LONDON (AP) — Four-time Olympic champion Mo Farah says he was illegally brought to the UK as a young boy and forced to care for other children before he escaped a life of servitude through running.
In a new documentary, Farah says his real name is Hussein Abdi Kahin and that he was from taken from the East African nation of Djibouti. The film that tells the story of his being trafficked, was produced by the BBC and Red Bull Studios, and the BBC is scheduled to broadcast it Wednesday.
The athlete says he was 8 or 9 years old when a woman he didn’t know brought him to Britain using fake travel documents that included his picture alongside the name Mohammed Farah, the BBC reported.
The woman took him to an apartment in west London where he was forced to care for her children, Farah said. He wasn’t allowed to go to school until he was 12.
“I wasn’t treated as part of the family…,” Farah says in the documentary. “If I wanted food in my mouth, my job was to look after those kids — shower them, cook for them, clean for them.”
Farah, who represented Britain at three Olympic Games, won gold medals in the 5,000- and 10,000-meter runs at both the 2012 London Olympics and the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.
“For years I just kept blocking it out, but you can only block it out for so long,” he said in the BBC documentary, which will be broadcast this week.
“Often I would just lock myself in the bathroom and cry. The only thing I could do to get away from this (living situation) was to get out and run.”
His physical education teacher Alan Watkinson contacted social services and helped him find a foster family in the Somali community after Farah told him what he was going through.
“I felt like a lot of stuff was lifted off my shoulders, and I felt like me. That’s when Mo came out - the real Mo,” Farah said.
“I 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.”
He said in May his elite track career could be over after he finished runner-up in the London 10,000 meter race and ruled out taking part in this month’s World Championships.