and fled his native Somaliland as a boy when his mother sent him and twin brother Hassan to live with an uncle in Djibouti.
Mo’s move to the neighboring country came after his father was killed in the civil war, devastated his family and his wife feared for the safety of their children.
The long distance champion was then brought to Britain under a false identity, leaving the real Mo Farah in Somalia and never to reach the UK.
The astonishing revelations are made in a BBC documentary, which raises as many questions about his past as it answers.
Sir Mo tells viewers: “The truth is I am not who you think I am. And now, whatever it takes, I must tell my real story.”
The biggest question is whether, by disclosing the truth about his identity, he has jeopardized his British citizenship.
Farah’s mother sent him and twin brother Hassan (L) to live with an uncle in Djibouti. to go live (Image: GETTY)
“Most people know me as Mo Farah, but it’s not my name or it’s not reality,” he explained. “Despite what I have said in the past, my parents have never lived in the UK. When I was four, my father was killed in the Civil War – as a family we were torn apart.
“I feel like I’ve always had that private thing where I could never be myself and tell what really happened.”
After hiding the truth for 30 years, he says he can’t do it any longer. “I want to feel normal and not like you’re holding anything.”
Mo, now 39, was brought in using false Visa documents to work in “domestic servitude” for a family with younger children.
The woman who brought him in pretended to be his mother and told him not to talk while traveling through the airports in 1993. He realized he had taken the place of another boy when the man who met her wondered where the hell his son was.
“He was her husband and their last name was Farah. He waited for them and his eldest son Mohamed. Then I realized that I had taken Mohamed’s place.”
The sports icon revealed that his real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin. is (Image: GETTY)
When they got home, she tore up the contact details he had for his only British relative. “That’s when I knew I was in trouble,” Mo recalls.
The woman – who did not respond to requests to appear in the documentary – threatened to stop him from telling anyone the truth.
“If I wanted food in my mouth, my job was to take care of those kids, shower them, cook for them, clean for them, and she said, ‘If you ever want to see your family again, don’t say anything else they will take you.’ Many times I would just lock myself in the bathroom and cry.”
After being banned from school for two years, he was finally allowed to attend Feltham Community College when he was 11. He struggled with speaking English and his mold teacher Sarah Rennie recalls his “incredible behavioral problems”.
She explains: “We had to speak to someone, but Mo’s family never showed up. He came to school, he was unkempt, he was not taken care of and we became more and more concerned.”
Mo said he was “afraid” and so the only way to deal with it was to get out and run.
His gym teacher, Alan Watkinson, immediately recognized his talent. “Every race we put him in he almost always won and then over a long distance. So that wasn’t hard to spot,” he laughs.
PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, above, immediately recognized his talent (Image: BBC)
Mo had finally found someone he could trust. “Mo told me that he was not the son of the person he was living with – that his name was not Mohamed Farah, that he was removed from his family, that he was given a new identity and brought here to do jobs and chores That was, of course, quite a shocking revelation to hear,” Alan said.
Social services were involved and Mo was lucky – Kinsi, the mother of a Somali school friend, agreed to take him in and he lived happily with the family for seven years. It turns out Kinsi was the sister of the man who met him at the airport – Mohamed Farah’s real father.
Alan remembers this period as a harbinger of a “remarkable transformation”. “We’d had good runners before, but the progress from there was just stratospheric.”
At the age of 14, when he was selected to compete for English schools in Latvia, it became clear that he did not have the proper documentation to travel abroad. Alan tries to give him British citizenship and shows Mo the box of documents he’s kept ever since. “We just bombed them,” he explains.
22 years later, Mo doesn’t want to get his former PE teacher in trouble, but Alan is optimistic. “When you went through the social services process, you stayed as Mohamed Farah. I think the state recognized you as Mohamed Farah at that time. I don’t think I or the school did anything wrong.”
But Mo decides to seek legal advice, is shocked to learn that his application for British citizenship was “obtained through fraud or misrepresentation” in the eyes of the law – meaning his British nationality could be taken away, although that risk is mitigated by the fact that he was smuggled into the UK as a child and then told social services what had happened.
