Sir Mo Farah reveals he was a child slave

Gold medalist's dark history - 25th July 2022

UK's Olympic medalist Sir Mo Farah has disclosed that he was trafficked into the UK as a child and forced into domestic child slavery.

The athlete revealed that he received his current name Mohamed Farah upon arrival in the UK at age nine then, he was made to take care of the children in the family he had been staying with. "For years I just kept blocking it out, but you can only block it out for so long."

Breaking the silence on his childhood, he confessed in a BBC documentary that he hadn't come from Somaliland to the UK with his parents as refugees as he'd previously claimed, but that his father, Abdi, had lost his life from a stray bullet during the civil war in Somaliland when he, Farah, was four. He added that he lived with his two brothers and his mother in Somaliland, on a family farm.

Farah stated that around the age of eight or nine, he was sent to Djibouti to live with family, then told he would be heading to live with relatives in Europe, which thrilled the young Mo who confessed that he was "excited." "I'd never been on a plane before." Upon arrival in the UK, the document with his relatives' contacts was ripped up before him and he was then forced into domestic labour and childcare "if I wanted food in my mouth", he recounted.

He was denied schooling up until the age of 12, when the school was informed that he was a refugee from Somaliland. His former tutor remarked that he was "unkempt and uncared for" when he first arrived at school and that young Mo hardly spoke any English and was "emotionally and culturally alienated."

Sir Mo's PE teacher, Alan Watkinson, recognized that he came to life on the race track, stating that "the only language he seemed to understand was the language of PE and sport."

Farah hopes that his story will challenge the public's attitude to trafficking and slavery, admitting that he "had no idea there was so many people who are going through exactly the same thing that I did. It just shows how lucky I was. What really saved me, what made me different, was that I could run."