View from THE BACK ‘ADMIRABLE’ MO
Nicola Methven says what you’re thinking
Sir Mo Farah has spent 30 years hiding the fact that he was trafficked to this country aged nine, cut off from those he loved and held in someone else’s house. He was threatened, kept away from school for several years and made to work as a servant.
When asked about his past since becoming one of Britain’s greatest ever Olympians, he told the story that he came to the UK with his mum to join his dad, who was already here.
This is what he wrote in his autobiography, and stuck to when talking on TV with Jonathan Ross. It wasn’t true.
Mo’s father was killed in the civil war in Somaliland when he was just four, and his mother has never been to the UK. But Mo felt unable to reveal how he’d arrived under a false name, with a woman posing as his mother, for fear of reprisals and, ultimately, the prospect of deportation. He didn’t even tell his girlfriend Tania – whom he’d known since school – until they were about to marry in 2010.
But now, in an extraordinary BBC documentary, he’s laid the truth bare, explaining he’d never ‘feel normal’ if he didn’t come clean that he was born Hussein Kahin. In my opinion, it makes him all the more admirable.
Some agencies estimate there could be as many as 130,000 people in the UK who have been trafficked against their will. Perhaps the
Home Office’s assurance that a child is never considered complicit in gaining citizenship by deception will encourage more to speak out.
Mo is nothing but thankful for the breaks that came later. His running ability was nurtured by PE teacher Alan Watkinson, who went above and beyond to get him his British citizenship, allowing him to compete internationally. And huge kudos to Kinsi, the mother of a school friend, who took Mo in for seven happy years.
Without their kindness Mo might never have achieved his sporting potential and we, as a nation, would be the poorer for it.