Mo, now 39, was brought in with false Visa documents to work in ‘domestic servitude’ (Image: GETTY)
Mo’s wife Tania, who first met him at school, says she only learned the full truth when they were preparing to get married in 2010. on his story,” she explained.
Like millions of others, Tania had believed the version of Mo’s life that he told in his autobiography – Twin Ambitions – that he was born in Mogadishu, Somalia and as a youngster came to the United Kingdom with his mother and two of his brothers to his father live.
Tania says she was “stunned” to learn the truth. She says the big question – still unanswered at the end of the documentary – is just WHY he got switched to the real Mo. “That to me is the $64,000 question.”
In his search for more answers, Mo travels to Somaliland to visit his real mother, Aisha, whom he reconnected as a teenager after she sent him her phone number.
Aisha hadn’t known for years that Mo had been brought to the UK after his father, Abdi, was killed by shrapnel from a bazooka while tending his livestock. “When I heard him, I felt like throwing the phone on the floor and being transported to him with all the joy I felt,” she says in the film.
Aisha said she sent him and Hassan to Djibouti for their own safety. “We lived in a place without livestock, and devastated land. We all thought we were going to die. Boom, boom, boom was all we heard. I sent you to your uncle so you could have something.’ She says she has no idea why he ended up in the UK.
“No one told me. I’ve lost touch with you. We had no phones, roads or anything. There was nothing here. The country was devastated.”
She says she has no idea who the real Mo Farah is and advises him to tell the world the truth. ‘You were given a name that was not yours, sent away to England, a country you knew nothing about. It is important that you tell your story. Lying is a sin.”
Mo is happy. “When I told them there would be a risk of me doing this, they said, ‘It’s the truth. It is what it is, you are who you are, there’s no denying that.”
The hut he lived in with his uncle in Djibouti now belongs to someone else, but a visit brings back the memory of being taken away. “The hardest part is admitting to myself that someone from my own family may have been involved in human trafficking,” he admits.
He learns from human trafficking expert Kate Garbers that there are between 10,000 and 100,000 victims of human trafficking in the UK. She tells him that he is “incredibly brave” for sharing his story. “Hopefully if you come forward, it will challenge people’s perceptions of what slavery and human trafficking is and who it could happen to.”
Looking back on his life full of sporting triumphs, Mo can’t help but be happy with the way his life has turned out. “It just shows how lucky I’ve been. So many moments in my life where it could have gone this way or that way. But what really saved me, what made me different, was that I could run.”
Gym teacher Alan says watching Mo at the 2012 Olympics, where he won his first “double” gold, was overcome with emotion. “I was in pieces, I was crying. I knew the story and it was just a crazy, ridiculous story that you couldn’t make up. Its sheer magnitude was just hard to comprehend.”
After those wins, which he repeated in Rio in 2016, Mo appeared on Jonathan Ross and recounted his excitement at being received off the plane by his father — the story he would later stick to in his autobiography.
“It’s not because you want to lie, but because you’re protecting yourself,” he explains. “You don’t realize until later that it’s okay to get things out and say how it happened.”
When producers track down Kinsi, he hopes she might provide more answers as the sister-in-law of the woman who smuggled him in.
But Kinsi says she was told Mo was brought to the UK because he was an orphan. She told Social Services that she was his aunt because she could see that he was unhappy and not being treated well. “I’m not your aunt, but you have my brother’s name,” she explained to Mo. “And you’re a kid, you need someone to protect you.”
She then says she can call her cousin, the real Mo Farah, who has never been to the UK. Talking to him, Mo discovers that his alter ego supports Arsenal and has no interest in running. “I want to say thank you so much – I used your name. I came here as a kid and it’s been hard, hard.”
Smiling and telling Mo that he would like to go to the UK, the real Mo says, “It’s okay, you’re still my brother.”
Excited Mo declares: “I feel like something has fallen off my shoulders. But I don’t know how everyone will see it.”
He plans to stick with the name Mo Farah and, since finishing the film, has sought legal advice on how to get in touch with the Interior Ministry.
The producers were unable to contact Kinsi’s brother who met him from the plane or any of the relatives in Djibouti.
- The Real Mo Farah, BBC One, Wednesday 13th July, 9pm.