Mo Farah has sensationally admitted that he was trafficked into Britain and spent his early years here in domestic captivity.
The Olympic champion totally topples the already incredible story of his life in a BBC documentary, The Real Mo Farah, which is to be publicised tonight.
Far from him coming to the United Kingdom to live with his father, his father was in fact dead, a victim of the civil warfare in his native Somalia, and, incredibly, Mo Farah isn’t even his real name.
The actual back story was that he came to Britain as an eight-year-old and lived with an aunt and uncle because his father showed little interest in him.
Equipped with just three English phrases, ‘Excuse me’, ‘Where is the toilet?’ and ‘C’mon then’. He was enrolled in a tough junior school in the predominately white area of Feltham, west London, where his refusal to be cowed meant he was forever getting into fights.
His troubled upbringing was splashed across the papers after he achieved a golden double, in the 5,000 and 10,000 metres, at the 2012 Games in London.
But it was far from the whole story. Yes, Sir Mo Farah, as he is today, was born in war-torn Somalia, but almost everything else about his earlier life is fiction.
The most spectacular bombshell is that young Mo didn’t come to the United Kingdom legally.
Instead, he was ‘trafficked’ into Britain and spent years in domestic captivity, forced to be a skivvy for the family of the woman who brought him here.
Sir Mo said at the start of the BBC programme that there was something about him that they didn’t know.
He said it was a secret that he’d been repressing since he was a child and that now he was able to face it and talk about the facts, how it transpired, why it transpired, and that it was tough.
He said the truth was that he was not who everyone believed he was, and that now, at whatever cost, he needed to tell the real story, and over the course of the next soul-searching hour, Sir Mo, 39, did just that, and at one point, he produced his visa document, saying that it was his picture, but it wasn’t his name.
In fact, Sir Mo was born Hussein Abdi Kahin, something he only completely understood much later and is still struggling to make sense of.
It seems that Sir Mo deceived everyone, but then so has Boris Johnson, but the difference is Sir Mo has done something with his life – I’m not sure what Boris Johnson has achieved.
Sir Mo was a child when he came to England and he must have been terrified, but he has done so much for Great Britain and he had the strength to do that and has shown us his incredible talent.
His whole life was at stake and he had no choice but to keep silent about it. It’s the traffickers who brought him here that should be brought to justice. He was a child and was just trying to survive.
He didn’t concoct the plan, his aggressors did that. He was just a child and he didn’t even know his name was different, and it’s so worrying that children can be exploited like this.
And those that have never been in servitude could never imagine what it must have been like for a child, like Mo, who was treated in such a harsh way. It doesn’t make him a bad person and it’s actually none of our business.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 